When the strawman betrays you

This note dives into some of the criticism of Seymour Hersh after he published his article «How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline» on 8 February this year. I do it to honor his life-long work as an investigative journalist, as I think his article was treated unfairly by many journalists, reporters and commentators.

My objective as a writer is to seek and speak the truth. I mainly write about monetary policy. It has an important geopolitical context, which now and then makes me look at other political subjects that are closely related to monetary policy.

One of these subjects is the co-operation between the governments of Norway and USA. The former adapts its monetary policy to the latter’s manipulation of the world’s global reserve currency, and for a long time it has been pretty much the same with the rest of the world. The result is a globally coordinated monetary policy that has implications for the two other major policy areas: Security and energy.

Norway is a major oil producing country. It’s also a founding member of NATO. This makes Norway special, and understanding the interplay between Norway and the US government provides valuable information about America and the so-called “Rule-based order”. This is the system of international organizations, rules, and norms. Representatives of the US government increasingly refer to the “Rule-based order” these days, as the geopolitical situation changes from a state of American hegemony to a more multipolar world.

In my job as a writer I focus on presenting the key facts and avoid speculating on people’s motives. If the facts are presented clearly and orderly, people can easily analyze them and form conclusions on their own.

In my world conspiracy theories are an energy drain and a distraction that I shun. I think the same of most rhetoric. And I have nothing but contempt for people who try to obstruct public discourse by introducing strawmen and attacking them with a smirk on their face.

Grammarly(.)com defines a strawman argument as following:

«[T]he logical fallacy of distorting an opposing position into an extreme version of itself and then arguing against that extreme version.»

This kind of trick is what was used by journalists, reporters and commentators in the mainstream and social media after Seymour Hersh published his article. He wrote about how the US blew up the pipe with the help of the Norwegian military. Hersh quoted his source, a person who said he had been part of the team that was planning the sabotage, and who said that the Norwegians «hated the Russians».

Hersh also wrote that Secretary General of NATO and former Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg

«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.»

Furthermore, Hersh’ source said about Stoltenberg that:

“He is the glove that fits the American hand.”

Hersh drew a lot of flak from journalists, reporters and commentators in the mainstream and social media. Some of the most profound criticism was put forward in an article written by independent analyst Oliver Alexander, who wrote:

“I doubt Jens Stoltenberg was a US intelligence asset in his early teens.”

Alexander’s article was widely referenced by newspapers, including here in Norway.

Commentators used the fact that Jens Stoltenberg only was a teenager during the Vietnam war as if it was some sort of a trump card that proved that everything in Hersh’ article was wrong. Jens was 16 when the war ended 30 April 1975. This supposedly proved that he couldn’t have cooperated with the intelligence community back then. People made the reference to Jens Stoltenberg as a strawman that they attacked with fervor.

When reading these comments, I got a bad taste in my mouth and thought the behavior was suspicious.

Everybody who knows something about the American intelligence service understands that it indeed would have been possible that the CIA had an asset who was a 16-year-old aspiring politician. The fact that he was born into one of the elite families of the Norwegian Labor parties actually meant that he could be an asset of immense value to the Americans.

In the following I will present a timeline with facts without discussing or analyzing the information. It will enable you to make up your own mind about Alexander’s and the other commentator’s attacks on Seymour Hersh.

1931: Torvald Stoltenberg, Jens’ father, is born.

1950: Torvald enrolls as a student at the University of Oslo where he takes the equivalent of a Master of Law degree in 1957. As part of his studies, he goes to the US to study international relations.

1958: Torvald gets his first job as a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Later his career will include being a diplomat stationed in San Fransisco, Secretary of State in three ministries, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defense.

1959: Jens Stoltenberg is born.

1965: Ola Teigen is elected president of the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League (WYL), the Norwegian Labor Party’s youth organization. WYL supports NATO membership.

1968: Someone steals a letter from Teigen’s desk. The letter includes information about large payments from the CIA (via another organization) to the International Union of Socialist Youth, where the WYL is a member. The newspaper Dagbladet writes about it a few days later and the scandal is a fact.

1969: Teigen resigns. The WYL’s investigative commission finalizes a report about the case. The report is marked “Strictly confidential”, and I don’t have any information about its content. WYL changes its stance on NATO and wants Norway to leave the organization.

1970: Teigen is found dead in Trondheim. It’s being reported as a suicide.

1973: Jens (14) enlists in the Labor Party and establishes a local department of the Workers’ Youth League.

1975: The Vietnam war ends. Jens is 16.

1983: Jens is elected vice president of the Workers’ Youth League.

