Geodog: Politics

Winning the so-called war on terrorism, one tortured prisoner at a time

This is how Rumsfeld and the Bush administration thinks we are going to convince 1 billion Muslims that Osama bin Laden is wrong about America? From today's NYT:

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.

Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics.

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement. The shacks were cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel California.

The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects....

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future.....

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

This is so wrong, on both a practical and moral level, that I don't know where to start, except that I fear for the world that we are creating for our children. Osama bin Laden must go to bed every night marveling at how Rumsfeld and Bush fell into his trap better than he could have ever expected.

AdvocacyDev and the future of e-advocacy

I spend most of my time at work dealing with the day to day details of designing, coding, testing and releasing high quality software for use by non-profits and advocacy organizations, so I'm greatly looking forward to spending the next 3 days with my head out of the weeds, so to speak, actually looking at the forest. I'm going to spend the next three days at AdvocacyDevII, a gathering of Political Technologists (or is it technical activists), exploring the current state of open source tools for non-profits and advocacy groups. I'm hoping to spend a little time at exploring the future of e-advocacy, and proposed an agenda item on the topic:

What is the future of E-Advocacy?

5 years ago, it was a novelty for policymakers to receive email from constituents, and organizations that mobilized people to send emails impressed policymakers. Now policymakers are making it more and more difficult for people to reach them electronically, and some of them are actively hostile to organized communications. Meanwhile, we have seen the rise of blogs and decentralized network-based e-organizing empowering individuals to put forth their own views, but it is unclear to what extent that has resulted in actual policy changes. How can we best use the tools we are developing to *effectively* mobilize support for the policies we advocate. How do we translate communication in cyberspace to action in meatspace?

Just today the Congressional Management Foundation released a study "Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in Citizen Advocacy (pdf)" which seems very on topic. The Washington Post summarized it thus:

On Capitol Hill, the Inboxes Are Overflowing

The money quotes from the article are:

Between legislators and the people who want to influence them, there's open warfare on the Web...

Unfortunately, a lot of the e-mails are barely worth reading -- or at least that's what the people who handle them believe. Interest groups generate most of the incoming e-mails and a numbing percentage of those are form letters. Half of the aides surveyed are convinced that constituents aren't even aware that they've sent such identical-form communications, and another 25 percent of staffers question whether those communications are legitimate at all.

Almost all of the congressional aides surveyed said that they'd like to find a way to differentiate between interest-group e-mails and the rare, more prized missives that individuals actually write themselves.

As one frustrated legislative director told the foundation: "[There is] too much mail, not enough staff. Not enough time to do it, particularly when in session. [We're] really losing sight of the important letters that come in -- like the three-page letter from Grandma as opposed to those floods of mail where all they're doing is clicking a button. It's insane."

"Stop sending form letters/faxes/e-mails that the constituent doesn't even know he/she is sending," a House staffer added. "It's a waste of time and resources and does not influence the members' stance on the issue in any way...

... once the e-mails penetrate Congress, staffers, for all their griping, usually take them into account. The survey shows that congressional offices at least tally and take note of the vast majority of electronic messages they receive, even if they are mass produced.

Deluging policy makers with form emails clearly doesn't have much effect on policy. So what are the new ways of organizing citizens online, and getting their voices heard? Targeting the media with blogs? Citizen journalism? Flash mobs organized via SMS? Distributed factchecking, or opposition research organized via blogs and wikis?

I hope to find out (and be part of creating new ones) at AdvocacyDevII.

America from the Statue of Liberty to Guantánamo

It still amazes me that in 4 short years, George Bush has managed to transform the symbols by which America is known overseas from the Statue of Liberty and Hollywood to Guantánamo and the hooded prisoner tortured at Abu Ghraib.

Each day brings new evidence confirming the reports of American murders and atrocities committed in the name of the so-called "war on terrorism," which seems to have turned into the "war to create terrorists." For instance, Human Rights Watch reports:

at least six detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan have been killed since 2002, including one man held by the CIA. More than two years later, no U.S. personnel have been charged with homicide in any of these deaths, although U.S. Department of Defense documents show that five of the six deaths were clear homicides.

While the Bush administration denies any responsibility for the atrocities, blaming low level soldiers for having correctly understood Bush's orders condoning torture, Guantánamo has come to symbolize the United States for large parts of the world. As the NYT reports:

From Mumbai, India, to Amman, Jordan, to London, Guantánamo is a continuing subject for discussion, from television talk shows to sermons to everyday conversations. In countries like Afghanistan, Britain and Pakistan, released detainees often return home and relate their experiences on television news programs. Accusations of egregious abuse sometimes prompt violence, as in last week's demonstrations in Afghanistan.

