Omerta in the Gangster War
By Diana Johnstone | Consortium News | September 28, 2022
Imperialist wars are waged to conquer lands, peoples, territories. Gangster wars are waged to remove competitors. In gangster wars you issue an obscure warning, then you smash the windows or burn the place down.
Gangster war is what you wage when you already are the boss and won’t let any outsider muscle in on your territory. For the dons in Washington, the territory can be just about everywhere, but its core is occupied Europe.
By an uncanny coincidence, Joe Biden just happens to look like a mafia boss, to talk like a mafia boss, to wear a little lopsided half smile like a mafia boss. Just watch the now famous video:
Pres. Biden: “If Russia invades… then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”
Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
Able for sure.
It cost billions of dollars to lay the Nord Stream 2 pipeline across the Baltic Sea, from near Saint Petersburg to the port of Greifsfeld in Germany. The idea was to ensure safe natural gas supplies to Germany and other European partners by going around troublesome Ukraine, known for readiness to use its transit rights to siphon off gas for itself or blackmail clients.
Of course, Ukraine was always vehemently hostile to the project. So was the United States. And so were Poland, the three Baltic States, Finland and Sweden, all attentive to what went on in their sea.
The Baltic Sea is a nearly closed body of water, with narrow access to the Atlantic through Danish and Swedish straits. The waters near the Danish island of Bornholm where the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged by massive underwater explosions is under constant military surveillance by these neighbors.
“It seems completely impossible that a state actor could carry out a major naval operation in the middle of this densely monitored area without being noticed by the countless active and passive sensors of the littoral states; certainly not directly off the island of Bornholm, where Danes, Swedes and Germans have a rendezvous in monitoring the surface and undersea activities,” writes Jens Berger in the excellent German website Nachdenkseiten.
Last June, Berger reports,
“the annual NATO maneuver Baltops took place in the Baltic Sea. Under the command of the U.S. 6th Fleet, 47 warships participated in the exercise this year, including the U.S. fleet force around the helicopter carrier USS Kearsarge. Of particular significance is one particular maneuver conducted by the 6th Fleet’s Task Force 68 — a special unit for explosive ordnance disposal and underwater operations of the U.S. Marines, the very unit that would be the first address for an act of sabotage on an undersea pipeline.”
In June this year this very unit was engaged in a maneuver off the island of Bornholm, operating with unmanned underwater vehicles.
Berger considers that a major sabotage operation “could not have been carried out directly under the noses of several littoral states without anyone noticing.” But he adds this clever observation: “if you want to hide something, it is best to do so in public.”
In order to be able to attach explosive devices to a gas pipeline halfway unnoticed, one would need a plausible distraction — a reason for diving near Bornholm without immediately being suspected of committing an act of sabotage. It doesn’t even have to be directly related in time to the attacks. Modern explosive devices can, of course, be detonated remotely. So, who has been conducting such operations in the maritime area in recent weeks? As luck would have it, exactly the same task force around the USS Kearsarge was again in the sea area around Bornholm last week.
In short, during NATO maneuvers, some participant could have laid the explosives, to be blown up at a later chosen moment.
By an odd coincidence, only a few hours after the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2, ceremonies began opening the new Baltic Pipe carrying gas from Norway to Denmark and Poland.
The Political Significance of the Sabotage
Due to Western sanctions against Russia, gas was not being delivered through the destroyed pipelines. However, gas inside the pipelines is leaking dangerously. The pipelines remained ready for use whenever an agreement could be reached. And the first, dramatic significance of the sabotage is that henceforth, no agreement can be reached. Nord Stream 2 would have been the key to some sort of settlement between Russia and the Europeans. The sabotage has virtually announced that the war can only intensify with no end in sight.
In Germany, the Czech Republic and some other countries, movements were beginning to grow calling for an end to the sanctions, specifically to solve the energy crisis by putting Nord Stream 2 into operation for the first time. The sabotage has thus invalidated the leading demand of potential peace movements in Germany and Europe.