1985: Jens is elected president of WYL. Prior to the election he supports the WYL’s fight for ending Norway’s membership in NATO. A journalist in the newspaper Aftenposten interviews him about this in the run-up to the election. Shortly after he is elected, Jens turns 180 degrees, and starts fighting for making WYL support NATO membership.

1987: Jens succeeds in convincing WYL about his stance on NATO. In his biography he says: “"I didn't lie to the journalist from Aftenposten, but I still couldn't look him straight in the eye."

1992: Trond Giske, who later became a high-ranking member of the Labor Party, but who is currently shoved out in the cold by the party’s leadership, finds a report at his desk on his first day as leader of the WYL.

1996: Anniken Huitfeldt, the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, also finds the report at her desk on her first day as leader of the WYL.

2004: The book “Politisk overvåking av studenter på 1950-tallet” (Political surveillance of students in the 1950s), written by lawyer Asbjørn Fossen, is published. Fossen tells the story about how a group of students at the university, including Thorvald Stoltenberg, started a witch hunt against leftist students and reported about their activities to the American embassy. An official commission that was set up to investigate the Norwegian intelligence community’s surveillance of citizens, The Lund Commission, has later confirmed that the surveillance negatively affected Fossen’s and several others’ careers.

2016: An article in Dagbladet says that the aim of putting the report on the WYL’s new leaders’ desk was “to remind new leaders of history, so it would not repeat itself.” The newspaper interviews Huitfeldt, who explains that “I had been preoccupied with the CIA scandal for a long time. It went so far that a friend told me that "you need to relax, the same bad things won’t happen to you””.

2014: Jens is appointed Secretary-General of NATO.

2022: Jens is appointed leader of Norges Bank, the Norwegian Central Bank. When the Ukraine War breaks out, he instead extends his stay at NATO.

Jens Stoltenberg has had a significant influence on Norwegian politics. He has been leader of the Labor Party, and held numerous high-ranking positions in the government, including Prime Minister in 2000-2001 and 2005-2013.

Summary and conclusion

If you familiarize yourself with CIA methods and read the timeline above, I will consider it rather unwise if you dismiss Seymour Hersh’s article on the basis that it says that American intelligence community trusted Jens Stoltenberg “completely since the Vietnam war” and that Jens only was 16 years at that time.

Considering that Jens evidently had political ambitions already as a 14-year old kid, and that his father Torvald seems to have started his cooperation with representatives of the intelligence service at the American embassy already while he was a young student it seems quite plausible that Hersh’ source was speaking the truth.

Having learned these facts, you should also view the rest of the arguments put forward by Alexander and the other critics of Hersh’ article with a great deal of skepticism.

They haven’t done their due diligence, and now it’s them that we cannot trust.

In this note I have shown how Jens Stoltenberg THE STRAWMAN has betrayed the critics of Seymour Hersh. I suggest that they go out, do their civic duty as writers and try to investigate if Jens Stoltenberg THE POLITICIAN has betrayed his fellow countrymen. If they care about their reputation that would be the only honorable thing to do.

***

Afterword:

In cases of tyranny, corruption and incompetence within government, no other group in society is more valuable than investigative writers. I salute people like Seymour Hersh, @schellenberger, @mtaibbi and our own @BjornJahr for playing a major role in seeking and speaking truth in a time when media constantly fails to do its duty. I hope they inspire young writers who are sick and tired of wandering through this fog of lies, the smearing and the bundle of cowardly tricks that meet us every time we open a newsletter or read comments on social media.

The Norwegian journalist and author Bjørn Wormdal has written several books on the cooperation between Norwegian and American intelligence organizations. When Dagbladet interviewed him about his recent book “The Spy War – the secret spying co-operation between Norway and the US” he explained that representatives of the Norwegian intelligence authorities threatened him and tried to steer the content of the book. I haven’t read the book but would be interested to hear what those who have say about it.

Lastly – we should keep in mind that people like Hersh and Wormdal must fight a significant challenge which best can be described as an asymmetry of information. Their investigations are of such a nature that they often run into things that governments want to keep secret, not necessarily due to our safety, but also because revealing information sometimes will be harmful to politicians’ and others’ careers. At the same time, as we have seen with the Twitter files scandal, they work actively to limit the writers’ freedom. While doing this they have all sorts of tools that can be used to surveille and cause problems for the writers.

This asymmetry represents a major challenge for our democracy. If you understand and honor this fact, you also understand that you should be careful with how you go about when you comment on those who dedicate themselves to investigating the people who are supposed to represent us. Principle No. 1 is to check facts thoroughly and present them in a clear and understandable manner.

If you found this note interesting, the algorithms and I would appreciate it if you click like and follow me.

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I have included some of the sources to this note below, including the article by Hersh, and Alexander’s comment. The sources are in English and Norwegian.

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