Guantánamo provides rhetorical fodder for politicians seeking to bring down United States-allied rulers in their own countries, and it offers a ready rallying point against American dominance, even in countries whose own police and military have been known for severe violations of human rights.

...

In Europe, accusations of abuse at Guantánamo, as much as the war in Iraq, have become a symbol of what many see as America's dangerous drift away from the ideals that made it a moral beacon in the post-World War II era. There is a persistent and uneasy sense that the United States fundamentally changed after September 11, and not for the better.

What can I say to the parents of the 654 young men being held and tortured by American soldiers in Guantánamo and Bahgram, many of whom appear to be guilty only of being Islamic in the wrong place and wrong time?

For a man raised with the idealism of the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the Peace Corps, this is an extremely painful transformation of America. For a father who has children who have to live in this world as Americans, it is very scary.

The organizing needs to start now

My favorite quote from Camp Wellstone was Pam Costain's refrain, "Win or Lose on Nov 2, the organizing needs to start again on November 3." Zack Exley, former Internet guru on the Kerry campaign, has written what is destined to be an influential blog post arguing that the Democrats need to create an effective field operation now:

The cheap shot argument for building a permanent field operation is: "Because the Republican's have one." It's not clear whether the GOP's long-term field push had a huge effect on turnout. But it is clear that the Republicans are building a powerful, permanent field operation -- and that, at the very least, it's a powerful growing threat. We know that they started building years ago. We've seen their volunteer training materials, and have sat in on some of the trainings. They give volunteers formal roles, hold them accountable for results and continuously replace the ones who do not perform. What they're doing is very advanced. If it wasn't a major advantage in 2004, just give them another four years and see where they are.

But we shouldn't need a Republican threat to motivate us to do the obvious. What is a political party without a strong, capable grassroots? Just a shell of a party -- and that's what both the Democratic and Republican parties were for a very long time. The 2004 election gives the Democrats a chance to leave that legacy behind. ...

Exley goes on to outline what he call "Ten steps to building a permanent field program with the New Grassroots." I don't know Exley, or much about his work on the Kerry campaign, and I've avoided following the internecine battles that have followed Bush's victory, but the rough outlines make sense to me. We have hundreds of thousands of people who got involved in politics for the first time in 2004, and now, because of the internet and the tools that groups like CivicSpace and CivicActions are building, we have the capability to organize them, and to enable them to communicate with each other and organize themselves. As Exley puts it:

We're talking about a totally new form of organization.

In the same way that railroads, highways, the telegraph and the telephone all changed the maximum size and efficiency of national organizations, so does the Internet -- "the Internet" being web tools and email.

Because of web tools and email, a new kind of massively volunteer-heavy organization is possible.

As Zephyr Teachout points out, and Zack Exley admits and promises to address in a future post, in his first post Exley doesn't address the power or role of self-organizing groups, and the internet's and web tools' catalyzing, facilitating and enabling role, but his program sure sounds like a good start.

Hat tips to David Weinberger and Micah Sifry for pointers to the post.

Putting the pieces back together, slowly

It's been a long strange trip since the election, and I haven't felt much like writing, and recent developments in my life haven't left me much time to write, hence the two month silence. I worked in campaign mode for the month leading up to the election, as part of a fabulous team that Dan Robinson and Henri Poole of CivicActions put together to do online support of Get Out The Vote efforts using AdvoKit! While we had our ups and downs, the biggest down of course being the election results, it was a great experience. I helped build sites like Rock the Vote, Vote All Your Values, Voter Call, and I supported some great kids on Zephyr Teachout's Baobabs Teams in their use of AdvoKit! I was putting in 16 to 20 hour days doing everything from project management to Apache configuration to writing documentation for AdvoKit, and I loved it. It was at least moderately effective as well, 15,000 people registered to use our sites and they recorded more than 110,000 phone calls to newly registered voters in battleground states, which research shows should add up to at least 11,000 additional voters going to the polls and voting against Bush.

Of course, it wasn't enough. In spite of massive efforts by groups on the left, we were out-organized by the Republican GOTV operation, as detailed in a recent Washington Post article, and the American people elected as president of the United States a man who condones torture, is borrowing money in our children's name to fund tax breaks for his friends and war on his father's enemies, and who is raping the environment. As you may be able to tell, I took the election hard, which was another reason not to write. Many of my thoughts I am just as happy not to have preserved for posterity. I found consolation in the support of my wonderful family, including a beautifully written note from my conservative father (and Bush 41 government appointee) thanking me and my sister for our efforts to defeat George W. Bush, in the great friends I made working with CivicActions, and the fact that I can at least say, I did my best to elect John Kerry as president of the United States. But great as they are, the consolations make a thin bowl of gruel to subsist on during 4 more years of George W. Bush. It is going to be a grim four years, I fear. I don't expect developments in Iraq, the economy and America's place in the world to be positive, although I would dearly love to be proved wrong.

