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Yesterday I posted this story and just assumed it must be true, but now I’m far less convinced, especially given the gravity of it.

My fatal assumption was “there’s no way the guy who was breaking huge stories like this in the past would drop the ball this hard this late in his career by fucking up what would possibly be his last huge story”, which led me to just immediately accepting the story as true without even doing any real investigation, especially since it was already more likely that it was us since the incentive is more obvious.

Turns out I definitely should have investigated, because this is also the same dude that claimed the Syrian gas attacks were staged, something which has never been substantiated, and which I wasn’t aware of, and would have already made me question this story if I was. So no, this is not quite the open and shut case that I thought it was.

It could be true, but if all he has are anonymous sources, and he’s no longer working with an editor to verify these sources, then for all I know his sources are just Russian agents.

And I should add that given the combination of his advancing age (I’ve seen this cognitive decline in the elderly in my own family; formerly sharp people falling for phishing scams), and how ML has advanced to the point where foreign agents can much more convincingly present themselves as known public officials to the unwary, and how it sounds like he is working independently now, he is way more susceptible to this kind of manipulation than most people realize.

So sorry, I dropped the ball on this one by assuming it must be true and presenting it as if it were verified fact. While this story could be true, it is not in any way “100% reliable”. For now, it’s just another narrative. -

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

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