China: 'Hidden Agenda' Seems to be Behind Opposition to Nord Stream Probe

Beijing called for an international probe into the mystery explosion

Geng Shuang, China's deputy permanent representative to the UN, called on an international investigation into the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines 19 months ago which seems like a mystery in Washington that nobody wants solved.

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The UN Security Council learned Friday that there is no additional information beyond what’s already public about the September 2022 attack, which cut off Germany from Russian gas.

China’s Xinhua News Agency said Geng addressed the body and noted how “certain countries” pushed for Sweden, Denmark, and Germany to conduct their own investigations but after more than a year, there has been essentially no new progress.

“With the situation standing where it is, one cannot help but suspect a hidden agenda behind the opposition to an international investigation, while lamenting the potential cover-up and loss of quantities of compelling evidence. We reiterate our call for the early launch of a UN-led international investigation to bring the truth to light for the international community,” he said.

The representative of the Russian Federation mocked the findings in the case and said, “It is as if a crime was committed — a murder — and a year later, the investigative authorities concluded that the victim was murdered,” according to the UN. He said the West has shown it has “absolutely no interest in finding out who is responsible for the attack.”

The mainstream media has hardly touched the story.

Seymour Hersh, the journalist, has done the most detailed reports thus far, including his article from September. (See “A Year of Lying About Nord Stream”)

He said President Joe Biden tasked his administration to come up with ways to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine before the war, and the Central Intelligence Agency responded with a strategy to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines that rest on the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

The report, citing an unnamed source, said Biden wanted the CIA to find a perfect target that would provide his administration with plausible deniability.

Hersh wrote that there was no significant information about the mission even mentioned on computer “but instead typed on a Royal or perhaps a Smith Corona typewriter with a carbon copy or two, as if the Internet and the rest of the online world had yet to be invented.”

Biden met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the White House on 8 February 2022, weeks before the Russian invasion, and told reporters: “If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the ... border of Ukraine again, then there will be ... no longer a Nord Stream 2. We, we will bring an end to it," Biden said.

Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, deleted this post on Twitter.

Reuters noted that he was asked how he could make good on the threat, and he said, “I promise you, we'll be able to do it."

A month earlier, Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland, the former State Department’s #2, also mentioned Nord Stream’s fate if Russia was to attack.

“We continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies and I want to be clear with you today,” she said. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

It was after the Biden-Scholz meeting, that U.S. president decided to hold off on a preemptive strike, the Hersh report said.

“We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war,” the source told Hersh, because Russian President Vladimir Putin was already annexing territory in Ukraine. “But was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up” the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

“The White House fear was that Putin would get Germany under his thumb and then he was going to get Poland,” the source told Hersh.

The leadership of the CIA team viewed Biden’s misleading guidance for its order to destroy the pipelines, the official told me, “as taking a strategic step toward World War III. What if Russia had responded by saying: You blew up our pipelines and I’m going to blow up your pipelines and your communication cables. Nord Stream was not a strategic issue for Putin—it was an economic issue. He wanted to sell gas. He’d already lost his pipelines” when the Nord Stream I and 2 were shut down before the Ukraine war began. (HERSH)

Hersh noted that Germany was not receiving any gas in the pipelines at the time of the explosions.

Hersh’s original story went into detail on how the U.S. and Norway allegedly carried out the elaborate bombing. His theory is that Biden was concerned Germany would turn back to Russia for its natural gas if there was a cold winter and restart the pipeline. The White House called Hersh’s story completely false.

Hersh has said the U.S. has for decades worried that cheap gas would bring Western Europe into the Russian orbit. Hersh said Biden’s decision to bomb to pipeline will severely damage the U.S. relationship with Europe as more information is released.

Kim Dotcom, a tech entrepreneur who lives in New Zealand, took to Twitter on 30 October - about a month after the attacks - to claim that the Russians learned that the West blew up the pipelines through former British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s iPhone message to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken “before anybody else knew.”

“iCloud admin access rocks!” he posted.

The State Department told The Trends Journal in an email hours after Hersh’s story was published that the claim “is totally false and complete fiction.”

“We can say categorically that the United States was not involved in any way. We continue to work with Allies and partners to get to the bottom of what happened.” the department said.

Blinken’s reaction to the bombing also raised eyebrows. He said, “Ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity. It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

Radosław Tomasz “Radek” Sikorski, the European Parliament member and former Polish foreign minister who is married to Russia hawk Anne Applebaum, tweeted a photo of the scene, “Thank you, USA.”

(That tweet was later deleted.)