In the days immediately following the election, I made several resolutions. The first was not to join the circular firing squad that is the Democratic party after every loss. In many ways the amazing thing about the election is that the Democratic candidate did so well. While we made a lot of mistakes we can learn from, narrowly losing an election against an incumbent president who the media had anointed as king, who convinced the country we were at war and who borrowed enough money to pump up the economy is not a sign that everything we did was wrong. I'm an American history buff, and I can't think a single president who was defeated for reelection in wartime, which George W. Bush managed to convince the American people this is (notice how there haven't been any orange alerts since the election?). I've seen a lot of writing on the net about starting a new political party. Did the Republicans think of starting a new party after 1964 or 1976? No, they organized, and the more effective elements took over the Republican party. Anyone who thinks that it would be more successful to start a new political party in America than to reform the Democratic party from within hasn't studied the history of 3rd parties in America. On of my closest friends in college wrote his honor's thesis on the topic, and he convinced me that such efforts are pretty much doomed.

The second resolution was not to give up on grassroots politics, but to continue advocating and organizing for the things I believe in, and find ways to use my professional, writing and technical skills to improve American political and public life. As Pam Costain of the Wellstone Action Network repeatedly said at Camp Wellstone, the organizing needs to start again on November 3, win or lose. I intend to be part of that organizing.

The last resolution was not to overdose on the media (including blogs) and to spend more time and energy on people close to home, who supported me while I was working the 16 to 20 hour days. The necessity of doing this was confirmed a week after the election, when the youngest member of the household decided it was better to jump from the top of a climbing structure than to be tagged "it", resulting in the broken bones in the picture above that gave me the title for this piece. The bones have mostly healed, and America will recover from this election eventually. Absolute power corrupts, and the Republicans will over-reach, they always do. The beliefs and values of George Bush and the leadership of the Republican Party are not those of the majority of the American people, nor even those of the majority of Republicans, and that will become evident over time, and we will throw the bums out. Until then, we have to organize, stand and fight for what is right, and to some degree just endure it. But the nation will heal, eventually, just as my child's bones are healing.

All over but the voting and GOTV

A friend wrote to me to thank me for working on Get Out the Vote. As I told him, I have mostly been having a blast working on GOTV, although at this point my brain is fried into a crispy critter from 3 weeks of 5 hours sleep a night. We are averaging 15 calls a minute on our busiest site now, and it was over 100 calls a minute on Sunday. If you have nothing else to do, feel free to go to www.votercall.org, register, and tell newly registered voters in PA and OH (and states west later in the night) why it is important to vote. Hearing someone tell them that their voice matters can make all the difference.

As I have written earlier, I have lived in countries where political matters were decided by guns, not votes. I was explaining to the progeny last night why it is so important that in this county, the final judge is the people's votes, and how, even though I loathe George W. Bush, if he is fairly re-elected I will consider him the legitimate president of the United States, and myself part of the loyal opposition. I got teary eyed.

I really believe in democracy, and I am proud of contributing to it.

Who would be more fun to go out for beers with, Bush or Kerry?

I read somewhere that political scientists say that Americans pick their presidents by who they would feel most comfortable sitting down and having a beer with. I watched the debates last night and thought about what a beer test would reveal about the candidates.

Going out for a beer with Kerry would probably be a bit of a bore. He gave all the signs of being a serious policy wonk, a Clinton without Clinton's ability to connect with people, but thankfully also without Clinton's pathological need for approval. He would probably spent the evening telling you about his ideas for health care and something esoteric like "The New Energy Economy", and would probably forget to drink his beer. It would be an early evening, and it wouldn't be the kind of thing I would do to relax.

Going out for a beer with Bush would probably start off a lot better. He would be charming, backslapping and solicitous of your well-being. However, he had that look and manner that tell you that after the second beer, he would start to change. He'd start complaining about how everybody was against him at work, and the company had it in for him, even though he hadn't done anything wrong. After the third beer, he'd get up to go to the bathroom and he'd start a fight with someone who "bumped" into him at the bar. When you refused to join the fight, he'd depart in a huff, leaving you stuck with the bill, a furious bartender, and worrying who he was going to kill while driving in that state.

It might not be the best set of choices, but I'll take the bore any day.

Republicans staying on message: keeping America scared

I finally watched the remixed film clip from the Republican National Convention that everyone is talking about. If you haven't seen it, please check it out. It is fascinating on many levels.

First, it is a testament to the ability of the Republicans to stay on message: "Be Scared, America." I am particularly sensitive to that after my Wellstone training, and it is very impressive just in terms of political discipline, something Democrats aren't nearly as good at. Second, the film clip shows the growing power of what Dan Gillmor calls We the Media, the citizen journalists. In this case one individual was able to remix material that had been previously aired to make a powerful point. If the copyright cartel has their way, this would be illegal.

