WASHINGTON (RockedBuzz via Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday dismissed a blog post by a US investigative reporter that the United States was behind the Nord Stream pipeline explosions as “completely false and complete.”
RockedBuzz via Reuters did not corroborate the report, published by US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, according to which an attack was carried out last September under the direction of President Joe Biden.
“This is a completely false and complete fiction,” said Adrienne Watson, a White House National Security Council spokeswoman. Spokesmen for the CIA and the State Department said the same.
The pipelines are multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects designed to transport Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
Sweden and Denmark, in whose exclusive economic zones the explosions occurred, both concluded that the pipelines were blown up deliberately, but did not say who might be responsible.
The United States and NATO called the incident “an act of sabotage”. Moscow has blamed the West for the unexplained explosions that caused the ruptures. Neither side has provided evidence.
On Wednesday, Russia’s foreign ministry said the United States had questions to answer about its role in the pipeline explosions.
Construction of Nord Stream 2, designed to double the volume of gas Russia could send directly to Germany under the sea, was completed in September 2021, but it was never commissioned after Berlin shelved the certification just days before Moscow sent its troops into Ukraine last February.
Hersh is a former New York Times and New Yorker reporter who has won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including the Vietnam War and the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal following the US invasion of Iraq.
More recently, he has sparked controversy with a report challenging the Obama administration’s story of the 2011 killing of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in a US special forces operation, and another accusing Syrian rebels of organizing a sarin nerve agent attack in August 2013 in a Damascus suburb that killed hundreds of civilians.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Additional reporting by Daphne Psaledakis, Jonathan Landay and Rami Ayyub; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Daniel Wallis)
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