Assignment Zero

Today marks the beginning of our publishing phase at Assignment Zero.

Anyone involved in Assignment Zero will tell you it was no small endeavor. Over eighty interviews (see directly below this post) were scheduled, rescheduled, transcribed, edited and formatted.

Research, writing, re-writing, fact-checking and more have gone into our feature stories.

New friends made, lessons learned and we hope, the potential for networked journalism will shine through it all.

Today Wired has published five pieces.

1. An intro from Jay Rosen

2. Open-Source Journalism: It's a Lot Tougher Than You Think
by Anna Haynes with additional reporting by Maurice Cardinal, Melissa Metzger, Robert William King, Francine Hardaway, and Neal G. Moore. Edited by Vivian Martin

3. Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book Reported by: Celestina Adams, Dan Charles, Orlando Dozier, Yvonne Allison Eriksen, Jack Frost, Kristin Gorski, Gerrit Janssens, George Karimalil, Raul Larson, Gregorio Magini and Yasmin E. Voglewede
Written by: Kristin Gorski
Illustrated by: Namir Ahmed
Edited by: Michele McLellan

4. (Q&A) Your Assignment: Art
Leah DeVun interviews Andrea Grover via telephone, May 10, 2007

5. Stock Waves: Citizen Photo Journalists Are Changing the Rules
Reported by Gregg Osofsky, Nancy Feraldi, Leah DeVun, and Daniella Zalcman
Written by Daniella Zalcman
Fact-checked by Craig Silverman
Edited by Hillary Rosner

And more to come... Stay tuned. And don't forget to visit NewAssignment.Net for updates on future projects.

The fact that Barack Obama is now under the protection of the Secret Service, nearly a year earlier than any other candidate Presidential candidate in our history (except HRC, who will remain under the protection of the SS as long as she is married to Bill Clinton) says a great deal about where we are at as a society.  Howard Fineman confesses the collective guilt and relief of mainstream white journalists attending the first Republican Presidential debate in Simi Valley when he wrote "I talked to my fellow reporters here about this last night, and they were uniformly relieved. So was I."

Anyone following even mainstream online blogs like Politico.com can see the naked hostility and racism directed Obama's way, if not direct threats to his life.  I don't read white supremacist blogs and sites but I can only imagine what is being said.  You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that one or more people, who are not stupid enough to post hostile messages on the web, may be actively plotting his demise.

By all accounts, Obama's appearances have generated such large crowds that he would be safer walking through Baghdad with a target on his back.  Hiring Blackwater as his praetorian guard would be unthinkable politically for Obama.  The damage to America's already horrendous image overseas would be incalculable if any harm were to come to Obama.  Michael Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security, who now run the SS, surely didn't need to be reminded of this and the fact that any attempted or successful assassination would make the election of a Democrat all but inevitable in 2008.  This is not to say that keeping Obama safe so that HRC can be eviscerated by the GOP is part of the Republican strategy for 2008, but to ignore this reality would be naive.

Fineman and the liberal media want to keep hope alive and not have a replay of 1968 when we lost MLK and RFK.  Fineman muses that "there is an innocence, almost a naiveté, to Obama and his campaign."  This is of course ludicrous - naive and innocent men do not run for President.  More accurately, the administration doesn't need a martyr on its hands after botching Saddam's execution.     

A fast month and a half has blown by in Assignment Zero time since the first mention about the AZ experiment hit Wired.com.

Started with little more than a big idea and commitment from a core group of visionaries at Wired magazine/online plus the NYU journalism crew (I am not real sure about who came to whom first), the leadership team put out a call on Wired to attract the curious professional or amateur journalist to participate. I was one of the people who responded.

The effort was self-organizing internally as well as externally, and confusing to behold at the beginning.

However, in the few short weeks since raw start-up, an amazing progression of events have happened, leading to the first crowdsourced story on Citizendium published on Wired.com.

I am struck by the meaning and ownership that a random virtualized crowdsourced group can take on so quickly and do so well, all things considered. Something tangible has happened.

Hats off to Michael Ho, primary writer on the Citizendium story, and to the other people on the crowdsourced crew. The editorial staff, Lauren Sandler, Jeff Abell, and David Cohn kept the enthusiasm and effort up, on track, and going forward. (I did have a dream one night during the process about how the editors were herding cats)

It is fun with much more to come. Confusion still remains but in a friendly, roll-up-your-sleeves way.

Watching George Tenet pitching his new book At The Center Of The Storm on 60 Minutes was a nauseating experience.  Not being content with having failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks or to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and his top deputies prior to 9/11, Tenet now insists that he never really believed in the case for going to war with Iraq and was bullied by Cheney et al. 