Finally, it is disgusting message of fear, straight out of 1984. Everyone remembers part of George Orwell's vision of a totalitarian state, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever," but the part where that state's power is fueled by always being at war doesn't get as much attention:

Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil...

it should get more attention, because it is the Republican vision for America.

Blogging Camp Wellstone: Day One, Jim Ross on Creating a Campaign Plan and Budget

The first speaker in the Working on a Campaign series was Jim Ross, a San Francisco political consultant. He seemed like a strange choice at first. He did some early work for Representative, now Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, famous for his statement "My vote can't be bought, but it can be rented". Ross has successfully managed the conservative (for San Francisco at least) side of many San Francisco ballot issues, such as Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash initiative, and he was the campaign manager for Gavin Newsom's successful bid for Mayor. It doesn't take much googling to find some pretty impassioned opponents of Jim Ross. His introduction earned him some (polite) hostility from a couple of the San Francisco political activists present. Last quarter, he was the biggest money maker among San Francisco political consultants.

Upon reflection, perhaps all those are reasons why Camp Wellstone invited him to speak. He is a very successful campaign consultant. Clearly, he knows something about winning elections. It was also a great introduction to the trade or profession of campaign management -- more on that later.

Here are my notes of Jim Ross' talk, Creating a Campaign Plan and Budget:

Step one, before you do anything, before you decide to run, is to do your research. You wouldn't believe how many candidates come to see me and ask me to work on their campaign without having done the most basic research. The first questions to answer are:

• How many registered voters in the district?


• What is the typical turnout?


• How have challengers done against incumbents in the past?


• How much money was spent in last election?


• What are the issues voters care about?

Research past winning candidates.
How did they win? Copy their strategies. Don't worry about being creative, worry about winning.

Resources:

Time
Spend your time raising money or reaching people. Time is the finite resource.

People
Overhead (Staff) is the most expensive thing in a campaign.

Money
Unless you can self-fund, you need to raise money. Howard Dean proved that liberal candidates can raise money.

Small races, how you raise money:

• Friends and families - Ask people who know the candidates the best, friends and family. (Candidates always want to call the people they don't know and ask them for money -- wrong).


• Respecters - People who know and respect the candidate. Work colleagues, acquaintances, college buddies. People from work, school, neighborhood, and civic groups. Good candidates are connectors in the Tipping Point sense, people who have lots of second tier friends.


• Professional donors - advocacy groups, affinity groups (e.g. Sierra Club, NOW, Unions) -- they won't give money until the other 2 have given money. You have to prove yourself to them first. You can buy the record of every donor in San Francisco for $5. (Every candidate wants to start with those).

Make a Plan
Research is to figure out the best way to reach voters. The top priority of campaign is voter contact. Campaigns are a place to communicate a message to a voter.
There are lots of ways to get to 50% plus one person. Field-based (grass roots) campaigns are an expensive way to talk to voters. It is the most effective way to reach voters. But it isn't necessary the cheapest.

Uses SF supervisorial races as example of how to figure best way to reach voters. 60,000 voters registered in a district, 27,000 voters will vote. Need 13,501 votes to win.
Two things you can do to win:

• Turn out the people who would vote for you, but wouldn't normally turn out. We call them low propensity voters.


• Or get the voters who are going to vote, to vote for you.

For Gavin Newsom - we got undecided voters who were going to vote, to vote for Newsom (using direct mail, TV), and then worked to turnout 18k more people who were Newsom supporters, but who wouldn't otherwise have voted (using direct mail, Get out the vote (GOTV)).

So you need to make a fundamental decision of how to spend the money on which. A bad budget that is well put together and worked from is better than a good budget that is ignored. [Jim Ross has a longer description of his strategy for the Newsom campaign at Tilting the Playing Field: Voter Identification and Turnout]

Bon mot of the day: Like Tolstoy said about families, every good campaign is the same, every bad campaign is different.

[I should also note that at this talk I sat next to a very nice woman wearing a scarf and chewing cough drops like mad -- I woke up the next morning coughing and with a sore throat, and it has been downhill every since, so the quality of my notes declines pretty severely over the weekend, and it is taking me a lot longer than I planned get them cleaned up and posted. If it hadn't been for the encouragement from my family (run, Lyn, run) Robert and Heath, I probably wouldn't have bothered.]

Blogging Camp Wellstone: Day One, Working on a Campaign, Trainees

After the welcoming speeches, we Camp Wellstone attendees were divided into the three different tracks based on what we had previously signed up for: Citizen Activism, Advocacy and Organizing, Working on a Campaign: Tools and Tactics for Success, or Being a Candidate: How to Run and Win the Progressive Way. I had selected the Working on a Campaign group, since I wanted something that would be immediately useful, and given my shyness in person I'm more likely to fly to Mars than be a political candidate myself.