This act of sabotage is above all a deliberate sabotage of any prospect of a negotiated peace in Europe. The next move from the West has been for NATO governments to call on all their citizens to leave Russia immediately. In preparation of what?
The Russians Did It
In this catastrophic situation, Western mainstream media are all wondering who could be the guilty party, and suspicion automatically fixes on… Russia. Motive? “To raise the price of gas” or “to destabilize Europe” — things that were happening anyway. Any far-fetched notion will do.
European opinion-makers are showing the result of 70 years of Americanization. Especially in Germany, but also in France and elsewhere, for decades the United States has systematically spotted up-and-coming young people, invited them to become “young leaders,” invited them to the United States, indoctrinated them in “our values” and made them feel like members of the great trans-Atlantic family. They are networked into top positions in politics and media. In recent years, great alarm is raised about alleged Russian efforts to exert “influence” in European countries, while Europeans bathe in perpetual American influence: movies, Netflix, pop culture, influence in universities, media, everywhere.
When disaster strikes Europe, it can’t be blamed on America (except for former President Donald Trump, because the American establishment despised and rejected him, so Europeans must do the same). It has to be the bad guy in the movie, Putin.
The fanatically anti-Russian former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorsky couldn’t restrain himself and joyously greeted the massive natural-gas leaks from the destroyed pipeline with a cheerful tweet, “Thank you, USA.” But Poland was certainly also willing, and perhaps even able. So perhaps were some others in NATO-land. But they all prefer to publicly “suspect” Russia.
Officially, so far, no NATO government knows who dunnit. Or maybe they all know. Maybe this is like the famous Agatha Christie mystery on the Orient Express train, where suspicion falls on all the passengers, and are all guilty. And all united in Omerta.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press). The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .
Russian security chief names ‘obvious’ beneficiary of pipeline rupture
Samizdat | September 30, 2022
The US stands to benefit economically from the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines and has a record of targeting energy infrastructure with sabotage operations, the head of Russia’s Security Council said.
“Pretty much from the first minutes after the news of the explosions broke … the West launched an active campaign for assigning blame. But it is obvious that the primary beneficiary, first of all in the economic sense, was the US,” Nikolay Patrushev said on Friday.
He compared this week’s incident with the attack on Nicaragua’s oil infrastructure in Puerto Sandino in 1983. Back then CIA officers, based on a ship moored in international waters, coordinated a raid by commandos they had trained to fight against the Sandinista government, US press reported at the time. The US spy agency also provided speed boats for the raid, a CIA source explained, according to Associated Press.
The operation was part of the Reagan administration’s “dirty war” on Nicaragua, which later led to the Iran-Contras scandal. The CIA’s secret sale of weapons to Iran to fund Latin American militants was exposed in 1986.
Patrushev made the remarks at a meeting with fellow security officials from former Soviet nations.
“It appears to be necessary to coordinate our effort to expose the masterminds and executors of this crime, setting a good example for effective cooperation,” he told his counterparts.
He noted that the US goal was “ensuring strategic and economic superiority over alternative centers of power” even though Washington’s ally the EU has been suffering from its policies. The US is replacing Russian natural gas with its more expensive liquified natural gas, as the bloc moves to decouple its economy from Russian energy sources.
The leaks in the two Nord Stream pipelines were first detected on Monday, when pressure in the undersea links connecting Russia directly to Germany drastically dropped. The pipelines were apparently breached with explosives, with the blasts detected by earthquake sensors in Sweden.
Moscow called the incident an international terrorist attack against civilian infrastructure, while some Western officials described it as an act of sabotage.
Some critics of Russia speculated that Moscow decided to blow up its own gas links with Germany to put pressure on the EU.
Polish MEP and former Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski thanked the US for the incident, but later deleted the tweet, calling his implied assertion of Washington’s involvement a personal working theory.
