‘GERMANY MUST LEAVE NATO’

Seminar on Revelations of the
Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage

by Paul Gallagher

[Print version of this article]

Feb. 25—“The story that will not go away” no matter how heatedly denied, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called it, was the subject of a Schiller Institute seminar Feb. 23, “Investigate Nord Stream Revelations: Stop Nuclear World War III.”

That “story” has in the past two weeks become a thorn in NATO’s side due to veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s Feb. 8 report on “How America Took Out the North Stream Pipeline.” The bombing of three of the four large undersea pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany—a clear act of state terrorism, since only a state could have carried it out in the intensely surveilled and patrolled waters of the Baltic Sea—had been covered with almost total silence in the United States and Europe for nearly six months after it shocked the world last Sepember 26.

Then Seymour Hersh, with an unrivalled, 50-year record of explosive exposés—denied and then confirmed and admitted—did the investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage which Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway had all silently buried. His first account was published on the Substack blog because Hersh knew no major media would run it. But in the past three weeks, it has spread to the point that at least one such medium, the Washington Post on Feb. 22, had to report that Hersh’s investigation had been presented to the United Nations Security Council Feb. 20 by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern—a speaker at the Schiller Institute seminar Feb. 23. Hersh’s investigation was not mere journalism but truthful intelligence work, with sources who apparently had direct operational knowledge of the Biden Administration’s planning to blow all four pipelines—planning and preparation which spanned nearly a year and began well before Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.

Now the demand for a real, transparent state investigation of this “friendly fire” destruction of Germany’s industrial energy lifeline, has been raised in the German Bundestag by parliamentarian Sarha Wagenknecht, as well as in the Security Council by Russia’s UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia.

‘Everything Is Taken Away from Germany’

The Feb. 23 Schiller Institute seminar was viewed by more than 700 people while it was streaming and has been viewed by thousands since on the Schiller Institute website where it is archived. Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, keynoting, reviewed the history, since the Sept. 26 explosions, of the “dissembling even while exulting” of U.S. officials from Biden on down about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. Biden’s own statement, with German Chancellor Scholz standing silently next to him Feb. 7, 2022, that “If Russia invades, there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it,” has become infamous. Zepp-LaRouche continued the list:

The notorious Victoria Nuland said, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream will not move forward.” And after the attack occurred, in a Congressional hearing she expressed her happiness—”that Nord Stream 2 is now a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Then, the former Foreign Minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski said immediately afterwards in a tweet, “Thank you, America!”

Liz Truss, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, is reported to have tweeted to Secretary of State Antony Blinken within a minute after the explosion, “It is done.”

Four days after the explosion, Secretary of State Blinken said, “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

Zepp-LaRouche declared that Germany has become a pawn in a war to restore the “unipolar order” in which “Global NATO” rules:

Everything is taken away from Germany, and the German government does not defend the interests of the German people, for which they have sworn an oath when they took office, that they would prevent damage to the German people. The livelihood of the German people is destroyed. Life savings, jobs, everything is going.

Zepp-LaRouche concluded: “If the Hersh allegations are confirmed, Germany has only one possible answer. It must leave NATO. And I think it’s already now high time that we start to discuss the urgent need to have a new security and development architecture which takes into account the security interests of every single country on the planet.”

Swiss Lt. Col. (ret.) Ralph Bosshard, who followed Zepp-LaRouche in the seminar, added the observation that President Biden, by his administration’s conduct toward Germany and its Chancellor, both in the destruction of Nord Stream and in the forcing of advanced weapons commitments for Ukraine from Germany, may actually be splitting the NATO alliance. Other major Western European members of NATO are being muscled in their turn, and against their populations’ unhappiness with the demands and risks of the war in Ukraine.

Colonel Bosshard, who has had a career in military intelligence, noted that he and his colleagues had done their own intelligence on the Nord Stream sabotage:

A plausibility check of Seymour Hersh’s article can be made on the basis of the analysis, which we made, based on the information known immediately after the sabotage of these two pipelines off [the Baltic Sea island of] Bornholm. In fact, also according to Mr. Hersh, professional divers from armed forces were at work, and this comes as no surprise to us, of course. Furthermore, his article is consistent with our findings that there was a thorough preparation required, that the installation of a large quantity of explosives on the pipelines was necessary, and required hours of strenuous work under very difficult circumstances. Furthermore, our prediction that a small warship was used as part of a naval exercise was also confirmed by Mr. Hersh’s article.

Statutes on War Crimes

A third Schiller Institute seminar speaker was the well-known expert in international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, Prof. Francis Boyle, who addressed legal and constitutional consequences of the state sabotage, or state terrorism, against the pipelines and their function. Prof. Boyle:

Let me start out by saying that this was clearly an act of war, and a war crime. Let me quote for you the exact language set forth in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court [referring to the 1998 UN treaty that established the Court]. “War crime” is defined as “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as such, or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities; or intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects—that is, objects which are not military objectives.” Let me repeat the latter one: “intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects—that is, objects which are not military objectives.” Clearly, the Nord Stream pipelines were not engaged in any type of military activity.

