Claim the US responsible for sabotaging pipelines needs probing: China Daily editorial

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed that the United States sabotaged the Nord Stream 2 pipelines in September.

In a story published on Wednesday, Hersh contends that in a CIA operation ordered by President Joe Biden, US Navy divers laid bombs under the natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea last September. According to an unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning", the US Navy did the operation "under the cover of a widely publicized mid-NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22" in June, with the assistance of the Norwegian navy and secret service.

The White House of course has denied the claim, calling it "utterly false and complete fiction". But Hersh is no fly-by-night blogger writing clickbait. He has a track record of breaking big stories dating back to his disclosure of the My Lai massacre of South Vietnamese villagers by US troops in 1969.

The Pentagon has also issued a statement saying that "the United States was not involved in the Nord Stream explosion".

But Biden declared on Feb 7 last year that there would no longer be a Nord Stream 2 if Russian troops or tanks crossed the border into Ukraine — "We will bring an end to it."

And, as was noted at the time, it was only the US that had anything to really gain from blowing up the pipelines, despite some Western officials trying to point the finger of blame at Russia.

Not surprisingly, Russia, which has "repeatedly expressed" its belief that the US and NATO were responsible for the explosions, has called for an international investigation.

While cautioning about treating the article as the primary source, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was "unfair" to ignore an article that was "remarkable for the depth of analysis" and the world must find out the truth about the act of sabotage as it set a "very dangerous precedent: if someone did it once, they can do it again anywhere in the world".

If the US wants the world to believe its denial that it was the culprit, it should offer full assistance to a transparent and independent international probe into the incident.

Given the nature of his reporting, which tears through the cover of US official accounts, it is no surprise that the US establishment has repeatedly tried to undermine Hersh's credibility by accusing him of spreading conspiracy theories.

Yet there is no doubting the plausibility of his claim, and it is important that the international community determine who was responsible and hold them accountable. Being civilian infrastructure, the sabotaging of the pipelines, was by its nature a terrorist act. It was also a grave environmental crime as the incident resulted in the releasing of an estimated 300,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere — the largest release ever of the greenhouse gas from a single event.