Ukrainian shelling of refugee convoy leaves 24 people dead – local authorities

Samizdat | September 30, 2022
At least 24 people were killed and 36 wounded when Ukrainian forces struck a refugee convoy on Friday, Vladimir Rogov, a senior Russian-appointed official in Zaporozhye Region, has said.
Rogov wrote on Telegram that the attack targeted a convoy of cars that was traveling from Ukrainian-controlled territory to Zaporozhye Region, which declared independence from Kiev and was recognized as a separate state by Russia on Thursday.
“It happened at a car market on the Orekhovskoe highway where convoys are being formed to enter the region,” he wrote.
“24 people, including 11 men and 13 women were killed, 36 were wounded including a child,” the official said.
According to Rogov, the people, who were targeted, had protested and blocked roads earlier this week, demanding that Ukrainian authorities allow them to enter the Russian-held part of the region. “After that they were approached by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the police, who openly threatened them and said that they’ll be sorry for what they were doing,” he wrote.
The head of the administration accused Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky of “trying to take revenge on the residents of Zaporozhye Region after they chose to join Russia during the referendum” by ordering the strike.
Rogov insisted the Ukrainian attack on the convoy was carried out with the aim of pinning the blame on Russia.
Kiev’s governor of Zaporozhye Region claimed that Russian forces were behind the shelling. While the head of a Ukrainian bomb disposal unit, police colonel Sergey Ujryumov told Reuters that the Russians “know that columns are formed here to go to the occupied territories… It’s not a coincidental strike. It’s perfectly deliberate.” According to Ujryumov, S-300 missiles were used in the attack on the convoy.
Voting on joining Russia ended in Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions as well as in the two republics in Donbass on Monday, with residents in all territories overwhelmingly supporting the move. The official ceremony, in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to sign treaties on incorporating the new areas into the Russian state, is scheduled to take place in Moscow later on Friday.
A similar attack by Ukrainian forces happened in the eastern region of Kharkov on Thursday. At least 30 people, including children, were killed after a convoy of refugees, which tried to enter the People’s Republic of Lugansk, came under intense artillery bombardment, LPR authorities said.
Western economic warfare backfired, new depression likely to come
What awaits Europe with Nord Stream pipelines possibly gone forever?
By Uriel Araujo | September 30, 2022
Now that the Nord Stream pipeline might have been sabotaged by Washington, as promised by US President Joe Biden on January 7, and is possibly gone forever (according to German authorities), it is time to consider the possible impacts.
The energy crisis in the EU has always been pushed by American interests. Moreover, the US has been engaging in economic warfare and even weaponizing the dollar for too long, but it has been clear for months now that its current economic and financial war against Russia has backfired – and once again, mostly upon Europe. Such economic wars in fact may dangerously spiral out of control, and are considered to be one of the causes of the 1929 crisis in the post-Versailles world.
Philip Pilkington, an Irish economist who works in investment finance, famous for his contributions on the empirical estimate of general equilibrium and other fields, has made quite interesting observations about the possible deindustrialization of Europe as a consequence of economic warfare. He remarks on how in the post-pandemic world debts in the West have been accumulating and, on top of that, the current conflict in Ukraine has brought extra energy costs.
After the conflict ends – or becomes a “frozen conflict” – or after good diplomacy is reestablished, Russia could start to once again supply gas to Europe as usual – this is how many analysts reasoned. However, now that the pipelines are gone, the price of energy in the continent is to remain tremendously high for years to come. With permanent high energy prices making manufacturing not economically viable anymore (thus decreasing European purchasing power), one should expect to see the bloc shutting out exports to revive an uncompetitive industry while increasing energy investments. These are Pilkington’s main points and it might be worth delving into them.
Pilkington argues that high energy costs will make the European industry largely uncompetitive because manufacturers will have no choice but to also raise the price of goods, which in turn, will not be able to compete with cheaper foreign goods. The economist goes on to argue that, in this scenario, with many manufacturers out of business, the result will be the loss of key jobs, with less employed people spending money and a new economic depression.
