Seymour Hersh I respect a lot. He broke the My Lai story. I know him, and he’s got great intelligence. People talk to him from all over the world. It… - Seymour Hersh

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has alleged US Navy divers laid bombs that destroyed the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea last September, drawing a denial from the Pentagon Wednesday... Hersh, who scooped journalism’s top award more than five decades ago for exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in 1968... [reported in Feb 8, 2023] that Americans planted remotely triggered explosives that wrecked three of the four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe... Hersh, a former reporter for the Associated Press and New York Times as well as a longtime contributor to the New Yorker... previously drew the wrath of the US government when he claimed in a 2013 interview that the official story of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was “one big lie.” Two years later, Hersh published an account in the London Review of Books that claimed the Al Qaeda kingpin was a prisoner of Pakistani authorities at the time he was killed and that the CIA was tipped off to his whereabouts by a member of the country’s powerful intelligence service — rather than bin Laden’s courier, as the Obama administration claimed.

If the attack were traceable to the United States, "It’s an act of war."...

Last December, after Saddam Hussein threatened to end seven years of United Nations arms-control inspections, President Clinton ordered American attacks on Iraq. Once again, the world watched, on television, as missiles fell on carefully picked targets. The purpose of the attacks, Clinton told reporters, was to "degrade" Iraq's capacity for waging war, and he added, "I gave the order because I believe we cannot allow Saddam Hussein to dismantle UNSCOM and resume the production of weapons of mass destruction with impunity." The President was mistaken. The United Nations Special Commission for Iraq, known as UNSCOM, had already been effectively dismantled, by the shortsighted policies of his own Administration.
Then, a few hours after Clinton spoke, William Cohen, the Secretary of Defense, appeared on television. "One thing should be absolutely clear," he told reporters. "We are concentrating on military targets." That, too, was a misstatement, for two of the targets were sites where Saddam was known to entertain mistresses, and they were specifically struck in the hope of assassinating him.
Saddam responded to the bombing--and the bungled assassination attempt--by formally ousting UNSCOM and turning anew to Russia, historically his most important trading partner. Today, eight years after the Gulf War, American policy has collapsed in Iraq, and a Cold War mentality has returned.