Once we got into our meeting room, we did introductions, which went on for much longer than planned. People were very nice, but some of them really liked to talk, myself included. There were some long-time political activists, like blogger "Christian Liberal," but most were people who hadn't been active in politics recently. Many of them had fascinating stories about what motived them to get involved in politics, some for the first time, some after a long hiatus. There was a woman who had suggested volunteering on a political campaign to her teen-age daughter, who had then had so much fun that she convinced her retired mom to join her full-time. There were numerous stories of people like me who had political childhoods, but then had gotten far away from politics (my favorite was the person who spent 7 years working on America's Funniest Home Videos, then went on to be a dot-com executive), but who had decided that the stakes for our democracy in this election were so high that they had to get re-involved in politics. There were people in the early twenties, and one fabulous woman who didn't say her age, but talked about having played hookey from her job in Washington, DC. to go up to the hill and watch the McCarthy hearings (for my younger readers, those were in 1954).

An encouragingly large number of people were planning to travel to swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida to do voter education, voter persuasion, get out the vote, and election defense, and were taking the Camp Wellstone training so that they could arrive at the state campaigns ready to contribute on their first day. One of them, Ethan, a really smart guy who I predict will be a formidable candidate himself some day, has even put up a web site about his trip, www.BacktoPA.com.

It turned out to be a great group of people to spend a weekend working and learning with.

Blogging Camp Wellstone: Day One, Message Development

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What are we saying about ourselves | what they are saying about themselves. |
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What we are saying about them      | vs what to they say about us.              |
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Blogging Camp Wellstone: Day One, Introduction

The first sessions hasn't started, but already Camp Wellstone seems very different from the tech conferences that I usually attend. For a start, there is no wireless connection. Whatever I write will be posted after the fact, which suits my style better anyway. Secondly, the demographics are way different. There are a lot more women than men here, and a much wider age spread than one would usually find in technology. I'd say there are more 40 to 60 year-olds than any other cohort, not the early 20's crowd that I anticipated. All the people with grey hair aren't wearing $1,000 suits -- in fact, as far as I can tell none of them are. I'm also hearing some southern accents, something that I very rarely hear at tech conference -- the woman next to me is from Mississippi. Sadly, the vast majority of the conference participants' skin is as pale in hue as mine, as is also usually the case at the tech conferences.



The kickoff of the conference was a special guest, Al Franken. Before he got on stage I listened to one of the conference organizers, Jeff Blodgett, executive director of the Wellstone Action Network, and former Wellstone campaign manager, remind him that this is a non-partisan affair, to which Franken respondeds, "OK, I'll just make a lot of jokes."

Franken got up and spoke. Here are my incomplete notes:

Paul was amazing, he touched people. Paul knew both my parents. In 2002 I came in to Minnesota to campaign for Paul. My mom was sick, the first thing Paul asked was how "How was your mom". When he heard she wasn't doing well, and I didn't know what to do about it, he said, "touch means a lot". Paul was a hugger and toucher. It wasn't the same kind of touch as your governor, where you feel disgusted and humiliated afterwards, it was reaching out.

The reason I am doing Air America is to get a foothold on radio. ... If you read my book, one of the most important chapters is the one about how the right lied about the memorial around Paul's death. We need to fight back -- oops, I know this is a non-partisan

I'm a uniter not a divider, we need to unite to fight these a**holes. This is a non-partisan event, so if there are any a**holes here, I'm sorry.

This election is just a start. On Nov 3 the work needs to start, again. We are the patriots, we are the people who love this country, we are going to take it back. As Paul said, this country belong to the people who work hard, so let's work hard to take it back.

According to someone in the audience, Franken can be heard in the Bay Area on LQKE AM 960.

Then Jeff Blodgett gave an introduction and inspirational speech:

• Organize to take back your country in 2004.


• Rebuild a progressive movement in this country.


• This is the 47th Camp Wellstone, the last one of the season. Camp Wellstone has trained over 7,000 people.


• We do camps in conjunction with Grassroots Solutions, a Minnesota company. Many of the trainers are volunteers, donating their time and work to help build the movement.


• Non-partisan. We offer this training to anyone who wants it. But we are particularly welcoming to people who share Paul's point of view.


• Paul Wellstone was a Senator from 1990-2202.


• Wellstone Action formed by his sons and his political staff, who thought there were things to learn from the way that Paul practiced politics.


• Paul Wellstone was a community activist and teacher for years before he was senator.

The Wellstone Triangle
Community Organizing - build the base - an ongoing year round activity.

