Pac Man lives!
- By Cris_Ard
- House Of Politics & Off-Topics
- 1 Replies
Lego is heading back to the ’80s with a 2,651-piece model ‘Pac-Man’ arcade cabinet
By: Jack Guy - CNN.comEighties kids, rejoice! Toy company Lego is about to release a 2,561-piece set celebrating “Pac-Man.”
The set is based on a real 1980s arcade game cabinet and comes complete with a light brick to illuminate the coin slot, Lego said on its website.
Lego
“Pac-Man” was launched in Tokyo in 1980 and went on to become the most successful arcade game of all time. Players control Pac-Man, a yellow, cheese-shaped character who is tasked with eating every small dot inside a maze while at the same time avoiding four ghosts.
While the Lego set does not actually function as a gaming system, it is “loaded with retro game details you’ll want to devour,” the company says.
It features what Lego calls a “mechanical maze,” which is operated by turning a crank on the side of the set.
“When turned, the characters move around the maze in a realistic way, thanks to triumphant engineering efforts,” it says.
Measuring 13 inches high, 10 inches wide and seven deep, the arcade cabinet has a removable back panel that reveals the inner workings of the machine.
The creation of 25-year-old game designer Toru Iwatani, “Pac-Man” pioneered a number of innovations in gameplay and game design. It featured the first “power-up”—the big pill that made ghosts vulnerable—and the first cut scenes, the small animated sequences between one level and the next. It was also one of the very first games in the “maze” genre.
To honor its role as a pillar in the history of video games, “Pac-Man” was among the titles added to the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2012.
Lego
The Pac-Man Arcade set goes on sale for $270 on June 4, as part of Lego’s Icons collection, which is “designed for a challenging yet rewarding building experience,” the company says.
Other sets in the collection include a Land Rover Classic Defender 90, the Titanic and the Eiffel Tower.
For those of you headed to Ireland anytime soon ...
- By Cris_Ard
- The West Zone
- 16 Replies
Ireland is set to be the first nation to require alcohol warning labels
By: Clark Schultz - SA EditorIreland passed legislation on Monday that will make it the first country in the world to require health warnings on alcohol products. The warning labels are expected to detail the dangers of drinking while pregnant, related cancer information, and the risks of liver disease from drinking.
The new legistation, which was signed into law by health minister Stephen Donnelly, also includes a requirement that alcohol warnings be posted at pubs and restaurants where alcohol is served. However, it will be a few years before any impact may be felt in the industry, with the new legislation not scheduled to go into effect until May of 2026.
"This law is designed to give all of us as consumers a better understanding of the alcohol content and health risks associated with consuming alcohol," noted Donnelly. Irish health department officials have also maintained the regulations only bring alcohol products in line with requirements for food packaging.
The Ireland alcohol warning plan has already seen protests from Italy, Spain and six other EU member states due to the potential issues it could create. Outside the EU, complaints about the new requirement have also been filed with the World Trade Organization by UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, and Cuba.
Dublin, Ireland is the world headquarters of Diageo's (DEO) Guinness beer brand and Pernod Ricard's (OTCPK
DRDF) Jameson whisky brand.
Clemson Baseball Postseason Update Thread
- By jmplexi
- The West Zone
- 304 Replies
Usually on Wednesdays the college baseball sites release their postseason projections, will try to update this as the weeks go on. Starting with Baseball America's newest prediction, Clemson has moved up to the first 4 out. Still plenty of time left to build our resume starting this weekend at BC (a projected regional host in this scenario)
www.baseballamerica.com
D1 Baseball's projections should come out this afternoon and I will share in here when they do. I expect Clemson to be in a similar spot in their projection. Bottom line is we have played our way back into contention from beyond the dead. Need to continue to win series on the weekends!!
2023 NCAA Tournament Projected Field of 64 (4/26/23)
College baseball is nearly into the stretch run of the regular season. There are 33 days until Selection Monday and the focus is increasingly on the postseason race.
www.baseballamerica.com
D1 Baseball's projections should come out this afternoon and I will share in here when they do. I expect Clemson to be in a similar spot in their projection. Bottom line is we have played our way back into contention from beyond the dead. Need to continue to win series on the weekends!!
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
- By TigerGrowls
- House Of Politics & Off-Topics
- 31 Replies
Just as we suspected. The sane ones of us anyway. Insider info and Seymour Hersh is formerly of the libs beloved NY Times.
seymourhersh.substack.com
21 hr ago
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The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
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.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
PLANNING
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.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that 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 PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.
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.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. 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.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat ****,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Login to view embedded media Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .”
