Substack is letting me access the Seymour Hersh archive from two separate devices. As it should. I'm not cheating. I paid my yearly subscription just now. I'm also paying my $4 a month or whatever it is to the New York Times, which still runs articles I care about.
I'm reading Sy's The Nord Stream Ghost Ship published less than 24 hours ago. The concluding paragraph reads:
The expert had one final thought: “In the world of professional analysts and operators everyone will universally and correctly conclude from your story that the devilish CIA concocted a counter-op that is on its face so ridiculous and childish that the real purpose was to reinforce the truth.”
Exactly. As a trained scuba diver, NAUI certified (no doubt an expired credential), I was exposed to a lot of the lore. Gill Gilleland, my exMarine diving instructor, told us about the special gas mixtures some professional divers would use, to avoid getting the bends while bypassing lengthy stays in hyperbaric chambers.
I thought the more common protocol is to hang tanks on the line, such that ascending divers can stay at various depths, waiting for the pressurized nitrogen to slowly bleed out (boring). But why use nitrogen in the first place? From Sy's earlier article:
The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers.
Actually, adding helium in place of some of the nitrogen may increase rather than decrease the need for decompression. The narcotic effects of nitrogen under pressure is what to avoid. I've been reading the Wikipedia article.
As a sports diver, I was familiar with the navy dive tables and kept to relatively shallow waters. That was easy in the Philippines, with great coral reefs beginning just beneath the surface.
That last paragraph though, jibes with my own analysis:
In my story line the USA is (a) innocent of wrongdoing and (b) actively pursuing the perpetrators, in part by making their cover stories ever less believable, ever more paper thin, to the point of transparent.
Sometimes when doing medical research, you use colored or even radioactive dyes to trace a system or condition.
Analogously, it's sometimes interesting to see which media outlets will repeat an obviously phony cover story, one deliberately designed to have gaping holes, if one has an operating hole detector. These media outlets are catering to an audience that doesn't necessarily want the truth. They -- the owners, editors, readers and so on -- want to be remembered for their loyalties, their obedience to specific powers. They're placing bets on which factions will still have the upper hand at the end of the day.
This needle in a haystack blog is itself a media outlet, one could say. Knowing something about the difficulties in diving to over 200 feet, for long enough periods to pack explosives around a pipeline, I'm not like your average clueless German journalist. Nor am I an obsequious American, eager to show off my loyalty to the King or Emperor.
I'm closer to Garland Nixon in thinking the conspirators behind the pipeline sabotage have no inherent right to represent themselves as avatars of a constitutional democracy. They're closer to British imperialists.
From my own email outbox:
My own bias, when wearing a nationalist pro-USA hat (not necessarily red), is to finger the Brits as our primary adversary. The Revolutionary War was fought against Brits. The Brits attempted to destroy the USA in 1812 as well. There's some evidence the assassination of Lincoln was the result of a plot by British intel. British Petroleum (BP) did damage to the Gulf of Mexico that's still beyond the scope of settled science to fully assess.
If I were asked to rank "enemies of the USA" from high to low, I'd definitely rank the Brits higher than the Russians or certainly the Chinese. A great fear the Brits seem to have is better relations between the USA and Russia.
Totally quirky, I realize. That's why I tend to save it for my blogs. I should add here that it's British reflex-conditioning I'm up against, i.e. bots (like soulless corporations, e.g. Pearson), and not thinking people. I'd like to save a next generation of British school kids from succumbing to inferior brainwashing.
