Western media blackout on US role in Nord Stream attack 'unsurprising': Analyst

Western media has turned completely mute after Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh last week revealed that US Navy was behind the Nord Stream pipeline blast in September 2022, according to an analyst.

Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based international affairs analyst who holds a Ph.D. in Russian history from Columbia University, told Press TV in an interview on Sunday that the Western media blackout on Hersh’s expose was unsurprising as it follows the US lead.

“I'm sitting in Belgium, I was just looking today at our newspapers, … there was not a word about Seymour Hersh, not a word about his exposé. There is no surprise there either because, for years now, European newspapers and media have taken their cues from Washington DC,” he said.

West’s anti-Russia moves

This episode is about explosions in Russian gas pipelines, Nord Stream and Moscow require NATO to hold an emergency summit on the results.

Hersh, a former award-winning New York Times reporter, wrote on his blog on Wednesday that US Navy divers planted the bombs that wrecked three of the four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe last September.

In his report, Hersh claimed that the bombing had been directly ordered by US President Joe Biden and carried out by the CIA with the help of the US Navy.

While the Pentagon has denied the claim, Moscow has called for a thorough investigation and said it should be taken seriously.

Doctorow said what Hersh wrote in his blog is likely to be true, citing two unnamed sources including a retired US diplomat and a law professor at the University of Illinois.

“I would like to use this opportunity to confirm that today two sources who are authoritative, respectable, and well-informed about the career of Seymour Hersh, wrote to me and to others, [saying that] they have great confidence in the veracity and comprehensive truths that Hersh has presented on his website a couple of days ago,” he said.

Russia calls for international probe after Seymour Hersh report on Nord Stream blasts

Russia has called for an international investigation after a new report by famous American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that the United States was behind Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline explosions.

Nord Stream 1, including two pipelines, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. Nord Stream 2, a second pair of pipelines, has been built but is not yet operational.

On September 26, 2022, following a powerful blast, three of the four strings of the Nord Stream network were knocked out.

Moscow has since blamed the West for the damage to the infrastructure and the unexplained explosions that caused the ruptures.

Sweden and Denmark have both concluded the pipelines were blown up intentionally, but have not said who might be responsible.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that Hersh’s blog post deserved more attention and he was surprised it had not been covered more fully by Western media.

He said the world must find out the truth about who carried out this act of sabotage, and called for “an open international investigation.”

“This is a very dangerous precedent: if someone did it once, they can do it again anywhere in the world.”

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