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THE OPERATION
Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.
In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.
A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.
In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.
Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.
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. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.
At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.
“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.
Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.
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.
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” 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.
The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.
Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.
Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.
The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.
The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
FALLOUT
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. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.
“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
seymourhersh.substack.com
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Seymour Hersh21 hr ago
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The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
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.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
PLANNING
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.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that 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 PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.
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.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. 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.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat ****,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Login to view embedded media Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .”
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THE OPERATION
Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.
In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China.
A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction for years, had become operational and more American submarines were now able to work closely with their Norwegian colleagues to monitor and spy on a major Russian nuclear redoubt 250 miles to the east, on the Kola Peninsula. America also has vastly expanded a Norwegian air base in the north and delivered to the Norwegian air force a fleet of Boeing-built P8 Poseidon patrol planes to bolster its long-range spying on all things Russia.
In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas” in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering with the work at the base.
Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.
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. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.
At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the cover of popular magazines.
“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies, which could report it.
Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish archipelago and be forced to the surface.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a fix.
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.
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” 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.
The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.
Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS, but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of his choosing.
Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.
The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being controlled by Communist Russia.
The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant violating the law.
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that “you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
FALLOUT
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. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.
“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
BREAKING: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Introduces Articles of Impeachment Against “Corrupt” FBI Director Christopher Wray
- By TigerGrowls
- House Of Politics & Off-Topics
- 32 Replies
Its about time. They need to be thinking article of impeachment against China Joe too. I know any of it is probably stonewalled in the senate but they need to do their job.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
By Jim Hoft May. 16, 2023 2:40 pm
On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced Articles of Impeachment against “corrupt” FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“I just introduced articles of impeachment against FBI Director Christopher Wray,” Greene tweeted.
“Under his watch, the FBI has intimidated, harassed, & entrapped Americans who have been deemed enemies of the Biden regime. Wray has turned the FBI into Joe Biden and Merrick Garland’s personal police force. Christopher Wray needs to be impeached,” she added.
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“In his conduct as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend, the Constitution of the United States, Christopher Asher Wray continues to materially endanger the justice system of the United States and empower President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., to persecute his political adversaries at will,” the Articles of Impeachment read.
“Director Wray has failed to uphold his oath and has instead overseen a denigration of the principles of our democratic republic by utilizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a Federal police force to punish or intimidate anyone who questions or opposes the current regime,” it added.
Rep. Greene’s office released the following statement, read below:
(This is a breaking story. Please check back for more updates.)
BREAKING: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Introduces Articles of Impeachment Against "Corrupt" FBI Director Christopher Wray | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
On Tuesday, Rep.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
By Jim Hoft May. 16, 2023 2:40 pm
On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced Articles of Impeachment against “corrupt” FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“I just introduced articles of impeachment against FBI Director Christopher Wray,” Greene tweeted.
“Under his watch, the FBI has intimidated, harassed, & entrapped Americans who have been deemed enemies of the Biden regime. Wray has turned the FBI into Joe Biden and Merrick Garland’s personal police force. Christopher Wray needs to be impeached,” she added.
Login to view embedded media
“In his conduct as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend, the Constitution of the United States, Christopher Asher Wray continues to materially endanger the justice system of the United States and empower President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., to persecute his political adversaries at will,” the Articles of Impeachment read.
“Director Wray has failed to uphold his oath and has instead overseen a denigration of the principles of our democratic republic by utilizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a Federal police force to punish or intimidate anyone who questions or opposes the current regime,” it added.
Rep. Greene’s office released the following statement, read below:
The decision to introduce Articles of Impeachment against FBI Director Christopher Wray comes after Special Counsel John Durham released his final report concluding the FBI had not verified intel when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump in 2016.
(This is a breaking story. Please check back for more updates.)
Why I don’t believe there ever was a Covid virus
- By TigerGrowls
- House Of Politics & Off-Topics
- 14 Replies
Wow!! This deserves its own thread. Very thought provoking and from an expert in the field.
off-guardian.org
Concerningly, almost no one will entertain this possibility, despite the fact that molecular biology is the easiest discipline in which to cheat. That’s because you really cannot do it without computers, and sequencing requires complex algorithms and, importantly, assumptions. Tweaking algorithms and assumptions, you can hugely alter the conclusions.
This raises the question of why there is such an emphasis on the media storm around Fauci, Wuhan and a possible lab escape. After all, the ‘perpetrators’ have significant control over the media. There’s no independent journalism at present. It is not as though they need to embarrass the establishment. I put it to readers that they’ve chosen to do so.