Professor Boyle proceeded to list the consequences, should it be proven the United States (and/or other NATO nations) destroyed these pipelines—consequences under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, impeachment under the U.S. Constitution, or national prosecution in European countries which are Rome Treaty signatories.

All Rome Statute states in the world are required to have domestic implementing legislation, making Rome Statute crimes, crimes under their domestic law…. It very well then could be possible that these five individuals I mentioned here—Biden, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan, and Austin—could be prosecuted under the domestic implementing legislation in any Rome Statute state around the world.

Prof. Boyle noted the deterrent effect which mere resolutions for impeachment in the U.S. House have had on previous presidents, giving as just one example President Reagan’s stopping on the brink of invading Nicaragua. He concluded:

It’s my advice that we get at least the bill of impeachment against Biden, if not the others, passed in the House of Representatives immediately. I noticed just the other day, EIR reported that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has a lot of power now, just said Biden should be impeached over Ukraine. We have to do this; we have to stop these people before we have a general de jure war with Russia. Right now, we have a de facto war between the United States and Russia—even Mr. Lavrov has said that; he is correct. It’s not yet de jure; we have to stop this.

Did Scholz Know in Advance?

As we noted above, Ray McGovern, the long-time CIA Russia analyst and a founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, also spoke at the Schiller Institute seminar a few days after having been called to brief a UN Security Council session on the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.

Recounting some important history of Russia, McGovern said the “window into Europe” first opened by the modernizing Tsar Peter the Great in the early 18th Century, has now been slammed shut, and “that will be true a for a decade or more.” What are the Russians to think of [German Chancellor] Olaf Scholz, who stood and heard President Joe Biden say the United States would end the Nord Stream pipeline into Germany, and when asked what he thought about that, said only that “We [the NATO alliance] do everything together.”

Commented McGovern:

Someone should ask Chancellor Scholz: “Does this mean that you knew of the plans to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines? Did Biden tell you, while you were there in Washington, that this was in the works? Was this something that you did ‘together’?”

I don’t know the answer to that. But the German people are certainly deserving of an answer to that very important question.

McGovern noted that the UN Security Council resolution by Russia—which called for the hearing at which he testified—had been supported strongly by China, and called this in itself a “big development”.

Moreover, he described the briefing he had given the Security Council a few days before. There he had made the effective identity between the stance of President John F. Kennedy in 1962, on learning of the presence of the Soviet Union’s 5 to 7 minute-flight nuclear missiles in Cuba; and the stance of Russian President Putin in 2021-22, seeing the nuclear cruise missile-capable NATO ABM systems emplaced in Poland and Romania, and then hearing Ukraine’s President Zelensky say, at the 2022 Munich Security Conference, that Ukraine needed nuclear weapons against Russia and could build them. JFK’s blockade and threatened invasion of Cuba, McGovern reminded the UN diplomats, was not called “unprovoked.”

McGovern ended with this:

So, what we need to do is get out and agitate: We have to educate our fellow citizens, because the press is not doing this. We have to get off our rear ends, and say, “Look, here are the facts, here. Seymour Hersh has exposed the fact that we did this horrendous terrorist act, ‘act of war,’ as Professor Boyle said.” And educate our people. Say, “Do we really want to risk nuclear war for this kind of thing?” I don’t think we do.

Interesting Questions Posed

Other prominent speakers at the Schiller Institute online event were French Army General (ret.) Dominique Delawarde, and Graham Fuller, a long-time intelligence analyst and officer in the CIA. Fuller warned that NATO has effectively constructed a “Berlin Wall” against Russia and is in the process of building a “Great Wall” against China; and Russia is turning to China, forming a partnership for “at least decades” which, if the European Union fights it, will produce a “Greater Asia” with such nations as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Iraq, Syria, and even attracting Italy.

General Delawarde simply emphasized:

I support action of the Schiller Institute conference of today, but also all the other conferences, to try to put an end to the destructive action of the U.S. government and the U.S. elite.

Subsequently a reporter for the Indian newspaper The Hindu asked the Schiller panel to address “why the West has now discovered [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi’s past, after doing business with him for a decade?” Graham Fuller’s answer was that the United States and the UK want “great pressure on India” to abandon its neutrality in the Ukraine conflict and its recently expanded trade with Russia, and instead to line obediently up with “the democracies” in building the walls between the great nations he had spoken of.

Another questioner asked simply, “What can be done” to use Seymour Hersh’s “story that won’t go away” against the threat of world war? Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the then-beginning rallies and demonstrations in about 100 cities across Europe, focused on Saturday, Feb. 25, which were tending toward a united front with the forces of the Feb. 19 Washington, D.C. demonstration for the disbanding of NATO. She quoted Friedrich Schiller for whom the Institute is named:

People united behind a good plan can bend down the arm of the worst dictator.

And Zepp-LaRouche called once again for wider international discussion of her “Ten Principles for a new international security and development architecture,” which can be found on the Schiller Institute website.