Thus, Pilkington reasons, the United States will not be able to “reshore” European manufacturing for too long because there simply won’t be anyone in the continent to buy the products the US ships to European shores. This crisis will thus affect Americans too, because as exports to Europe fall, US workers also lose their jobs. What could EU states do in such a scenario? The Irish economist writes quite convincingly that a tariff solution would be the most obvious one: by raising tariffs, these countries will be able to “render international products as expensive as the domestic products suffering from energy cost inflation.”
The result of that can only be more economic chaos for the West, while Europe “shuts itself off” and becomes a kind of a “black hole”, in a repetition of the 1920 events which resulted in the Great Depression, writes Philip Pilkington.
However, the global situation today has changed much, with the BRICS+ alliance, apparently aimed at “decoupling from the Western economy.” For a while, the rise in commodity prices has been perceived as a result of Western sanction policies, and this has forced the global south to look for parallel mechanisms and alternatives. Therefore, these emerging powers have the potential to build a “separate economic bloc”, which means the West would suffer the most from the economic chaos, as BRICS+ “has a relatively clean bill of economic health”.
All of this is a quite likely scenario and one should also consider the political implications. The economic crisis will in all likelihood bring back protectionism, and it might come accompanied by a 1930-like political climate. This in turn can only strengthen the populist camp in Europe. Populist and so-called “far-right” tendencies have been growing in the continent for years and the time seems to be just right for speeding up this phenomenon.
One remembers defeated French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen promised to pull France out of NATO during this years’ elections. Meanwhile, in August, Hungary had once again the lowest energy prices in the EU. Over 8,700 sanctions have been imposed on Moscow, and yet they have hurt Europe more than Russia as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been a strong critic of such sanctions. In fact, whether one likes the man or not, he has oftentimes been the voice of reason in the bloc. Now, the German eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) political party is heavily focusing on attacking European elites and opposing the German government’s sanctions against Russia. This trend is everywhere across the EU.
It is about time Europe assert its sovereignty, however such a political stance is largely marginalized in the continent. Thus, although a European populist wave should increase skepticism about NATO and the EU itself, it will also increase political instability and turmoil. To sum it up, in the worst post-Nord Stream scenario, one can then expect a deindustrialized and isolated Europe going through a serious political and economic crisis.
Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
Gates Foundation boosts funding for Digital ID projects
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | September 28, 2022
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has increased its investment in digital ID projects through part of a $1.27 billion package to support “global health and development projects.” Part of the funding, $200 million, will go to digital public infrastructure, including civil registry databases and digital ID.
The announcement followed the annual “Goalkeepers Report,” an annual assessment report on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (UN SGD). The UN set a goal (goal 16.9) for a global legal identity by 2030, and the report said that the world will not make that deadline. A podcast is available on the plans here.
To achieve that goal, digital identity programs are supposedly needed.
The 2019 Goalkeepers Report touted biometrics as one of the technologies needed for the equitable redistribution of resources in developing nations.
The $200 million will also support data sharing systems and interoperable payments systems.
The Gates Foundation supports several digital ID-related programs, including the MOSIP, an open-source digital ID platform.
Related:
The EU is running a digital ID pilot
Denmark’s new digital ID system risks locking some people out of society
Famous Pro-Vaccine Doctor Suspects Pfizer Booster Shot Sent His Cancer Into Overdrive

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 28, 2022
Michel Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of immunology and pharmacotherapy at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, suspects his third dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may have sent his cancer into overdrive.
Goldman, 67, is one of Europe’s best-known champions of medical research and a lifelong promoter of vaccines.
But he told The Atlantic he wants discussion of the COVID-19 vaccine to be transparent — so he went public about his suspicion that the Pfizer booster shot he received on Sept. 22, 2021, may have induced rapid progression of his angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (AITL), a type of lymphoma he’d been diagnosed with before he got the booster shot.
After his diagnosis, Goldman said he rushed to get the booster shot, believing he would need it more than most people because once he started chemotherapy, his immune system would be compromised.