So who do I mean by ‘they’ and ‘the perpetrators? There are a number of candidates competing for this position, with their drug company accomplices, several of whom are named in Paula Jardine’s excellent five-part series for TCW, Anatomy of the sinister Covid project. High on the list is the ‘enabling’ World Economic Forum and their many political acolytes including Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern.
But that doesn’t answer the question why are they focusing on the genesis of the virus. In my view, they are doing their darnedest to make sure you regard this event exactly as they want you to. Specifically, that there was a novel virus.
I’m not alone in believing that myself at the beginning of the ‘pandemic’, but over time I’ve seen sufficient evidence to cast strong doubt on that idea. Additionally, when considered as part of a global coup d’état, I have put myself in the position of the most senior, hidden perpetrators. In a Q&A, they would learn that the effect of a released novel pathogen couldn’t be predicted accurately. It might burn out rapidly. Or it might turn out to be quite a lot more lethal than they’d expected, demolishing advanced civilisations. Those top decision-makers would, I submit, conclude that this natural risk is intolerable to them. They crave total control, and the wide range of possible outcomes from a deliberate release militates against this plan of action: ‘No, we’re not going to do this. Come back with a plan with very much reduced uncertainty on outcomes.’
The alternative I think they’ve used is to add one more lie to the tall stack of lies which has surrounded this entire affair. This lie is that there has ever been in circulation a novel respiratory virus which, crucially, caused massive-scale illness and deaths. In fact, there hasn’t.
Instead, we have been told there was this frightening, novel pathogen and ramped up the stress-inducing fear porn to 11, and held it there. This fits with cheating about genetic sequences, PCR test protocols (probes, primers, amplification and annealing conditions, cycles), ignoring contaminating genetic materials from not only human and claimed viral sources, but also bacterial and fungal sources. Why for example did they need to insert the sampling sticks right into our sinuses? Was it to maximise non-human genetic sequences?
Notice the soft evidence that our political and cultural leaders, including the late Queen, were happy to meet and greet one another without testing, masking or social distancing. They had no fear. In the scenario above, a few people would have known there was no new hazard in their environment. If there really was a lethal pathogen stalking the land, I don’t believe they’d have had the courage or the need to act nonchalantly and risk exposure to the virus.
Most convincingly for me is the US all-cause mortality (ACM) data by state, sex, age and date of occurrence, as analysed by Denis Rancourt and colleagues. The pattern of increased ACM is inconsistent with the presence of a novel respiratory virus as the main cause.
If I’m correct that there was no novel virus, what a genius move it was to pretend there was! Now they want you only to consider how this ‘killer virus’ got into the human population. Was it a natural emergence (you know, a wild bat bit a pangolin and this ended up being sold at a wet market in Wuhan) or was it hubristically created by a Chinese researcher, enabled along the way by a researcher at the University of North Carolina funded by Fauci, together making an end run around a presidential pause on such work? Then there’s the question as to whether the arrival of the virus in the general public was down to carelessness and a lab leak, or did someone deliberately spread it?
I also need to point out that the perpetrators have hermetic control of the mass media via a Big Tech and government stranglehold documented in part here, here and here. That’s why they’ve found it so easy to censor people like me. If a story appears on multiple TV networks, it’s because they’re either OK with it or it has been actively planted. It won’t be genuine. They never tell the truth. I don’t think they’ve told the truth since this coup began and probably much earlier. Most so-called journalists have lost sight of what truth ever was.
I believe that the perpetrators (who could be all or any of Gates, Fauci, Farrar, Vallance, CEPI, EcoHealth Alliance, DARPA and numerous others) planted the controversy about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 because a little embarrassment of the establishment was a small price to persuade most of us that there surely must be a novel virus when there isn’t. (And they have got away with it to date.)
I have colleagues who do not believe what we’ve been told (i.e. that a virus has been experimentally constructed) is even possible technologically. I don’t have the background to assess that idea. But the rest hangs together for me in a way that no other explanation does.
To this point, an ex-pharmaceutical industry executive Sasha Latypova, speaking with Robert F Kennedy Jr on his podcast of last Thursday, March 16, describes the extensive evidence of the contracts and relationships that were in place before the Covid era. Contracts were signed for billions of dollars in February 2020.
Not only would the required production never happen (from a standing start, to sign such a large commitment is ridiculous) but it cannot be done. She estimated that approximately one kilogram of DNA was required. There isn’t that much medicinal grade DNA on the planet at any one time. That’s because it’s hard to do, very expensive, wholly bespoke and difficult to store for long periods. Also, the amounts of any specific DNA sequence required and held in store by commercial suppliers would be milligrams or perhaps grams at a stretch. So it was always completely unfeasible, regardless of how much money was thrown at the problem, to have accomplished what they claim to have done in a short time.
