This article in the Economist caught my eye today. (I hope it's accessible without a subscription.) The title is:

When deadly force bumps into the hearts and minds: With elections due in a month, our "embedded" correspondent reports on how the American army is failing to persuade Iraq's sour Sunni minority to co-operate.

What struck me is some of the raw, profane quotes he reports being spoken by lieutenants and corporals on the ground, especially with a reporter tagging along. I can't begin to imagine what people are going through there, but there is a clear disconnect between what we had been hearing in Washington about our strategy of winning the hearts and minds, and what is actually happening on the ground, at least within this reporter's view. Fundamentally, I think our soldiers aren't equipped for the duty they're being asked to undertake.

Warning: the following quotes contain profanity.

THERE is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hand, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sergeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: "Back this bitch up, motherfucker!"

Apparently there are bilingual notices affixed to the rear bumpers of US military vehicles in Iraq:

Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied

Understandably jumpy from recent suicide attacks, a lieutenant says:

If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them. It's kind of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent people...

It gets to a point where you can't wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody... It gets to a point where you don't mind the bad stuff you do.

The 800-person battalion was deployed to Ramadi September 1st, and they estimate they've killed 400-500 people since then, but they admit it's hard to be certain. They have four translators. Here's another telling quote:

... marines in Ramadi who, on a search for insurgents, kicked in the doors of houses at random, in order to scream, in English, at trembling middle-aged women within: "Where's your black mask?" and "Bitch, where's the guns?" In one of these houses was a small plastic Christmas tree, decorated with silver tinsel. "That tells us the people here are OK," said Corporal Robert Joyce.

So, senior commanders have abandoned the pretense of winning the hearts and minds:

"Our broad intent is to keep pressure on the insurgents as we head into elections," says General [George W.] Casey [the commander-in-chief of coalition forces in Iraq]. "This is not about winning hearts and minds; we're not going to do that here in Iraq. It's about giving Iraqis the opportunity to govern themselves."

Well, let's hope we get that part right.

Here's a nice season's greeting courtesy of Joi Ito:

Season's Greetings and Global Voices

I don't know much about the Global Voices project he references, but here's a quote of their "covenant." It makes perfect sense to me.

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak -- and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we want to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak -- and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication. Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world.

We want to build bridges across the gulfs of culture and language that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We want to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.

We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond between individuals from different worlds is personal, political and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable - for all citizens of this planet.

While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also want to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one other.

We are Global Voices.

I'm struck by how much this sounds like something we might be saying here at omidyar.net. (In fact, there's a short discussion of Global Voices on omidyar.net here.)

Seasons Greetings!

Just installed this:

Make Love Not Spam

Clever little screensaver that slowly hits sites of spammers. Comes with a nifty Missile Command-like map of the globe, with parabolic arcs showing where you're hitting the spammers' sites.

The idea is that if everyone added just a little traffic to a spammer's site, maybe they'd have to pay a little more for their bandwidth, which would increase their cost of actually spamming. Probably wishful thinking, but it's fun to think about.

Now, given the previous item I blogged, I am not encouraging anyone else to use this.

Just saw this on EFF:

Libel Case Could Chill Speech Online

California - Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a case that could undermine a federal statute protecting the free speech of bloggers, Internet service providers, and other individuals who use the Internet to post content written by others. The case in question is a libel suit filed against women's health advocate Illena Rosenthal after she posted a controversial opinion piece on a Usenet news group. The piece was written not by Rosenthal, but by Tim Bolen, a critic of plaintiff Terry Polevoy.

If simply quoting or referencing the statements of another person can be construed as libel, thereby treating you as if you were the original author of the statements, that would be bad.

Steven Aftergood writes recently in Secrecy News that we (Americans) may now be required to comply with laws that we are not legally permitted to read.

If you can't read the law, how do you know the person with the badge in front of you isn't misinterpreting it? How do you defend yourself if you're charged under a secret law? How do you counsel other citizens, who may be less sophisticated and more prone to intimidation, of what their rights are?