But after receiving the shot, Goldman’s follow-up CT scan showed something unexpected: Within only a few days, his cancer had grown so fast that cancerous points were lighting up all over his scan.
“It looked like someone had set off fireworks inside Michel’s body,” The Atlantic reported.
Goldman and his brother, Serge Goldman, a fellow scientist and head of nuclear medicine at the teaching hospital of the Université libre de Bruxelles, suspected Goldman’s COVID-19 booster shot may have triggered the rapid proliferation of cancerous growth in his body.
The initial CT scan had been “a bit disturbing,” Serge Goldman told The Atlantic, because it showed an asymmetrical cluster of cancerous nodes around Goldman’s left armpit, where Michel’s first two doses of vaccine had been delivered.
The CT scan done after Michel’s third dose showed the cancer’s asymmetry had flipped and was clustered by his right armpit, where he received the third shot.
The brothers knew it could be a mere coincidence, but they thought it was important to investigate the possibility that the vaccine might be behind the clustering — because it could mean other people with certain forms of cancer might be at risk of a COVID-19 vaccine causing their cancer to progress more rapidly.
So on Nov. 25, 2021, the brothers — who had written prior papers together — and other colleagues published a case report in which they described Michel Goldman’s experience and urged the scientific community to study the phenomenon to see if it occurred in patients diagnosed with AITL.
“Since nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccines strongly activate T follicular helper cells, it is important to explore the possible impact of approved SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines on neoplasms affecting this cell type,” the authors wrote.
The brothers said the case study “suggests that vaccination with the [Pfizer-BioNTech] BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine might induce rapid progression of AITL.”
They noted, however, that it would be “premature” to extrapolate the findings from Michel Goldman’s case to other patients with the same kind of cancer and that “dedicated studies are needed.”
Going public was ‘the right thing to do’
Michel Goldman’s case study added to the scientific literature that aims to understand the relationships between mRNA vaccines and the functioning of helper T-cells.
For instance, previous researchers have noted mRNA vaccines rev up helper T-cells, which may explain why Michel Goldman’s AILT went into overdrive following his third booster shot.
“Perhaps the shots gave such a jolt to his helper T cells that they went berserk,” The Atlantic reported. “If they were prone to forming tumors, or if they were already cancerous, then overstimulation could have made the problem even worse.”
Research involving body scans of some people who get mRNA vaccines — including cancer patients — shows heightened activity in the lymph nodes near the armpit on the side where the shot was received.
In February 2018, a team of researchers at Columbia University’s Institute for Cancer Genetics published a study using mice with a pair of gene mutations — the same two mutations found in Michel Goldman’s tumor — showing that the mutations predispose T-cells to go rogue.
The study also showed that when the mice were injected with red blood cells from sheep — as an experimental stand-in for invading microbes — the mice developed the same subtype of lymphoma Michel Goldman had.
Michel Goldman previously headed a $2 billion European endeavor to accelerate the research of new medicines and in December 2020, he publicly spoke out in support of the safety of mRNA vaccines — the technology used in both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
At that time, he said the highest risk — especially for vulnerable people — is not to be vaccinated and that his main concern about mRNA vaccination was that people might use the possible side effects as an argument against getting the vaccine.
He currently leads the Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Healthcare, or I3h, a university hub aimed at assisting in drug-design projects.
Michel Goldman doesn’t regret going public with his case, even though it presented challenging evidence regarding the safety of mRNA vaccines for individuals such as himself.
“I’m still convinced it was the right thing to do,” he told The Atlantic.
He remains adamant that COVID-19 vaccines are useful for the vast majority of people, but he is unsure whether he himself will get another booster dose.
“I don’t know what I will do,” he said.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Hindawi and Wiley to retract over 500 papers linked to peer review rings
Retraction Watch | September 28, 2022
After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.
Hindawi’s research integrity team found several signs of manipulated peer reviews for the affected papers, including reviews that contained duplicated text, a few individuals who did a lot of reviews, reviewers who turned in their reviews extremely quickly, and misuse of databases that publishers use to vet potential reviewers.