• Develops 1-to-1 relationships


• Build power and leaders from the bottom up.


• Start with Issues at the center of people's lives


• Build coalitions and bridge differences among people


• Ongoing process for long term change


• Foster new leadership, bring more people into the process.

Grassroots Electoral Politics - PW was a progressive with a massive field organization.

• Actively engage votes in conversation.


• Harness the power of a highly energized base


• Recruit a huge base which goes out. Wellstone in 2002 had 17,000 volunteers.


• Adept at recruiting new voters -- young people and new voters from immigrant communities.


• Engage new voters is how you win.


• Find common ground between very disparate groups.


• Make people feel that their participation matters.


• Successful electoral campaigns focus on clear messages, and focus on numbers.

Progressive Public Policy - direction and agenda for action
Ideas matter. Big ideas. Progressives need to articulate ideas in ways that people can understand and that connect to their lives and values. Think about how use language.
Progressives can win with big ideas. We are the majority and we need to act like it.

The other element is leadership. Conviction politics. PW operated from strong convictions and an ethical core. What you saw was what you got. People, including swing voters, liked that style, and voted for him. Wellstone was the only person up for election in 2002 who voted against Bush's Iraq resolution. Wellstone voted his convictions. That vote led to a big boost in his poll numbers. That's a lesson for leaders. [In my experience in business life, people respond to leadership. Good and honest leadership is rewarded with support]. PW was an empowerment leader. He believed in highlighting the leadership of others. He was always talent scouting, looking for other leaders.

Blodgett concluded with this quote:

"And so we shall have to do more than register and more than vote. We have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with enthusiasm.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

And then Blodgett showed a great get out the vote video, with lots of footage of Paul Wellstone, some of which brought tears to my eyes.

Blogging Camp Wellstone: Background

Paul Wellstone was one of my personal heros. Like George McGovern he was an exceptionally decent human being who also worked in politics. Soon after he died I signed up to be part of the Wellstone Action Network, and when they recently sent me an invitation to take the Camp Wellstone Training Program, I jumped at the chance. It seemed like another way to put my recent resolution to write less and do more about politics into action. So far most of what I have done during this political season is behind the scenes action, beta testing political organizing software and drafting user documentation for it, and I thought Camp Wellstone would give me some valuable expertise. Plus, who knows, I might find some more effective way to get politically involved.

I thought that I would write up my experience as I went through the training, both as an exercise for myself, and in case anyone else can benefit from it. Unlike people like Cory Doctorow and Heath Row, I'm not a good transcriber, and I suspect that I won't have any time to polish up notes, so I suspect the results will be very uneven, but we'll see how it goes.

"What was once a hell wrought by Saddam is now one of America’s making"

Christopher Allbritton has done some great reporting from Iraq, and his blog gives a real taste of what life is like for American soldiers, Iraqi citizens, and of course American journalists. Through the wonder of the internet, we are getting the opportunity to read something like Michael Herr's Dispatches as they are being written. One of his posts at the beginning of this summer, Heart of Darkness, made incarnate all the fears that I expressed at the beginning of this war about having an monolingual, English-speaking, predominantly Christian, understrength army, not trained for occupation, occupying an ethnically, politically and religiously divided Arabic country in the Islamic heartland: a recipe for disaster. Allbritton wrote:

Violence, too, is never distant. A few days, there was an IED attack against an American humvee near the Interior Ministry. It killed one American soldier and wounded three others. We were on our way to the Oil Ministry and we detoured to the site of the attack. As I rushed up to the cordon, I yelled out to the soldiers that I was press. They responded by waving me away. I tried to ask one soldier a few questions about what had happened. Traffic streamed around us and cars horns beat out a cacophonic concert.

“Can’t talk to you, sir, go away,” he said.

“Well, where was the attack?” I pressed.

“I said go away,” he growled.

“Can I speak to your commanding officer? Who is he?”

“He said get the fuck out of here!” a second soldier screamed and both soldiers pointed their weapons at me. There are few things more threatening than seeing scared and pissed-off American soldiers pointing weapons at you. The Iraqis know this feeling well. I quickly retreated and returned to the car, shaken at the Americans’ hostility.

This feeling of trusting no one has gotten to me; it’s palpable and the constant vigilance is exhausting. My mood is black and I can feel a depression that is never far away. Not writing for the blog is a source of guilt, too, but TIME has kept me so busy with stories that don’t bring me in touch with average Iraqis much. I’ve been moving between the CPA and the former members of the Governing Council.

I also can’t seem to get excited over stories of abused Iraqis. There are so many and they have a numbing quality. Also, the hostility I encounter from Iraqis makes me — shamefully — less empathetic to their complaints. But nor do I feel much sympathy for Americans who point guns at me. The tragic part of this is that there is no way to blame anyone in this situation. The Iraqis will naturally hate an occupying army. And soldiers will naturally grow to hate a people they think they came to liberate but who continue trying to kill them.

