Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on Substack on Wednesday that said the CIA was instructed to come up with a cover story for the Nord Stream bombings that was fed to The New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit.
The cover-up story was created to shift blame from the US after Hersh’s bombshell report published on February 8 that said President Biden ordered the attack on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, which connect Russia to Germany. “It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story,“Hersh was told by a source within the American intelligence community.
Hersh said that the CIA was ordered to come up with a cover story after President Biden met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington on March 3. Scholz’s visit was very brief and did not include the routine joint press briefing that usually follows a meeting between the president and another world leader. Hersh was told that his report detailing how the US took out Nord Stream was discussed by Biden and Scholz.
Hersh writes: “I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2.”
The result of the CIA’s work was published in The New York Times and Die Zeit on March 7. The New York Times report was very vague and said US officials are now claiming the Nord Stream bombings might have been carried out by a “pro-Ukrainian group.”
The Die Zeit report claimed German investigators believe it was carried out by six people using a yacht rented in Poland that was owned by two Ukrainians. Other Western media outlets published similar articles reinforcing the cover story in the following days.
Hersh said the information The New York Times received “originated with a group of CIA experts in deception and propaganda whose mission was to feed the newspaper a cover story—and to protect a president who made an unwise decision and is now lying about it.”
The cover story offers a radically different narrative than what Hersh’s February 8 report alleges. Using anonymous sourcing, Hersh reported that the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed by explosives planted by US Navy divers in June 2022 under the cover of NATO drills in the Baltic Sea. The operation was done in coordination with Norway, and a Norwegian spy plane detonated the explosives by dropping a sonar buoy on September 26, 2022.
The last time Scholz visited Washington was on February 7, 2022. Biden vowed during a press conference that day that if Russia invaded Ukraine, he would “bring an end” to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. According to Hersh, the plot to destroy the pipelines was already underway at that time, and the plotters took Biden’s comment as a blatant threat.
Biden in Feb 2022: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.“
Q: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?“
On Scholz’s possible complicity in the operation, Hersh said in his new article: “At this point, it must be noted that Chancellor Scholz, whether or not he was alerted of the destruction of the pipeline in advance — still an open question—has clearly been complicitsince last fall in support of the Biden Administration’s cover-up of its operation in the Baltic Sea.”
US Firms No Longer Safe In Mexico? Army Commandeers US-Owned Marine Terminal
We’ve heard many heartbreaking stories of American tourists venturing into Mexico only to be kidnapped or, worse, killed in crazy cartel drug war battles. It appears these days, no one is safe across the southern border, not even US-owned companies.
Bloomberg reported that Mexican marines and police officers seized US construction firm Vulcan Materials’ port terminal near Playa del Carmen in southern Mexico.
Footage from the seizure showed a long line of police and military units entering the property last Tuesday.
🚨 WATCH: The Mexican military seized a U.S. company’s (Vulcan Materials) marine terminal in Mexico. This is insane, @SecBlinken@JakeSullivan46
In a statement, Vulcan Materials claimed that Mexican officials did not possess any legal documentation to warrant the seizure of the terminal.
“It should be clear that the rule of law is no longer assured for foreign companies in Mexico,” the Alabama-based company said in a statement. “This invasion, unsupported by legal warrants, violates Vulcan’s commercial and property rights.”
AP News pointed out that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the company have been in a multi-year dispute:
López Obrador needs the dock to get cement, crushed stone and other materials into the area to finish his pet project, a tourist train known as the Train Maya. The president shut down Vulcan’s stone quarries last May, arguing the company had extracted or exported stone without approval.
US lawmakers, including Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, voiced concern about the forced takeover of the terminal. He said this “adds to the trend of misguided and counterproductive behavior” by the Mexican president.
This presents a significant concern for US companies considering relocating production from China to Mexico – how can they be sure their businesses will be safe from government seizure?
The Road To A More Global Yuan Runs Through Moscow
By George Lei, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and analyst
Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded his Russian visit on Wednesday without much progress on peace in Ukraine. China, however, has pushed for deeper trade and investment links with its northern neighbor using its own currency. That suggests the path of least resistance for yuan internationalization now runs through Moscow instead of London or Singapore.
China and Russia are committed to “significantly” increasing trade volumes by 2030 and pledged to steadily boost the proportion of local currency settlement, according to a joint statement released Tuesday. That might sound like cheap political talk, though a closer look at developments since the war in Ukraine shows the Chinese currency is already making major inroads in all walks of Russian financial life.
The share of yuan in Russian export payments surged 32-fold in 2022 to 16% by year-end, according to the Bank of Russia.Its use in Russian imports also jumped to 23% from 4%. Yuan savings accounted for 11% of Russia’s total FX deposits as of January, compared with practically zero when the war broke out. The Chinese currency has also overtaken the dollar and euro as the most traded FX on the Moscow Exchange.
Never before has the yuan — which is not fully convertible — been so widely used for trade, private savings and FX transactions in a trillion-dollar economy that regularly ranks among the world’s biggest. “Market logic mostly prevails over geopolitics until one day it does not,” wrote Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Western sanctions that sharply curtailed Russia’s dollar and euro access acted as a push factor, while booming trade with China served as a pull. Russia overtook Saudi Arabia to become China’s biggest oil supplier in February while Beijing’s total energy purchases ballooned to $88b over the past 12 months, surging more than 50% from the period ending February 2022. Chinese businesses have also expanded in its northern neighbor, filling the void left by departing Western brands.
Russia is now the 5th biggest user of the Chinese currency, with 2.3% of global yuan payments, behind Hong Kong, the UK, Singapore and the US, according to SWIFT. A year ago, the country didn’t even make the cut for the top 15: Its share in worldwide yuan payments was less than 0.3%. At this speed, Russia is poised to become the biggest yuan user outside Hong Kong in the next couple years.
This week, the Russian central bank made it more costly for commercial lender to have liabilities in dollar and euro by raising the mandatory reserve requirements on “unfriendly” currencies. The longer the war and sanctions drag on, the more entrenched yuan gets in Moscow’s financial ecosystem. Should the current trajectory persist, Russia will probably become the first major economy where the Chinese currency has an equal standing with its American and European counterparts.
We’re all being set up to be dump into one big trash bin. So many people don’t remember that we’ve been here at this point in history.
It was called Cuban missile crisis and was back in the sixties. Well it’s happening again. It seem that the neocons must think the world stands still for them, wile the neocon have been going all over the world destroying Nations and having their news anchors remark about how lovely their weapons are, they seem to have no idea that their technology has been surpassed!
But don’t worry the Neocons are not trying to kill us all…
Just most of us!
I don’t do Google! If you know some folks who might be interested in the information on this site, please pay it forward, and pass the ammunition (Information)!
