It's been a long, a long time coming but I know
A change gon' come oh yes it will
- Sam Cooke
16 months "surveyed." From January 2008 to April 2009
Five different sections, excluding "news" pages written by TPM staff and contributors to "All Readers' Posts"
Persons in the following sections are "invited" to participate.
Twenty-one (21) total posts by
Eight (8) different writers, including
One (1) "member" of the Coffee House "regulars" from May 14 to July 14, 2008
The focus of this week's TPM Book Club discussion is Liaquat Ahamed's riveting book, "The Lords of Finance."
John Lanchester of The New Yorker magazine writes:
"The sheer frictionlessness with which money moves around the world is frightening; it can induce a kind of vertigo. This can happen when you are reading the financial news and suddenly feel that you have no grip on what the numbers actually mean--what those millions and billions and trillions actually represent, how to get hold of them in your mind. (Try the following thought experiment, suggested by the mathematician John Allen Paulos, in his book "Innumeracy": Without doing the calculation, guess how long a million seconds is. Now try to guess the same for a billion seconds. Ready? A million seconds is less than twelve days; a billion is almost thirty-two years.) Or it can happen when you look at a bank statement and contemplate the terrible potency of those strings of digits, their ability to dictate everything from what you eat to where you live--the abstract numerals whose consequences are the least abstract thing in the world. Or it can happen when the global flow of capital suddenly hits you personally--when your apparently thriving employer goes out of business owing to a problem with credit, or your mortgage payments jump unpayably upward--and you think, Just what is this money stuff, anyway? I can see its effects--I can thumb a banknote, flip a coin--but what is it, actually? What do these abstract numbers stand for? What is the thing that's being represented? Wouldn't it be reassuring if it was more like a physical thing, and less like an idea? Wouldn't the global financial system be less vertiginous, less bizarre, if your money actually stood for something?
My avatar shows me smiling. Believe me, I am not. Last night I stumbled upon one of the entries in the TPM Book Club entitled "Race, Racists and Journamalism," by Aaron Schwartz. I stopped to read the story and was gobsmacked by one member of this week's discussion group (Mr. Schwartz) calling the another (Steve Sailer) a racist. Helpfully, Mr. Schwartz included a link to Mr. Sailer's Wikipedia biography and a "interesting" quote from him.
After reading Sailer's bio, and challenging him for the "context" he claimed was absent from Schwartz's assessment of him, I, too came away wholly convinced that yes, indeed, Mr. Sailer is a racist. (And never one to shy away, I told him so.)
But all day, what I first read about him and his covert participation at TPM was nagging at me for two reasons:
As long as they were considering "Jack Bauer" scenarios, why not just use Sodium Thiopental... Truth Serum.
Sodium thiopental, better known as Sodium Pentothal (a trademark of Abbott Laboratories), thiopental, thiopentone sodium, or trapanal, is a rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anaesthetic. It is an intravenous ultra-short-acting barbiturate. Sodium thiopental is a depressant and is sometimes used during interrogations--not to cause pain (in fact, it may have just the opposite effect), but to weaken the resolve of the subject and make him or her more compliant to pressure.[citation needed] Thiopental is a core medicine in the World Health Organization's "Essential Drugs List", which is a list of minimum medical needs for a basic health care system.[3]
Truth serum
Thiopental is still used in some places as a truth serum.[8] The barbiturates as a class decrease higher cortical brain functioning. Some psychiatrists hypothesize that because lying is more complex than telling the truth, suppression of the higher cortical functions may lead to the uncovering of the "truth". However, the reliability of confessions made under thiopental is dubious; the drug tends to make subjects chatty and cooperative with interrogators, but a practiced liar or someone who has a false story firmly established would still be quite able to lie while under the influence of the drug.[9]
Surely, it's efficacy is no more dubious than beating the hell out of someone, or nearly drowning him. And certainly it's more "humane." After all, it's one of the drugs used for administering the death penalty via lethal injection.
Maybe instead of lawyers, they needed a "script doctor."
This is a long blog post, and I'll apologize for the length at the outset. However, I think if you can get through it, you might find it helpful for moving forward.
There are two things which need to be explored: the track record of the United States in prosecuting, or even investigating those accused of war crimes. And second, if you are to bring about that prosecution, how might you do it effectively. Perhaps if you employ some of the lessons learned in the civil rights movement to further your cause, you might make significant progress with what will be a near impossible task.
Many of us are disgusted, appalled, outraged, angered by the content of the released torture memos written by Bush's Office of Legal Counsel. It is the content -- the black and white letters on the pages -- that delineated in gruesome detail exactly what was done to Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Muhammed. Done to them by operatives of the United States government. Many of you are taking your outrage out on the blogosphere, railing against the Obama administration, because -- at least for now -- a decision has been made (not etched in stone, mind you) that the administration is not likely to pursue prosecution against those who conducted the torturing, and possibly (again, not etched in stone) against those who crafted this policy. The critical problem is your outrage is seen as limited to the "liberal bloggers." Although the story has some traction in the mainstream media, they are not actively pursuing the goal you seek: the prosecution of George Bush and key members of his administration responsible for constructing and implementing this policy.
On a personal note. (which is neither here nor there just my need to vent a little). my feeling is your anger is a bit misdirected at the present time, BUT-- and this is the critical part -- there is something more effective you can do rather than sitting on your patoots pounding away at your keyboards or signing petition after petition. What you lack is an effective game plan to achieve your goal: the prosecution and or impeachment of somebody who was involved in the criminal activity. To achieve that, you have to get over your righteous outrage and get righteously ACTIVE.
In other words, since you are the ones you've been waiting for, stop waiting, start doing.
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