Hirsch’s script will make for an exciting and profitable fictional thriller for the big screen.
By Andrew Benjamin Feb 13
This story begins and ends with the observation: Everything is so, unless it isn’t.
A great fiction scribe but a poor journalist, Seymour Hirsch at SUBSTACK concocted an amazingly-intricate-but-contrived script for a Hollywood production, from which he will make millions for his progressive friends and himself.
What Hirsch’s script is not, is intelligence. Or an accurate recount of what really happened.
Sy provides no evidence to substantiate his LSD-induced hallucinations. Admittedly, I have no issue with other segments of his story about the Russian oil businesses or U.S. government operations, the earlier CIA’s alleged nefarious shenanigans, or even concerning the possible intent of the parties. They are all plausible.
So are ghosts, astral projection, Obama’s birth certificate, and UFOs.
But “plausible” constitutes entirely different assumptions from historical facts.
Only the conclusions matter: Is Hirsch’s story true, or is it false?
Not that is it believable.
Within I include photos I took of the Russian naval buildup near Murmansk and St. Petersburg in the Baltic before the invasion of Crimea. I was there. Sy was not.
At the end, I append photos of a glossy before the internet era (from 2004) in which I wrote the correct story of a fable for which Hirsch received much acclaim in the leftwing media and global news. Hirsch’s inventions in that tale required an exorcists.
Hirsch falsely characterized our military and intelligence operations in the very title of his fabulist work, conflating the CIA with Special Operations Command, about which he knew nothing. The leftwinger managed smearing the United States in it, a nation he despised then, as he despises it now. Fact: Hirsch spent a productive lifetime besmearching the United States in every leftwing media.
An excellent science fiction writer and entertainer, Sy knows how to get vast media attention and make oodles of money.
My essay however preceded Hirsch’s by years. It had the places, people, and organizations referenced and characterized correctly. Hirsch’s story was incorrect from the getgo, a fabulism for Mother Jones and HuffPo readers who needed more bias confirmation while they were experiencing acute BDS meltdowns – Bush Derangement Syndrome.
One might ask about Hirsch’s “confidential” source. Does he exist?
Can he be at the two major places relevant to Hirsch’s story: the SCIF where administration officials made the decision to attack the pipeline, as well as finding himself snorkeling 250 feet under the Baltic planting C4 explosives? Or did Hirsch have several confidential sources willing to sully the United States with another conspiracy a la Doug MacGregor, Scott Ritter, and Glenn Greenwald? As it were, all these men have an enviably long record of sucking up to the Kremlin. Meanwhile these boys also spew anti-U.S. propaganda the self-same Kremlin is now using against us.
Is Hirsch’s “confidential” source as credible as the confidential sources, media, and whistleblowers who contributed to the Democrat coup to amplify the Russia Collusion Hoax? As credible as the “witnesses” in subsequent Trump impeachments? As credible as Representative Adam Schiff’s post-SCIF allegations that he is “in possession” of the “evidence”?
Has Hirsch provided corroboration among more than ten thousand people in several disparate operations, organizations, and places connected to Hirsch’s allegations?
Thousands of actors, and no corroborator has come forward?
Not one “in on it” “leaked?”
Funny thing. During Trump’s four years of being illegally surveilled, and at the subsequent impeachments, Mueller Probe, dozens came forward from a handful of Democrat operatives in Hillary’s and Obama’s employ. The daily FBI and media leaks created a downright flood in the global media.
What am I missing from Hirsch’s convincing-only-for-those willing-to-be-convinced fabulist tale?
EVIDENCE.
What else?
Hirsch reputation behind his Pulitzer Prize may not be as deserved as the charitable Hungarian Jozsef Pulitzer has charitably offered his larges.
Give it Back! The ‘Russiagate’ Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post
Guess from where today’s Pulitzers come?
Pulitzer HQ at Columbia University where Cloward-Piven’s the Frankfurt School landed. Where Cloward-Piven, Barack Obama and Saul Alinsky landed.
Is Hirsch a Marxist? You decide after you researched his allies.
U.S.A.F. SSgt Shawn Canionero maintains flight line security while an F-117 Nighthawk is refueled. Image: NARA
After Hirsch’s intricate lead-in to the political shenanigans behind the scenes, Sy wrote:
“In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion… Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.”
