“Ask Pinch!”

For a few days now, we’ve been working the following hypothesis:

I suggest that Times management—Keller, Sulzberger—was embedded in the disinformation campaign run by the White House Iraq Group, that Miller was their operative, and Libby was their handler.

Miller proved out (Miller was WHIG operative—CONFIRMED!)

But Bill “Helen” Keller, now… After reading Keller’s pathetic, deeply wussy coulda, woulda, shoulda staff email on why he took a year to look at what Kneepads was doing, and just thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to, ya know, actually sneak a look at her famous notebooks, I can almost believe that Keller was a “Good German” who looked the other way, as Miller blew smoke for the WHIG disinformation campaign. How humililated he must be!

But Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger… To connect the Pinch dot, let’s parse Pinch’s slightly hysterical disavowal—“[T]his car had her hand on the wheel.”

Notice anything curious about that sentence? I’ll wait. Here it is: “Hand” is singular. How many people do you know that drive a car with one hand? And surely Pinch, who lives in a deeply literate world, would never have written such a sentence…. Unless there were another hand on the wheel, eh? The hand of Times management? Paging Doctor Freud! ’Cause Pinch’s slip is showing!

Yes, it would be irresponsbible not to speculate. Which leads us to ask the following question: Like father, like son? No, not George I and George II. Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger and Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, Junior. See the Wikipedia entry on Operation Mockingbird:

After 1953 the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25
newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people
with well-known right-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O’Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor). ^[9]

So, it would have seemed quite natural, indeed, an act of filial piety, for Pinch to have assented to WHIG operative “Scooter” Libby’s proposition to help out the country by planting a few stories… And to have pimped Judy “Kneepads” Miller to him.

UPDATE Welcome, Daou Report readers. I’ve organized this series of posts into a book. Click on the “Previous” and “Next” buttons to follow the story as it unfolds for us.

UPDATE Somebody asked me “Arther than what?” so I corrected the typo. Sorry.

NOTE One of the subtexts of Colonel Wilkerson’s old-school polemic (“When in the course of human events”) is that the Bushies, the first post-Cold War Republican administration, are like children treating sharp, Cold-War-edged weapons as if they were toys; that they don’t even know these weapons had edges. As usual, the Republicans recognized no duty of care. One can imagine Pinch’s father feeling the same thing about his son.