Consequently, no other conclusion is supported by the facts than that it’s a huge crime, extensively planned. In itself, that rules out a natural emergence of a pathogen, unless divine providence occurred. Logically we’re left with a leak or, as I argue, a lie plus a PsyOp. The former may or may not be possible, but what isn’t arguable is that something like this could be done and would be likely to run smoothly, with a real pathogen. Almost any outcome but the one presumably wanted is likely if a pathogen is released. I can reach no other conclusion than that it’s fake.
In closing, I’m not saying people weren’t sick or that they didn’t die in huge numbers. I’m arguing only about the causes of illnesses and deaths. People were made sick and some killed by all the pre-existing causes, amplified by fear, resulting in immunosuppression and then a host of revolting actions. Note even the official overlap of signs and symptoms of ‘Covid-19’ and existing illnesses.
Notably, they chopped antibiotic prescriptions in the US by 50 per cent during 2020. They ensured large numbers of frail elderly people were mechanically ventilated, a procedure which, in such subjects, is close to contraindicated. Some were administered remdesivir, which is a poison for the kidneys. In care homes, they were given midazolam and morphine, respiratory depressant drugs which in combination are all but contraindicated in patients with breathing difficulties. If used, close monitoring is required, most usually automated alarm systems attached to vital cardiorespiratory monitoring, including fingertip monitoring for blood gases. That didn’t happen in care homes.
I believe the main reason for the lies about the novel virus is a desire for total predictability and control, with the clearly articulated intention of transforming society; beginning by dismantling the financial system through lockdowns and furlough, while the immediate practical goal of lockdown was to provide the causus belli for injecting as many people as possible with materials designed not to induce immunity, but to demand repeat inoculation, to cause injury and death, and to control freedom of movement. I’m sure they’re pretty content with getting at least one needle into 6,000,000,000 people.
Note that though an estimated 10-15million have been killed with poisonous ‘vaccines’, these are the but first of many mRNA injections to come. The indications are that ways to force you to accept ten more have been anticipated, because that’s the number of doses your government has agreed to purchase. Purchasing what? Well, it’s already been mooted that all existing vaccines are to be reformatted as mRNA types. If this happens, I don’t believe anyone injected ten more times is likely to escape death or severe, life-limiting illnesses.
Inducing your body to manufacture non-self proteins will axiomatically induce an autoimmune attack by your own body. Your disease will be related to where the injected dose goes and of course the consistency of that injected product. They’ve been horribly erratic so far. It’s not certain they ever could have been made and launched if they had been subject to the usual quality requirements and not granted ’emergency use’ authorisations. Of course, as we now know, the regulators played an important role beyond lying for the US military, the organisation which made the original orders for ‘vaccines’, and set all the contractual conditions for companies such as Moderna and Pfizer.
The chickens are coming home to roost right now in the banking system.
As I always say, I cannot know much for sure. I don’t have a copy of the script of this, the greatest crime in history. But, whatever Covid actually is, I don’t believe that what was called influenza disappeared conveniently in early 2020. It’s another lie. It’s what they do. It’s all they do.
To those who sense that all is not well but are unwilling to make the psychological leap to the diabolical world I believe we’re now living in, I point out the asymmetry of risk. If you follow the official narrative and I’m right, you and your children will lose all your freedoms and probably your lives. If you believe what I’m saying and I’m wrong, you’ll be laughed at. These options aren’t faintly balanced. A rational actor should cease believing what we’re being told. It’s not a safe position, keeping your counsel and your head down. It’s the most dangerous thing you could do.
Why I don’t believe there ever was a Covid virus
Dr Mike Yeadon I’ve grown increasingly frustrated about the way debate is controlled around the topic of origins of the alleged novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, and I have come to disbelieve it’s ever been…
off-guardian.org
Dr Mike Yeadon
I’ve grown increasingly frustrated about the way debate is controlled around the topic of origins of the alleged novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, and I have come to disbelieve it’s ever been in circulation, causing massive scale illness and death.Concerningly, almost no one will entertain this possibility, despite the fact that molecular biology is the easiest discipline in which to cheat. That’s because you really cannot do it without computers, and sequencing requires complex algorithms and, importantly, assumptions. Tweaking algorithms and assumptions, you can hugely alter the conclusions.
