Thursday, February 9, 2023
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to...
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1289
Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,
Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.
If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.
Please Leave Silently Into The Night......
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1989
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Biden admin under fire for pursuing diversity over merit: They're finding people 'who aren't highly-skilled'
 |
| President Biden's judicial nominees are sworn in during a hearing with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 25, 2023. (REUTERS/Leah Millis |
Biden has nominated record numbers of women and people of color to the federal judiciary
Project 21 co-chairman Horace Cooper weighs in on the Biden administration's history of race-based hiring on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
President Biden has nominated a record number of diverse judges to the federal judiciary, with nearly 65% being people of color, according to an analysis by Balls & Strikes.
The outlet found that out of 97 confirmed federal judges, five are White men and 22 are Black women. Female judges make up 66% of the confirmations compared to 24% under former President Donald Trump and 42% under former President Obama.
Project 21 co-chairman Horace Cooper called out the Biden administration for its seemingly race-based confirmations Monday, arguing it is trying to replace excellence and merit with diversity.
"What we're seeing from the Biden administration, and which is what we're seeing generally from the progressive movement, is this idea that we just need to reshape the judiciary in a way under color," he said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
Cooper added that America ultimately "suffers" because of this...
SNP/Greens accused of 'environmental madness' as wind turbines found to be running on diesel fuel
A whistleblower has revealed that Scotland's wind turbines ran on fossil fuels for up to six hours a day, adding to the anger over the Scottish Government's environmental credentials
The SNP and Greens are being held responsible for a damning incident that led to fossil fuels being used to run a number of wind turbines in Scotland.
Despite the environmentally friendly credentials of turbines being lorded by ministers, ScottishPower has admitted that 71 have been linked up to generators burning diesel fuel.
The power company said they were forced to step in due to a fault on the national grid during the freezing spell in December but political opposition has slammed the Scottish Government for being untrustworthy with their environmental policies.
Labour MSP Colin Smyth said the scenario is further evidence of the SNP and Green Party's "dishonesty" over Scotland's renewable potential after they came under fire for using data they knew to be inaccurate. Ministers were slated for incorrectly stating that Scotland possessed 25 per cent of Europe's wind energy potential.
On top of this not being true, the recent revelation found 60 turbines at Arecleoch Wind Farm in South Ayrshire and 11 at the nearby Glen App Wind Farm were connected to six huge diesel generators.
Mr Smyth said: "The SNP and Greens have proven time and time again they cannot be trusted on environmental issues.
"They laud Scotland's potential for renewables yet don't appear to ensure those already in existence are properly run. This isn't the first problem raised - and there is concern at a lack of openness when problems arise.
"Whatever the reasons, having to use diesel generators to deice faulty turbines is environmental madness. This level of dishonesty cuts to the very core of the SNP and Green Government where their rhetoric on net zero is very different from the reality."
The wind farms are operated by ScottishPower Renewables, a subsidiary of the Spanish-based company Iberdrola, which operates 1,183 onshore turbines capable of producing enough electricity to power two million homes.
The use of diesel generators was revealed by a whistleblower who told the Sunday Mail: "During December, 60 turbines at Arecleoch and 11 at Glen App were de-energised due to a cabling fault at Mark Hill wind farm.
"In order to get these turbines re-energised, diesel generators were running for upwards of six hours a day."
A ScottishPower spokesman said: "Due to an external fault on the network, the three wind farms were unable to operate.
"During the extreme cold in December, in line with manufacturer's recommendations, the turbines' internal temperature were returned to safe levels by six diesel generators for...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)