The actors in Hirsch’s cleverly-constructed play really do exist. So do the stages, props, floodlights and theaters. The evidence for what took place in that room however is what’s missing from this play.
Unless Hirsch’s “confidential” source happened to be the same person, meaning the diver who planted the C4 shaped charges 250 feet below the freezing Baltic on top of the Russian pipeline, after he left the bunker from which Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland gave the orders.
What are the chances?
Hirsch fertile imagination – the fly on the wall:
“Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
In other words, there were dozens of higher ups, including generals and their adjuncts from all branches of our military, CIA, DIA, and thousands of troops partaking in BALTOPS 22, a “13- day exercise which featured 47 ships, 89 aircraft, and 7,000 personnel in the Baltic Sea.”
Hirsch’s “source” must have been present at Langley too: “Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.”
A typical leftwing guru of his time, along with his philosophical mates Noam Chomsky and others, Hirsch has had it in for the CIA’s taking down communist revolutionaries. If anything, Hirsch never wanted America to prevail over the Russians. But bet on it, Hirsch’s tall tales will be promoted by the crackpots on the right too, especially ones now selling tickets for trips aboard UFOs.
As it were, Hirsch became the exact political mirror image of conspiracist Alex Jones. The difference? Just one. Alex will never win a Pulitzer. The left and other conspiracists have always blamed America first and America’s enemies last.
Have the alt-right too, adopted the old left’s historical America-hating narratives, whereas America is always in the wrong, and its mortal enemies are always in the right?
Hirsch’s fly on the wall in the Oval Office: “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.”
7000 warriors, staff, crew, almost fifty battleships and carriers, 89 aircraft, logistics and supply teams in Panama too, hundreds of military reporters of several NATO nations with cameras and recording equipment at the scene, Russian navy battle cruisers, patrol boats and subs patrolling nearby, hundreds of fishing and recreational vessels, thousands more based in Panama during the “planning stage,” with no evidence on the horizon that Biden has ever made the decision as characterized by Sy. (Other than a few clips of wishing and hoping featured on FOX’s popular UFO show).
Yet not one of these folk could have possibly leaked anything? No other than Hirsch’s “confidential” fly on the wall has come forward to date to verify the content of Hirsch’s upcoming Hollywood blockbuster?
Hirsch’s saga conveniently ignored that Biden’s decision would have kneecapped NATO’s, as well as America’s mission in the region. It would have plunged the European continent and billions into darkness to freeze. It would have crushed the massive EU business empire and U.S.’ trade with it, the third largest U.S. customer base after China.
Europe’s leaders will have found themselves new work after the next elections. You see Dear Reader, every story is believable, unless it isn’t. Every story makes sense, unless it doesn’t. Every story is true, unless it isn’t!
I covered the SOCOM story in which Hirsch mischaracterized a CIA operation in his “Dick Cheney’s Assassins” in my essay AMERICANISM: FAITH IN COUNTRY – see below. It was published in The Improper December 2004. Hirsch’s story, five years later, proved to be false.
In other words, in a fabulism fit for a Michael Crichton and James Bond book, Hirsch’s take down of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – and America of course – got it all wrong.
Moreover, one can arguably suggest plagiarism, because my expose of SOCOM’s role and the American heroes who took out Bin Laden was published years before Hirsch’s. Years before the film about that story. Moreover, unlike Hirsch’s clever Bondian fakery, my story about the American hero Danny Eggers resulted a few years later in the $190 million Combined Operations Command in Kabul: Camp Eggers.
WIKIPEDIA: Camp Eggers was home to the Combined Forces Command – Afghanistan (CFC-A) and the Combined Security Transition Command – Afghanistan (CSTC-A). It was used by all U.S. military branches and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Hirsch: “The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island.”
In Hirsch’s upcoming TV series we not only have the German PM Sholtz (who is even more hesitant than Joe Biden supplying Ukraine with hardware), okaying an operation that could start World War III, but a third independent nation from whose territory, now in the way of Norway itself, is used to launch an operation to initiate that war.