This raises the question of why there is such an emphasis on the media storm around Fauci, Wuhan and a possible lab escape. After all, the ‘perpetrators’ have significant control over the media. There’s no independent journalism at present. It is not as though they need to embarrass the establishment. I put it to readers that they’ve chosen to do so.
So who do I mean by ‘they’ and ‘the perpetrators? There are a number of candidates competing for this position, with their drug company accomplices, several of whom are named in Paula Jardine’s excellent five-part series for TCW, Anatomy of the sinister Covid project. High on the list is the ‘enabling’ World Economic Forum and their many political acolytes including Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern.
But that doesn’t answer the question why are they focusing on the genesis of the virus. In my view, they are doing their darnedest to make sure you regard this event exactly as they want you to. Specifically, that there was a novel virus.
I’m not alone in believing that myself at the beginning of the ‘pandemic’, but over time I’ve seen sufficient evidence to cast strong doubt on that idea. Additionally, when considered as part of a global coup d’état, I have put myself in the position of the most senior, hidden perpetrators. In a Q&A, they would learn that the effect of a released novel pathogen couldn’t be predicted accurately. It might burn out rapidly. Or it might turn out to be quite a lot more lethal than they’d expected, demolishing advanced civilisations. Those top decision-makers would, I submit, conclude that this natural risk is intolerable to them. They crave total control, and the wide range of possible outcomes from a deliberate release militates against this plan of action: ‘No, we’re not going to do this. Come back with a plan with very much reduced uncertainty on outcomes.’
The alternative I think they’ve used is to add one more lie to the tall stack of lies which has surrounded this entire affair. This lie is that there has ever been in circulation a novel respiratory virus which, crucially, caused massive-scale illness and deaths. In fact, there hasn’t.
Instead, we have been told there was this frightening, novel pathogen and ramped up the stress-inducing fear porn to 11, and held it there. This fits with cheating about genetic sequences, PCR test protocols (probes, primers, amplification and annealing conditions, cycles), ignoring contaminating genetic materials from not only human and claimed viral sources, but also bacterial and fungal sources. Why for example did they need to insert the sampling sticks right into our sinuses? Was it to maximise non-human genetic sequences?
Notice the soft evidence that our political and cultural leaders, including the late Queen, were happy to meet and greet one another without testing, masking or social distancing. They had no fear. In the scenario above, a few people would have known there was no new hazard in their environment. If there really was a lethal pathogen stalking the land, I don’t believe they’d have had the courage or the need to act nonchalantly and risk exposure to the virus.
Most convincingly for me is the US all-cause mortality (ACM) data by state, sex, age and date of occurrence, as analysed by Denis Rancourt and colleagues. The pattern of increased ACM is inconsistent with the presence of a novel respiratory virus as the main cause.
If I’m correct that there was no novel virus, what a genius move it was to pretend there was! Now they want you only to consider how this ‘killer virus’ got into the human population. Was it a natural emergence (you know, a wild bat bit a pangolin and this ended up being sold at a wet market in Wuhan) or was it hubristically created by a Chinese researcher, enabled along the way by a researcher at the University of North Carolina funded by Fauci, together making an end run around a presidential pause on such work? Then there’s the question as to whether the arrival of the virus in the general public was down to carelessness and a lab leak, or did someone deliberately spread it?
I also need to point out that the perpetrators have hermetic control of the mass media via a Big Tech and government stranglehold documented in part here, here and here. That’s why they’ve found it so easy to censor people like me. If a story appears on multiple TV networks, it’s because they’re either OK with it or it has been actively planted. It won’t be genuine. They never tell the truth. I don’t think they’ve told the truth since this coup began and probably much earlier. Most so-called journalists have lost sight of what truth ever was.
I believe that the perpetrators (who could be all or any of Gates, Fauci, Farrar, Vallance, CEPI, EcoHealth Alliance, DARPA and numerous others) planted the controversy about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 because a little embarrassment of the establishment was a small price to persuade most of us that there surely must be a novel virus when there isn’t. (And they have got away with it to date.)
I have colleagues who do not believe what we’ve been told (i.e. that a virus has been experimentally constructed) is even possible technologically. I don’t have the background to assess that idea. But the rest hangs together for me in a way that no other explanation does.
To this point, an ex-pharmaceutical industry executive Sasha Latypova, speaking with Robert F Kennedy Jr on his podcast of last Thursday, March 16, describes the extensive evidence of the contracts and relationships that were in place before the Covid era. Contracts were signed for billions of dollars in February 2020.
