In addition to the interview with Berliner Zeitung, Seymour Hersh also granted an extensive interview yesterday to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, thereby reaching an American audience. Much of what he said is a reiteration of what he wrote in his Feb. 8 article exposing the Biden Administration’s plot to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline. Some highlights of what he said follow:
The hatred that has been stirred up in the United States against the person of Valdimir Putin is not useful. “I don’t think there’s any chance that Putin wants to take over Europe,” he said. “I don’t think he wants to take — he wants to have Ukraine tamed, but he’s not interested in doing anything more.”
Hersh explains what Biden did by deciding to blow up the pipeline. “What he did is he said, ‘I’m in a big war with Ukraine. It’s not looking good. I want to be sure I get German and West European support. And I know winter is coming, and if it’s going to be bad, I don’t want the Germans to say, We’ve got to check out, because we’re getting massacred. We’ll be massacred with no cheap fuel, and our economy will go bonkers. We’re going to check out, and we’re going to open up the gas line,’ which they could do. So he took away that option.”
But the fear of cheap Russian gas to Europe goes back to the Bush-Cheney years. “Anyway, at that time, they began to talk about the threat — the threat of gas, the threat of cheap energy for Europe, was always seen as a threat to make Europe be more palatable or more willing to trade with Russia. We always wanted to isolate Russia. This has been a theme of the last decades.”
“The fear was Europe would pass away, walk away from the war,” Hersh continued. “They really — this has cut into the notion that they can depend totally on America, even in a crisis. And I think it’s going to undercut NATO, which I always found to be supremely useless, but certainly that European countries are going to be — I know people that are paying five times as much now for electricity. People are paying three or four times more for gas. There’s not enough of it. It’s very expensive. It’s colder now than it was in the fall.”