It's not clear to me what the rationale is here. How do you expect citizens to support and abide by laws that are kept secret from them? We're all interested in our collective security, and we want to support laws that enhance our security.

Can't do that if we can't read them.

Here is an excerpt from Aftergood's piece:

Last month, Helen Chenoweth-Hage attempted to board a United Airlines flight from Boise to Reno when she was pulled aside by airline personnel for additional screening, including a pat-down search for weapons or unauthorized materials.

Chenoweth-Hage, an ultra-conservative former Congresswoman (R-ID), requested a copy of the regulation that authorizes such pat-downs.

"She said she wanted to see the regulation that required the additional procedure for secondary screening and she was told that she couldn't see it," local TSA security director Julian Gonzales told the Idaho Statesman (10/10/04).

"She refused to go through additional screening [without seeing the regulation], and she was not allowed to fly," he said. "It's pretty simple."

This may sound like an isolated incident, but it is part of a pattern of increasing secrecy that Aftergood has been writing about for years. It is also well documented in other sources, including reports by the Congressional Research Service (which used to be publicly available, but aren't anymore.)

Read Aftergood's complete piece on this story here.

I was reading in the New York Times (reg. req'd) that Ohio Republicans are mounting a huge effort to challenge the qualifications of voters at the polls on Election Day. State Law provides for the possibility of party members being registered as official challengers. They have four grounds on which they are empowered to challenge someone who is arriving at the precinct to vote:

1. Are you a US citizen?
2. Are you at least 18 years of age?
3. Are you a resident of the county in which you are voting?
4. Have you lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days?

In theory, the challengers are only supposed to request an investigation if they have reasonable justification to suspect that the voter does not meet one of the four qualifications. The Republican Party has supplied lists of people to these challengers that they believe are not qualified to vote.

When a challenge is made, precinct workers must huddle and decide what to do. Many precinct workers are elderly volunteers. The challengers are each being paid $100 for the day. While precinct workers are addressing a challenge, they aren't able to process the other incoming voters. If there's a line, it will move more slowly, and people may decide to go back to work rather than lose more time waiting to vote.

Republicans said they had enlisted 3,600 challengers by the deadline to register them yesterday. Most are in heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities.

I don't understand why this is legal. If I wanted to upset an election, I would challenge every voter who "looked" like he might vote for the other party. If it takes 5 minutes to argue about the voter before he is allowed to cast a vote, and before other voters are processed, you could dramatically reduce the number of people actually casting votes.

Not to mention the fact that these challengers could be intimidating to some voters. Having members of one political party staring you down as you sign your name in the log book to prepare to vote is not my idea of democracy.

Let's say this happened in Iraq. There are certain people who I'm sure Iraqis would prefer not to see at the voting booth. And if they were there, how could we be sure every eligible voter cast their vote without fear? This isn't Iraq, but the principle is the same.

Voter intimidation, or anything that has the capacity to turn into intimidation, should be illegal. And I'm not talking about a misdemeanor like spitting on the sidewalk, like it is in many states. It should be a felony.

The voting booth should be safe, American, and non-partisan.

Apparently Mr. Gates thinks so. According to a BBC News article I scanned, he claims 700 people at Microsoft use blogs to keep their peers updated on their work. Blogs work better than alternatives because they are much easier than a web site content-management system, and they don't overwhelm your colleagues like mass e-mails.

Most importantly, blogs offer the ability to do RSS syndication. People can keep track of their colleagues' blogs via RSS, and their desktop software will alert them as soon as the blog is updated. They can quickly read a summary of what's new, and get greater detail if it's interesting.

My personal experience is that I'm able to track 25 to 50 blogs very quickly using a news-reader, RSS aggregator like NetNewsWire for the Mac. NewsGator for PCs is quite popular as well, and they offer a web-based service.

We will have RSS for our omidyar.net blogs in a future release.