Bundestag Blocks Motion for Nord Stream Investigative Committee

March 15, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—It comes as no real surprise that the motion presented by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) for the creation of a special committee to investigate the Nord Stream attack was blocked by all other parties in the Bundestag, today. Their common narrative was that it is conspiracy theory; there was no substance to the motion; it would interfere with official investigations; and it is anti-American and propaganda for Vladimir Putin.

Especially vicious in the 45-minute debate which followed the presentation of the motion by AfD Deputy Harald Weyel was the speech by Social Democrat Bengt Bergt, who claimed that nobody listens to American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story on the U.S. role in the attack, that Putin was to blame for waging “energy war” against Germany, that the AfD should rather be called “PFD” for “Putin’s Friends in Germany,” that the AfD should share its bed with Die Linke’s Sahra Wagenknecht—one of the main organizers of the Feb. 25 Berlin peace rally that drew 50,000 people—and that there was justified reason for the BfV State Protection Agency to keep the AfD under surveillance.

The motion, however, most certainly does have substance: It refers to the campaign against Nord Stream beginning with the passage of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act in 2017. It quotes from Hersh’s Feb. 8 revelations in detail. It questions why the Berlin government remained quiet for six months after the explosion attack, possibly as an accomplice of the U.S. and NATO, and asks why the German government showed no concern about the nation’s sovereignty.

In introducing the motion, Weyel pointed to Charles de Gaulle’s 1959 decision to suspend NATO’s command over the French Navy in the Mediterranean, and denounced the current German government’s refusal to build Nord Stream as an example of genuine German sovereignty as pursued by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder against geopolitical adversaries in the West.

The special investigative committee will not be created, but the issue and the many unanswered questions remain on the agenda and may, as Weyel warned, spell the doom of the present German government.