“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

Conceivably this is a pro-Biden article. It demonstrates what Biden is willing to do and/or is capable of when it comes to big, complicated foreign policy questions. If you know ahead of time that a Russian invasion is inevitable (as all intelligence assessments made very clear) wouldn't it be a prudent strategy to relieve Russia of one of its most prominent economic weapons?

Considering the much rumored campaign announcement, I can absolutely see a large portion of "centrist America" respecting Biden for this move, and rewarding him for it. I think this quote from TFA encapsulates the sentiment:

> The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

I think that's a reasonable spin. And I'll admit that there's a repressed neocon in the back of my brain that secretly wants to believe that the US is still capable of taking decisive and effective action in defense of world order.

But... this is just really, really thin. Hersh had no editor on this, it's literally a self-published blog with one entry[1], created for just this article. No one else wanted to run it, one has to assume. There's one source, with only the thinnest of descriptions[2] and no independent verification described.

Everyone wants to lean hard on Hersh's reputation from My Lai and Abu Ghraib. But those stories had evidence! The vietnam story was about a covered-up-but-very-real prosecution of an actual person for actual crimes. Abu Ghraib had the famous photographs and people willing to go on record with their own names. This isn't the same at all.

I mean, maybe it's true. Again, the Freudian Neocon would like that. But realistically this could also be someone feeding Hersh a fake story sourced from anywhere. I don't think this really tells us much of anything.

[1] When I saw this the first time, I immediately thought it must be a fake!

[2] Just "someone familiar with the planning", I mean, were they even looped in on the execution? How does that description square with all the Tom Clancy prose about operation processes?