Not only would the required production never happen (from a standing start, to sign such a large commitment is ridiculous) but it cannot be done. She estimated that approximately one kilogram of DNA was required. There isn’t that much medicinal grade DNA on the planet at any one time. That’s because it’s hard to do, very expensive, wholly bespoke and difficult to store for long periods. Also, the amounts of any specific DNA sequence required and held in store by commercial suppliers would be milligrams or perhaps grams at a stretch. So it was always completely unfeasible, regardless of how much money was thrown at the problem, to have accomplished what they claim to have done in a short time.
Consequently, no other conclusion is supported by the facts than that it’s a huge crime, extensively planned. In itself, that rules out a natural emergence of a pathogen, unless divine providence occurred. Logically we’re left with a leak or, as I argue, a lie plus a PsyOp. The former may or may not be possible, but what isn’t arguable is that something like this could be done and would be likely to run smoothly, with a real pathogen. Almost any outcome but the one presumably wanted is likely if a pathogen is released. I can reach no other conclusion than that it’s fake.
In closing, I’m not saying people weren’t sick or that they didn’t die in huge numbers. I’m arguing only about the causes of illnesses and deaths. People were made sick and some killed by all the pre-existing causes, amplified by fear, resulting in immunosuppression and then a host of revolting actions. Note even the official overlap of signs and symptoms of ‘Covid-19’ and existing illnesses.
Notably, they chopped antibiotic prescriptions in the US by 50 per cent during 2020. They ensured large numbers of frail elderly people were mechanically ventilated, a procedure which, in such subjects, is close to contraindicated. Some were administered remdesivir, which is a poison for the kidneys. In care homes, they were given midazolam and morphine, respiratory depressant drugs which in combination are all but contraindicated in patients with breathing difficulties. If used, close monitoring is required, most usually automated alarm systems attached to vital cardiorespiratory monitoring, including fingertip monitoring for blood gases. That didn’t happen in care homes.
I believe the main reason for the lies about the novel virus is a desire for total predictability and control, with the clearly articulated intention of transforming society; beginning by dismantling the financial system through lockdowns and furlough, while the immediate practical goal of lockdown was to provide the causus belli for injecting as many people as possible with materials designed not to induce immunity, but to demand repeat inoculation, to cause injury and death, and to control freedom of movement. I’m sure they’re pretty content with getting at least one needle into 6,000,000,000 people.
Note that though an estimated 10-15million have been killed with poisonous ‘vaccines’, these are the but first of many mRNA injections to come. The indications are that ways to force you to accept ten more have been anticipated, because that’s the number of doses your government has agreed to purchase. Purchasing what? Well, it’s already been mooted that all existing vaccines are to be reformatted as mRNA types. If this happens, I don’t believe anyone injected ten more times is likely to escape death or severe, life-limiting illnesses.
Inducing your body to manufacture non-self proteins will axiomatically induce an autoimmune attack by your own body. Your disease will be related to where the injected dose goes and of course the consistency of that injected product. They’ve been horribly erratic so far. It’s not certain they ever could have been made and launched if they had been subject to the usual quality requirements and not granted ’emergency use’ authorisations. Of course, as we now know, the regulators played an important role beyond lying for the US military, the organisation which made the original orders for ‘vaccines’, and set all the contractual conditions for companies such as Moderna and Pfizer.
The chickens are coming home to roost right now in the banking system.
As I always say, I cannot know much for sure. I don’t have a copy of the script of this, the greatest crime in history. But, whatever Covid actually is, I don’t believe that what was called influenza disappeared conveniently in early 2020. It’s another lie. It’s what they do. It’s all they do.
To those who sense that all is not well but are unwilling to make the psychological leap to the diabolical world I believe we’re now living in, I point out the asymmetry of risk. If you follow the official narrative and I’m right, you and your children will lose all your freedoms and probably your lives. If you believe what I’m saying and I’m wrong, you’ll be laughed at. These options aren’t faintly balanced. A rational actor should cease believing what we’re being told. It’s not a safe position, keeping your counsel and your head down. It’s the most dangerous thing you could do.
Originally published by The Conservative Woman. Part of out Covid – Three Years On season.
Dr Mike Yeadon has a degree in biochemistry and toxicology and a research-based PhD in respiratory pharmacology. He has spent over 30 years leading new medicines research in some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, leaving Pfizer in 2011 as Vice President & Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory. That was the most senior research position in this field in Pfizer. Since leaving Pfizer, Dr Yeadon has founded his own biotech company, Ziarco, which was sold to the worlds biggest drug company, Novartis, in 2017.