Have we asked the Danes about this adventure co-sponsored by the U.S. and Norway? Didn’t think so, but nevertheless, Hirsch wove his intricate whopper through other fictional back channels of cooperation between nations, along with a warning about native observers at the scene who might have called the cops. Meanwhile, there was persistent Russian naval surveillance over NORDSTREAM, which the Russians installed and partly own. Aside these, the film’s Russian characters have not yet been developed. But rest assured, the big screen will make for a thrilling director’s cut once Oliver Stone agrees to direct, and Olga the Hooker in the Trump Collusion tale, plays the female lead.
Hirsch: “The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.”
This is exactly how scripts for spy thrillers combine half fact-half fiction news with historical events and half-baked historical characters. The precise formula for developing successful docudramas to advance political messaging.
We didn’t have to wait long before leading actors Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken made their appearances. So what is missing?
Dialogue, “foley” (special effects, bam, boom, crash, bullets, tracers and shrapnel flying, everything on fire), and enlisting the cooperation of the local armed services to supply military equipment, the key to central casting, black face paint, fully-outfitted newbies in bloodied-up camo as stand-ins.
Half fact-half fiction Hirsch continues: “The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them…. It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.”
Folks, nothing, I repeat, nothing could possibly go wrong here!
Maybe the MGM lion, laughing hysterically, running the other way?
Or…..
A UFO sighting and witnesses who’ll swear on their mom’s grave they’ve been teleported to the best news channel on 6th Avenue in midtown in the 9PM EST timeslot.
Rearview-running my October 2022 take at SUBSTACK, Hirsch added: “In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution.”
I would call Hirsch’s conflating SOCOM’s and DIA’s operations with the CIA’s as an act of self-sabotage.
Hirsch’s tactic? Taking his illogical premise logically to his illogical conclusion.
It is a well-documented technique and tactic of the conspiracist and paranoid mindset – and of the global leftwing.
It begins with the conclusions resolved up front (ie, Trump is a Russian asset), based on apriori bias, mixed-in assumptions from Aesop’s, wishing and hoping for change, wrapping the newly-invented fairy tale around unsubstantiated factoids, out of context sidebars, diversions, pivots, what-ifs, real characters and history-mixed-with-news, and in Hirsh’s case, old news.
Hirsch’s conclusions are as flawed as are his premises which assert that irreparable damage finished off Nordstream. Problem:
The Russians could repair the pipeline in two weeks with little financial or logistical expenditure and they said so. They agreed to resume gas and oil deliveries under the same conditions agreed to earlier. That story is in my October 2022 SUBSTACK written five months prior to Hirsch’s pandemic of inventions about divers in Panama.
World War III may happen, but NORDSTREAM will have had nothing to do with it. Denmark and Norway will have had nothing to do with it. And a fly on the White House office wall with Seymour Hirsch’s bespectacled face will have had nothing to do with it.
October 2022 I began with these words:
“Persons on the political extremes right and left invented the “news” that suggest Joe Biden has blown up the Nord Stream pipelines, because “that is what he had promised to do.“
I’m hardly a Biden fan, knowing well that everything Joe touched turned to disaster.
The conspiracists’ reasoning is just as disastrous.
Russia has no interest in blowing up “its main source of revenue” they argued, convinced of their own drivel.
Russia? “No way,” said these bright bulbs. “Russia won’t act against its interests.”
Certainly not, unless blowing up the pipeline was – very much in Russia’s interests…”
For the photos of the Russian navy pre-invasion of Crimea I took, please click the link above.
ONE IS FREE TO DISAGREE WITH THE GOVERNMENT OF ONE’S COUNTRY ON ANY ISSUE, INCLUDING ITS FOREIGN POLICY, BUT ONE HAS NO RIGHT TO EXPRESS ONE’S SYMPATHY WITH THE ENEMY IN WARTIME, BECAUSE THIS AMOUNTS TO SANCTIONING THE KILLING OF ONE’S COUNTRYMEN. – AYN RAND
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FURTHER READING
Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh’s Pipe Dream
I would like to preface this post by stating that I will not be making any conclusions on who is responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline explosions in this piece. While I have my suspects, all publicly available information regarding the explosions is circumstantial and there is none that conclusively points to a specific culprit. The purpose of this p…
© Andrew G. Benjamin is in finance, real estate and equities, a former advisor to New York City mayor’s office (Subcommittee on Taxation, Finance and the Budget). Benjamin wrote extensively about politics, transnational and domestic, intelligence and military affairs, security and strategy, economic issues, Mideast, terrorism, technology and high end audio.