I certainly take no pleasure in having the scenario turn out the way I thought it would. I wish we had been greeted as liberators -- alas, that fantasy was propagated by those who knew better, in order to sell this accursed war.

And now Allbritton reports that the situation in Iraq is even worse than we think:

I don’t know if I can really put into words just how bad it is here some days. Yesterday was horrible — just horrible. While most reports show Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra as “no-go” areas, practically the entire Western part of the country is controlled by insurgents, with pockets of U.S. power formed by the garrisons outside the towns. Insurgents move freely throughout the country and the violence continues to grow.

I wish I could point to a solution, but I don’t see one. People continue to email me, telling me to report the “truth” of all the good things that are going on in Iraq. I’m not seeing a one. A buddy of mine is stationed here and they’re fixing up a park on a major street. Gen. Chiarelli was very proud of this accomplishment, and he stressed this to me when I interviewed him for the TIME story. But Baghdadis couldn’t care less. They don’t want city beautification projects; they want electricity, clean water and, most of all, an end to the violence.

And in the midst of all this violence, most of the Iraqi Interim Government is out of town. Security Advisors, heads of important ministries and the chief of the new Mukhabarat are all mysteriously absent. The Iraqi security forces are a joke, with the much talked about Fallujah Brigade disbanded for being feckless and — worse — riddled with insurgents who were being paid and trained by the U.S. Marines.

There is more, including the line I used for the title of this post. I highly recommend reading it.

Why is there any chance that we would elect the miserable failure that did this to the Americans and Iraqi's?

What if Bush wins?

The Washington Monthly has a fantastic feature this month, 16 essays from writers all across the political spectrum, all on the same subject, what we could expect from another 4 years of the Bush Administration. The most terrifying essays are those by the conservatives writers lusting for an end to the Democratic Party and the New Deal. Aside from an inane contribution from Gregg Easterbrook, who seems to have finally and completely gone off his rocker, the essays are well-reasoned, thought-provoking and stirred me to renewed activism to prevent the calamity of a second Bush Administration. Highly recommended.

Reflections on 9-11 and the candidate of revenge

This weblog used to be devoted largely to political essays about the criminal modus operandi of the Bush Administration, and to pointing out under-reported news items, like the Bush Administration's unilateral and unconstitutional suspension of the writ of habeas corpus by creating a new and fictitious legal category, enemy combatant, and detaining U.S. citizens like Jose Padilla. In the 2 years after 9-11, when the media decided that the salvation of the country required pinning wings on the pig who had stolen the election and pretending it could fly, I spent a lot of time writing about the follies and crimes of the Bush Administration. At times I felt like a lone dog baying at the moon.

However, in the last year, I've slowly written fewer and fewer political essays, and spent less time pointing at news stories. In part this was because my changed life circumstances left me less time to write, in part it was because I decided to spend some of that energy actually trying to effect change instead of just writing about it, and in part it was because around the first anniversary of the start of Bush's unilateral War on Iraq, some parts of the media woke up to Bush's lies and started reporting again. So, except for incidents like Abu Ghraib, where I got so outraged at the signals from on high that America now condones torture, I have pretty much ceased to write at length about political matters. I assumed that as Bush's lies became more widely known, and the utter cynicism of his exploitation of the national tragedy of 9-11 for political gain became clearer, his support among the American people would drop precipitously. I trust the long-term judgement of the American people -- you can only fool them so long, although when you have most of the media in your pocket it is a lot easier to keep them fooled for longer. But I have been wrong about Bush' support, or at least misjudged how much it would drop. About half the country, plus or minus 5%, still plans on voting for him on November 2.

I have racked my brains trying to understand the American people's support for Bush. The 5% up or down can be explained by the media frenzy of the week about Swift boats or National Guard service or similar garbage (while the media continues to ignore issues like the economy, the environment, health care, Iraq, and Afghanistan). But what about the other 45-50%, most of whom are patriotic Americans who don't condone torture and do believe in the U.S. constitution? This weekend I was listening to a father of one of the U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq being interviewed. He said that his son had died in the battle against terrorism. I was amazed. Nobody with any experience in the Middle East thinks that Bush's War on Iraq has done anything positive about terrorism -- quite the reverse. From pulling Special Forces out of Afghanistan to send to Iraq and focusing scarce security-cleared Arabic translation assets on Iraq instead of Al-Qaeda to providing Muslims the world over a second rallying cry against the United States, Bush's War on Iraq has been a giant gift to Al-Qaeda. As Richard Clark said, it was as though Bush was under the mind control of Osama bin Laden in his cave when he decided to make war on Iraq and enrage the Arab world.