Breaking: Majority of Americans Believe Joe Biden Has Committed Impeachable Offenses – Despite Mainstream Media Blackout of His Criminal Acts
- By TigerGrowls
- House Of Politics & Off-Topics
- 2 Replies
The great awakening in progress as foretold.
This is big. A majority of likely voters think Biden has committed impeachable offenses.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
By Jim Hoft May. 20, 2023 2:40 pm
On Sunday Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures and revealed that NINE Biden family members received foreign payments totaling more than $10 million.
On Monday the Durham Report was released that revealed John Brennan, Barack Obama and Joe Biden KNEW the Trump-Russia collusion accusations were completely meritless. They knew Hillary Clinton was behind this political attack. The Obama regime and later the DOJ, and FBI ran an attempted coup against President Trump anyway.
We also know the Biden Campaign organized the fraudulent letter with 51 senior intelligence officials who lied and said Russia was behind the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. They all knew it was a lie at the time. Not a single official has since had their security clearance revoked for this criminal act.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/biden-camp-called-mike-morell-after-debate-with-trump-to-thank-him-for-creating-bogus-letter-on-hunter-laptop-signed-by-51-intel-operatives-and-lying-to-american-public/
Joe Biden also organized an invasion of millions of illegal aliens at the US southern border.
Login to view embedded media
On Thursday Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced Articles of Impeachment against Joe Biden.
A majority of American voters agree with Rep. Greene. The latest Rasmussen poll found that 53% of American voters believe Joe Biden has committed impeachable crimes!
That is a HUGE number considering the fake news media has censored any serious criticism of Joe Biden and have ignored his family’s criminal business deals.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 53% of Likely U.S. voters believe that, since becoming president, Biden has committed high crimes and misdemeanors that would justify Congress impeaching him, including 38% who say it’s Very Likely. Thirty-nine percent (39%) don’t think it is likely Biden has committed impeachable offenses as president, including 28% who say it’s Not At All Likely.
This is big. A majority of likely voters think Biden has committed impeachable offenses.
Breaking: Majority of Americans Believe Joe Biden Has Committed Impeachable Offenses - Despite Mainstream Media Blackout of His Criminal Acts | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
On Sunday Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures and revealed that NINE Biden family members received foreign payments totaling than $10 million.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
By Jim Hoft May. 20, 2023 2:40 pm
On Sunday Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures and revealed that NINE Biden family members received foreign payments totaling more than $10 million.
On Monday the Durham Report was released that revealed John Brennan, Barack Obama and Joe Biden KNEW the Trump-Russia collusion accusations were completely meritless. They knew Hillary Clinton was behind this political attack. The Obama regime and later the DOJ, and FBI ran an attempted coup against President Trump anyway.
We also know the Biden Campaign organized the fraudulent letter with 51 senior intelligence officials who lied and said Russia was behind the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. They all knew it was a lie at the time. Not a single official has since had their security clearance revoked for this criminal act.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/biden-camp-called-mike-morell-after-debate-with-trump-to-thank-him-for-creating-bogus-letter-on-hunter-laptop-signed-by-51-intel-operatives-and-lying-to-american-public/
Joe Biden also organized an invasion of millions of illegal aliens at the US southern border.
Login to view embedded media
On Thursday Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced Articles of Impeachment against Joe Biden.
A majority of American voters agree with Rep. Greene. The latest Rasmussen poll found that 53% of American voters believe Joe Biden has committed impeachable crimes!
That is a HUGE number considering the fake news media has censored any serious criticism of Joe Biden and have ignored his family’s criminal business deals.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 53% of Likely U.S. voters believe that, since becoming president, Biden has committed high crimes and misdemeanors that would justify Congress impeaching him, including 38% who say it’s Very Likely. Thirty-nine percent (39%) don’t think it is likely Biden has committed impeachable offenses as president, including 28% who say it’s Not At All Likely.
**New** (Paul) Familiar 4-star sets Clemson visit next week
- By Cris_Ard
- The West Zone
- 1 Replies
TigerIllustrated - Familiar 4-star sets Clemson visit next week
This 4-star recruit is quite familiar with Clemson and Nick Eason. He's about to learn even more about both.
clemson.rivals.com
We are ruled by morons
- By gardentiger
- House Of Politics & Off-Topics
- 1 Replies
Dozens of giant turbines at Scots windfarms powered by diesel generators
Scottish Power admitted 71 of its windmills were hooked up to the fossil fuel supply after a fault developed with their power supply.
15million trees were cut down to make space for these. Where were the tree huggers?