I suggest we ask ourselves several questions about the Nord Stream sabotage:
1. Who stands to gain financially from it’s destruction?
2. Who stands to gain geo-politically from it’s destruction?
3. Who had the capability to destroy it?
4 Who had (more than ample) opportunity to do it, without setting off all sorts of alarms?
5. Who is happy, (no, make that “giddy”), that Nord Stream was destroyed? Vicky Nuland?
6. Who is stonewalling the investigation into the matter?
Answer those questions, (if you even need to), and you will know who exactly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
A criminal case requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A civil case contents itself with the balance of probabilities.
I don’t know if there is enough evidence to meet the criminal standard, but there is certainly enough to meet the civil standard.
Another fact that has great sway is the existence of motivation. Clearly only the US was motivated to do it whereas Russia had no motivation at all.
Andrew, nice try but no cigar.
@Morry Rotenberg
Why, indeed. The Swedes have forsaken their former position of neutrality, and are desperate to join NATO so they can spend less on defense to help deal with the economic crisis which brought down the previous govt last summer. This can not help but lead us to the obvious implication that their silence is motivated due to them either having nothing to report which will implicate the Russians or something to report which will not exonerate the US or NATO. Alternatively, they could be holding the report until they gain authorization to join NATO.
Just some thoughts.
So why have the Swedes who investigated the sabotage and know what happened decided to keep their findings classified?
@seymour
Important points to raise.
From a legal perspective there is plenty of “evidence” of American involvement. What was this guy expecting, a smoking gun? Like the Covid/Wuhan lab connection, No smoking gun but plenty of “evidence”. Circumstantial evidence is legally acceptable evidence. There’s probably no case that goes to trial that isn’t decided on the basis of some circumstantial evidence. In this matter technically Biden’s and Nuland’s statements re Nordstream 2 may even be considered admissions not merely circumstantial evidence. Whatever else you can say about Hersh he is not a novelist which the unhinged Benjamin is essentially accusing him of.
Interesting read, but when did governments ever need evidence and facts to do what they do? I get a sense AJB is creaking click bait, for those people who stand on the other side of the Nordstrom issue. The sound’s to me like heavy axe grinding.
@Michael
Glad to hear it. I fail to understand, irregardless of Hirsch’s story, how anyone could reasonably find any merit in the Russians blowing up their own pipeline. The fact that so many have heralded the claim that ‘of course the Russians did it’ only demonstrates their lack of any semblance of rational integrity on anything relating to this war.
REDACTED covered Hirsch’s story in detail in this VIDEO.
This article piqued my interest in Glenn Greenwald, whom I honestly can’t remember anything about. He recently tweeted:
That probably shines light on the Greenwald – Benjamin animosity; but unfortunately, it tells us nothing about Nordstream — or maybe not unfortunately.
BTW Peloni, I suspect the Russians did not blow up the pipeline, for what it’s worth.
Benjamin’s character assassination on Hirsch, warranted or not, does not eliminate the reasonably likely truth that Russia had nothing to do with the terrorist action taken against the Russian people, which brings us to the only important point raised by Benjamin, IMHO:
Yet, as Benjamin requires some level of evidence to support the notion that Hirsch’s claims are accurate, he seems fairly comfortable in ignoring the lack of evidence which indicates that his own ridiculous claims are better supported by the facts.
Indeed, where is the evidence which implicates Russia in this crime against the Russians? Well, there is none. So, failing for the moment to have clear evidence one way or the other, let us look more closely at the principle of qui bono, ie who benefits, and to better assess exactly who might benefit, let us also look at the timing of things, as doing so might provide a further point of discernment to suggest who clearly benefited from carrying out this terrorist strike against millions of people.