The only way I can understand the viewpoint of the many American patriots who support Bush is that they are so traumatized by the terrorist attack on 9-11 that they want revenge, and Bush is the candidate of revenge. What Bush promises is to strike and kill the people who killed us. It satisfies the visceral urge to hit back at the people that hit us. The fact that he isn't actually killing the people who killed the victims of 9-11, and that he is actually helping further their aims is secondary. Bush promises revenge, and he promises to satisfy the emotional need many people feel to hit back. How do you compete with that?

The difficulty of dealing with terrorism is that all the successful strategies are long-term, and they involve penetration of the terrorist network, the intelligent and ruthless application of force against a very small group of people, the cadre of the terrorists, and ameliorating the grievances of the people that the terrorists spring from, so as to separate the two. This takes a lot of patience, a lot of intelligence work, and the willingness to admit that some of the grievances of the terrorists are shared by the larger population and that therefore they need to be resolved (notice how Saudi Arabia very quietly expelled U.S. troops from the Hejaz during Bush's war on Iraq, a key demand of Al-Qaeda). These are very hard things to do in any case, and they require a lot of nuance.

Long-term nuanced strategies are not in the least bit emotionally satisfying, and successful ones would require taking a hard look at some of our own policies in the Middle East and risking angering some domestic constituencies and some supposed allies in the Middle East. It is much easier and emotionally satisfying to proclaim a policy of revenge, and to insinuate that everybody who disagrees with your policy is pro-terrorist. Apparently a policy of revenge is also a key to domestic electoral success. Too bad it also guarantees increased support for Al-Qaeda world-wide, decreased sympathy for American political aims, and more terrorism. Just ask the French about their experience in Algeria, the Israeli military about their experience in Lebanon, or reflect on our own experience in Vietnam to understand how well the policies of revenge worked. Contrast them with the more successful recent policies of the British with the IRA, and the Spanish goverment with the ETA.

We are living in dangerous times. I hope enough people use their heads as well as their hearts on November 2.

Pentagon tried to hide details about top brass responsibility for U.S. torture of Iraqis

According to a New York Times report, buried in the part of the Fay-Jones report on abuses at Abu Ghraib that was classified by the Pentagon is the detail that:

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, approved the use in Iraq of some severe interrogation practices intended to be limited to captives held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

Moreover, the report contends, by issuing and revising the rules for interrogations in Iraq three times in 30 days, General Sanchez and his legal staff sowed such confusion that interrogators acted in ways that violated the Geneva Conventions, which they understood poorly anyway. ...

[Sanchez'] memorandum, while not authorizing abuse, effectively opened the way at Abu Ghraib last fall for interrogation techniques that Pentagon investigators have characterized as abusive, in dozens of cases involving dozens of soldiers at the prison in Iraq.

The techniques approved by General Sanchez exceeded those advocated in a standard Army field manual that provided the basic guidelines for interrogation procedures. But they were among those previously approved by the Pentagon for use in Afghanistan and Cuba, and were recommended to General Sanchez and his staff in the summer of 2003 in memorandums sent by a team headed by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, a commander at Guantánamo who had been sent to Iraq by senior Pentagon officials, and by a military intelligence unit that had served in Afghanistan and was taking charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib....

This is the same General Miller who Rumsfeld sent over to take charge of Iraqi prisons after the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, who is currently in charge of Iraqi prisons. What was Rumsfeld trying to cover up?

The passages involving General Sanchez's orders were among several deleted from the version of the report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay that was made public by the Pentagon on Wednesday.... The classified sections of the Fay report reinforce criticisms made in another report, by the independent panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, the former defense secretary. That panel argued that General Sanchez's actions effectively amounted to an unauthorized suspension of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq by categorizing prisoners there as unlawful combatants.

Clearly, there are still depths to be plumbed:

The classified section of the Fay report also sheds new light on the role played by a secretive Special Operations Forces/Central Intelligence Agency task force that operated in Iraq and Afghanistan as a source of interrogation procedures that were put into effect at Abu Ghraib. It says that a July 15, 2003, "Battlefield Interrogation Team and Facility Policy,'' drafted by use by Joint Task Force 121, which was given the task of locating former government members in Iraq, was adopted "almost verbatim'' by the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which played a leading role in interrogations at Abu Ghraib.

That task force policy endorsed the use of stress positions during harsh interrogation procedures, the use of dogs, yelling, loud music, light control, isolation and other procedures used previously in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don't want my liberty and security to be based on the torture of others, and these violations of the Geneva Convention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo have put the lives of all our soldiers, sailors and marines in jeopardy. Since our politicians are doing there best to hide from this issue, I'd argue that we need an independent truth commission and a national debate, similar to that started by the 9/11 commission.