**** Clemson's ACC Tournament schedule ...
- By Cris_Ard
- The West Zone
- 36 Replies
• Wed. at 7 p.m. vs. VT (#Clemson is visiting team & in first-base dugout)
• Fri. at 11 a.m. vs. BC (#Clemson is home team & in third-base dugout)
2023 ACC BASEBALL CHAMPIONSHIP SCHEDULE
Durham Bulls Athletic Park; Durham, N.C.
POOL A – #1 Wake Forest, #8 Notre Dame, #12 Pitt
POOL B – #2 Virginia, #7 North Carolina, #11 Georgia Tech
POOL C – #3 Clemson, #6 Boston College, #10 Virginia Tech
POOL D – #4 Miami, #5 Duke, #9 NC State
Tuesday, May 23
No. 10 Virginia Tech vs. No. 6 Boston College, 11 a.m. (ACC Network)
No. 11 Georgia Tech vs. No. 7 North Carolina, 3 p.m. (ACC Network)
No. 9 NC State vs. No. 5 Duke, 7 p.m. (ACC Network)
Wednesday, May 24
No. 12 Pitt vs. No. 8 Notre Dame, 11 a.m. (ACC Network)
No. 2 Virginia vs. No. 11 Georgia Tech, 3 p.m. (ACC Network)
No. 3 Clemson vs. No. 10 Virginia Tech, 7 p.m. (ACC Network)
Thursday, May 25
No. 1 Wake Forest vs. No. 12 Pitt, 11 a.m. (ACC Network)
No. 7 North Carolina vs. No. 2 Virginia, 3 p.m. (ACC Network)
No. 4 Miami vs. No. 9 NC State, 7 p.m. (ACC Network)
Friday, May 26
No. 6 Boston College vs. No. 3 Clemson, 11 a.m. (ACC Network)
No. 5 Duke vs. No. 4 Miami, 3 p.m. (ACC Network)
No. 8 Notre Dame vs. No. 1 Wake Forest, 7 p.m. (ACC Network)
Saturday, May 27
Pool A Winner vs. Pool D Winner, 1 p.m. (ACC Network)
Pool B Winner vs. Pool C Winner, 5 p.m. (ACC Network)
Sunday, May 28
ACC Championship, Noon (ESPN2)
----------------------------------------------
Every Clemson hat in stock now at The Tiger Fan Shop HERE!
*** To view all 4,400+ Clemson items in inventory, click HERE!
• Fri. at 11 a.m. vs. BC (#Clemson is home team & in third-base dugout)
2023 ACC BASEBALL CHAMPIONSHIP SCHEDULE
Durham Bulls Athletic Park; Durham, N.C.
POOL A – #1 Wake Forest, #8 Notre Dame, #12 Pitt
POOL B – #2 Virginia, #7 North Carolina, #11 Georgia Tech
POOL C – #3 Clemson, #6 Boston College, #10 Virginia Tech
POOL D – #4 Miami, #5 Duke, #9 NC State
Tuesday, May 23
No. 10 Virginia Tech vs. No. 6 Boston College, 11 a.m. (ACC Network)
No. 11 Georgia Tech vs. No. 7 North Carolina, 3 p.m. (ACC Network)
No. 9 NC State vs. No. 5 Duke, 7 p.m. (ACC Network)
Wednesday, May 24
No. 12 Pitt vs. No. 8 Notre Dame, 11 a.m. (ACC Network)
No. 2 Virginia vs. No. 11 Georgia Tech, 3 p.m. (ACC Network)
No. 3 Clemson vs. No. 10 Virginia Tech, 7 p.m. (ACC Network)
Thursday, May 25
No. 1 Wake Forest vs. No. 12 Pitt, 11 a.m. (ACC Network)
No. 7 North Carolina vs. No. 2 Virginia, 3 p.m. (ACC Network)
No. 4 Miami vs. No. 9 NC State, 7 p.m. (ACC Network)
Friday, May 26
No. 6 Boston College vs. No. 3 Clemson, 11 a.m. (ACC Network)
No. 5 Duke vs. No. 4 Miami, 3 p.m. (ACC Network)
No. 8 Notre Dame vs. No. 1 Wake Forest, 7 p.m. (ACC Network)
Saturday, May 27
Pool A Winner vs. Pool D Winner, 1 p.m. (ACC Network)
Pool B Winner vs. Pool C Winner, 5 p.m. (ACC Network)
Sunday, May 28
ACC Championship, Noon (ESPN2)
----------------------------------------------
Every Clemson hat in stock now at The Tiger Fan Shop HERE!
*** To view all 4,400+ Clemson items in inventory, click HERE!