Richard Bennett, vice president of researcher and publishing services for Hindawi, told us that the publisher suspects “coordinated peer review rings” consisting of reviewers and editors working together to advance manuscripts through to publication. Some of the manuscripts appeared to come from paper mills, he said.
We asked what prompted the investigation. Bennett told us:
In April 2022, Hindawi’s Research Integrity team led an initial investigation into a single Special Issue (SI) after a Chief Editor raised concerns about some of the papers published in it. The team decided to investigate the content of the journal further. Through this investigation, the team highlighted a pattern of irregular and concerning reviewer activity and identified potential ‘bad actors’ that were present across many of these publications.
These concerns prompted the Publishing Insights and Research Integrity teams, enabled by recently enhanced analytic capabilities and newly developed dashboards providing views across all reviewer activity, to conduct a wider investigation to determine whether these same bad actors were involved in peer review manipulation elsewhere in the Hindawi portfolio.
Following the discovery that these bad actors were present in other journals, the Hindawi leadership team put in place a cross-functional working team combining the manual and data-driven investigation which resulted in the identification of further published articles.
In early August, Hindawi expanded the investigation under a combined investigation team comprising Research Integrity experts, data and analytics experts, publishing and operational teams, and legal counsel from both Wiley and Hindawi. This team evaluated in depth review activity across all potentially impacted articles and manuscripts. This resulted in a list of ‘compromised’ reviewers and editors in addition to the bad actors already discovered, identification of networks that exist between them, patterns of review activity, and insight into published articles and manuscripts at each stage in the review process that we could initially label as ‘compromised’. On September 6, the combined investigation team began assessing published articles which led to the initial recommendation to retract 511 articles that are compromised based on reviewer activity alone. We expect ongoing investigations to result in further retractions.
The publisher also held up the review and production of submitted manuscripts in which “potentially compromised” individuals were involved, and will begin assessing those articles.
We asked about what Hindawi will do to prevent something similar from happening again, but Bennett declined to share specifics, “as we believe it will simply open up new targets for those who seek to exploit a system based on trust.”
He did say that the publisher has banned the individuals its investigation identified, will contact research integrity officers or department heads as appropriate, and has shared its findings with industry groups:
It is increasingly apparent to all involved in safeguarding and investigating issues of research integrity that closing rings down at one publisher can simply move the problem to others. We are committed to taking an active role in preventing that.
Other publishers have announced large batches of retractions recently. IOP Publishing earlier this month said it planned to retract nearly 500 articles likely from paper mills, and PLOS in August announced it would retract over 100 papers from its flagship journal over manipulated peer review.
In a prepared statement, Liz Ferguson, Wiley senior vice president of research publishing for Wiley, said that attacks on research integrity such as paper mills, manipulated peer review, and image duplication and doctoring “are sophisticated and appear to be coordinated.”
Her statement continued:
As these attacks increase in frequency and intensity, we remain committed to upholding research integrity throughout our publishing programs. We have and will continue to share our findings with our peers and industry bodies to advance a cross-industry approach. This is absolutely essential to safeguard trust in research.
It’s something that we at Wiley are committed to and as a result we have taken the step of sharing our findings as transparently as possible, not just with our peers, but with industry associations, third party databases, and others.
These conversations have been very constructive. Our industry is one of trust – this remains our greatest asset. Only through concerted and collaborative action will we succeed together. This is our goal, and Wiley and Hindawi will continue to advance it tirelessly.
Should Europeans ‘Thank’ the Americans for Destroying Nord Stream?
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 29, 2022
With an investigation continuing into the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline that provided energy supplies to Europe from Russia, there appears to be just one prime suspect, and that should surprise nobody.
Following the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski already seemed to know the identity of the perpetrator when he tweeted out: “Thank you, USA.”