Presuming Benjamin’s claims are correct, we must believe that Russia purposefully denied themselves of a geopolitical asset which actually gave them leverage over Europe, and the Germans in particular, and that they did so just as that leverage was about to be most useful – during the WINTER, when Germany and northern Europe was going to be simultaneously experiencing the thermal blight of cold and the economic blight of rising costs of living – note that not only were both of these conditions the result of the denial of Russian gas, but that these conditions, particularly in the short term, could only be remedied by the restoration of the free flow of Russian gas thru the now defunct pipelines. If one were to believe that Russia would ever have done something so nihilistic, so self destructive, and so aimlessly foolish as to destroy their own pipeline simply for the effects of propaganda, it would only be reasonable to believe that such a silly, costly and pointless measure would be taken in the spring, after the Germans failed to be tempted, under the scourge of a cold and costly winter, to be drawn back to the ever ready Russian pipelines which stood as a source of salvation to their freezing and unemployed public. Recall that the party who did blow up the Russian pipeline was free to choose the timing in which their terrorism would have the greatest effect. Consequently, I think it is pretty soundly supported to suggest that the timing, alone, argues quite soundly against the Russians being behind the elimination of their greatest asset in this war when it would have been of the greatest use to win the war.
Forgive the analogy, but it seems Benjamin and his Neocon allies prefer the idea that it was actually the wife who beat herself silly, just to implicate her knowingly abusive husband.
Hi Peloni
While not arguing with you assertions for a moment, you still haven’t proved Hirsch’s claims. The very least he could do to this end, would be to reveal his “anonymous source”. Then, who is to decide the matter? the ICC? The US is not a party to the ICC. How about the New York Southern District Court? or the High Court of Israel. If the Russians appealed to the US Supreme Court, would they score a win?
I strongly doubt that any of these charges will be verified. Meanwhile, I was glad to see,
I’ve had my own suspicions about these fellows.
@Peloni.
Your comments are well argued and appreciated.
To counter the claim in these statements, let us look at what is claimed by MIT Technology Review
So, “two weeks with little financial or logistical expenditure” is quite a dubious claim which I would suggest should be fairly obvious, even if the Russians did make the claim to the contrary – recall that this was the pipeline was their greatest asset in ending this war without having to fight it to its obvious conclusion, which was certainly not in Russia’s interest.
The articles linked in this section, which are the only links I read, do NOT support what Benjamin asserts.
Let us look at them each.
The article cited in this sentence was written in 2019 and states that
which is clearly not related to the act of sabotage which took place 3yrs later.
The article linked in this sentence relates that
Nowhere in this article do I find any statement related to Russia resuming gas or oil deliveries.
This is a most disagreeable assertion – one which is irresponsible, undemocratic and immoral.
In a free society, it is the people who choose the govt, and are free to challenge any position taken by their govt by expressing their views openly and freely, without the threat of their challenge to the govt being labeled as an act of treason or terrorism.
The people choose what their govt supports. The choice of a govt to enter a war does not amend the authority of the people over their govt and the requirement of the consent of the governed does not have a carve-out during war beyond the implementation of marshal law, which actually requires a declaration of war. In fact, it is during war, when the greatest assets of the nation, both blood and treasure, are placed at the greatest risk, that the concept of the consent of the governed must be most vigorously pursued. This is the very purpose behind which the Founders of the American Republic made it the sovereign duty of the Congress, not the president, to make declarations of war, since they more closely represent the will of the people, or so it was intended, in any event.
For the public to submit to the will of an administration gone rogue on any issue is to accept the rule of tyrants, and this would be all the more significantly true should such an administration choose to make war on another sovereign nation without the support of the people. A nation of free people can only be free so long as the people hold the reigns of power over their govt, and abjuring this responsibility out of a false sense of patriotism would only make the people complicit in any illicit or illegal actions taken by their govt.
An example of what Rand’s statement above entails can be assessed by considering the case of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement in Nazi Germany (link). Scholl and her comrades were heroes. They became German martyrs while acting as true German patriots, who only suffered their ultimate fate due to her fellow Germans exercising the full intent of Rand’s statement above.
The third pamphlet released by the White Rose movement stated:
I would suggest that objecting to the false representations which draw a nation to war is not only one’s solemn right, it is one’s moral obligation.