At first glance, it seemed that Sikorski was speaking sarcastically, berating Washington for carrying out an attack that will have severe repercussions for the people of Europe. After all, how could anyone see any good coming from the termination of Europe’s primary source of gas reserves with winter just around the corner? It was Sikorski’s homeland of Poland, after all, that urged its citizens to collect firewood in the face of dwindling gas reserves.
In fact, the Polish diplomat was speaking one-hundred percent literally, thanking the United States for plunging the continent deeper into the abyss. This has been the attitude of European leaders from the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine: ‘we will accept our self-destruction as scripted by Washington policymakers so long as the baddies in Moscow hear our virtue-signaling whimpers and screams.’ European capitals are about to learn the hard way that virtue signaling does not put food on the table or heat homes.
Judging by the rising temperature in Europe, however, last seen in Italy where a far-right leader has come to power on the wave of voters fed up with high electricity bills and loose immigration, the phrase ‘Thank you, USA’ may eventually be chiseled into Europe’s tombstone.

But first, the big question: was the United States really responsible for the destruction of Nord Stream, as Sikorski seems to believe? Well, if we were are to take bumbling Joe Biden at his word, then the answer would seem to be yes.
“If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be — there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” the U.S. leader told reporters two weeks before Russia began its Ukrainian mission. “We will bring an end to it.”
When asked to specify, Biden responded, “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”
There are other clues that point to American complicity.
On September 2, an American helicopter with the call sign FFAB123 was observed maneuvering in the area of the Nord Stream pipelines. According to the site ads-b.nl, six aircraft used this call sign that day, of which the tail numbers of three were established. All of them were Sikorsky MH-60S. By overlaying the FFAB123 route on the scheme marking the areas of the explosions, it is observable that the helicopter either flew along the Nord Stream-2 route, or exactly between the points where the ‘accident’ occurred.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, there are screenshots of other American aircraft flights as of September 13th in exactly the same area. In June there was an article in Sea Power magazine where the Americans boast of experiments in the field of underwater drones that they set up at the BALTOPS 22 exercises – in the area of Bornholm Island, the Danish island where the explosions were reported to have occurred.
“Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark, with participants from Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, and Mine Warfare Readiness and Effectiveness Measuring all under the direction of U.S. 6th Fleet Task Force 68,” Sea Power reports.
Such an “experiment” would have required the deep-sea equipment needed for reaching the depths where the Nord Stream pipelines are located.
Finally, here’s one last tantalizing piece of information for all of the ‘coincidence theorists’ out there. On the day after Nord Stream 1 and 2 went offline, Poland, Norway and Denmark’s leaders attended the opening ceremony of the new Baltic Pipe, which will transport natural gas from Norway via Denmark and through the Baltic Sea to, yes, Sikorski’s ferociously Russophobic homeland of Poland. Yes, just a coincidence.
However, the main motivating factor for Washington having a hand in destroying Nord Stream is the awesome powers – both financial and political – that it will reap. The economic crisis in Europe is already forcing companies and corporations to consider relocating to the U.S., which is providing a better business environment and more or less affordable electricity bills.
And after the destruction of Nord Stream, the economic situation on the continent will deteriorate significantly. Even though the NS-II was not launched, there was the chance of its launch, and this “chance” had a considerable effect on the market. Now, without its main energy supplier, Europe is doomed while America will soar.
The economic destruction of Europe makes it totally dependent on the U.S. economically, politically, and militarily, turning it into a toothless tiger with no political will and independence. At the same time, Europe will become almost completely dependent on the U.S. for its (prohibitive) gas. The United States plans to supply at least 15 billion cubic metres (bcm) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to European Union markets this year as Europe seeks to wean itself off Russian gas supplies.
In other words, the transformation of the EU into a banana republic – albeit it one in the northern hemisphere with winter quickly approaching – has already begun.
Europe, you really should have heeded the advice of Henry Kissinger, who understands the nature of the U.S. better than anyone: “To be an enemy of the U.S. is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”







Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.