In a letter to Tenet signed by six former CIA officers, he is rightly exorciated for attempting to burnish his reputation and to cash in on his failures.  Calling him "a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality", the former CIA officers charge that "By your silence you helped build the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States. Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush Administration to cite your participation in these deliberations to justify their decision to go to war. Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq, which has killed more than 3300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis."

Where was this man's sense of duty to the American people?  At least Colin Powell, although equally culpable for making the case for the Iraq War, was asking hard questions of Tenet.  Powell insisted that Tenet sit behind him as he made the case for invading Iraq to the U.N. and Tenet did so.  More than any other single piece of evidence or speech made by any American official, including President Bush's infamous State of the Union address, the American people knew and trusted Colin Powell, who quite obviously realizes that he sold his soul in a misplaced sense of duty to the Commander in Chief leftover from his service in the Pentagon. 

Unlike Powell, who was obviously shut out of day to day foreign policy making despite having the title of Secretary of State, Tenet spoke to Bush every morning about the threats to American security.  While both men should have resigned in protest rather than enable Bush's war, only Tenet could have exerted strong back channel pressure in Congress with his briefings to the intelligence committees.  Had he raised any doubt in private about the intelligence that Congress was spoon fed by the neocon's, we may very well have avoided one of the worst foreign policy and military debacles in our history.

In what is surely not the last of the revelations over just how poorly the Bush Administration has treated military veterans and their families, the Washington Post reported today that the Veterans Administration, after more than a decade of lawsuits and seeking to avoid further scrutiny of its incompetence after the Walter Reed scandal, has agreed to allow the Wiccan symbol to be displayed on tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery and other national burial grounds: 

"The Department of Veterans Affairs previously had given veterans a choice of 38 religious symbols, including numerous forms of the Christian cross, as well as the Jewish Star of David, the Muslim crescent, the Buddhist wheel and an atomic symbol for atheism."  

Where to begin?  With the intrusion of the government on the constitutional protection of religious practice or with the fact that the VA actually took the time to amass a list of approved symbols? Why not a swastika?  A good place to start is at the top:

"During his first campaign for president, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush told ABC's "Good Morning America" in 1999 that he was opposed to Wiccan soldiers practicing their faith at Fort Hood, Tex. "I don't think witchcraft is a religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this and decide against it," he said."

To parse this statement is an exercise in deep frustration and anger.   Illegality aside, why does the President care what our brave volunteer soldiers do or do not do with respect to religious practice?  Unless they were engaging in human sacrifice on the military base, they are free to practice any religion, or perhaps more importantly, none. 

Criticizing Bush's judgment is too easy.  But isn't there anyone in the VA who cared enough about the fallen soldiers and their grieving families to not bureaucratize their choice of gravestone inscription?  I am sure this will be great for recruiting volunteers for the endless War on Terror.

Michael Abramowitz and David Romano of the Washington Post shed yet more light on an administration in free fall in their reporting on Speaker Pelosi's trip to Syria.  Pelosi's thanks for doing Bush's job of talking to other world leaders came in the form of a dressing down by the White House and thinly veiled accusations of treason by many of the President's supporters.  Bush's response to Pelosi's trip to Syria was that any visits by any American officials sent "mixed signals."

Abramowitz and Romano now report that Pelosi said yesterday that Bush told Pelosi in private that he never criticized her trip, but that it was the State Department which did so, and more importantly, the President took her up on her invitation to an official briefing on her discussions with President Assad. 

In an indication that White House Spokesman Tony Snow is badly missed, his replacement, the telegenic but obviously lightweight Dana Perino managed to screw this one up badly:

"I was there the whole time. I don't recall him saying that," Perino said. "I know that he is critical of the trip, and what he says in private is the same as in public."  Quite an unfortunate choice of words ("I don't recall"), given that the Attorney General was down the street making the same statement about the U.S. Attorney/Phantom Voter Fraud scandal.

The really frightening part of Ms. Perino's statement is that the President cannot say one thing in private and another in public.  This is what leaders in politics and business do for a living and this is how nations avoid going to war and corporations settle business disputes without a judge or jury. 

That Perino and Bush can't get their stories straight is unfortunate and unsurprising (this is the man who chose Alberto Gonzales as his chief counsel and then Attorney General) but as usual, Bush leaves it to Vice President Cheney to speak the unvarnished truth about the incompetence of this administration and its contempt for the intelligence of Americans:

"This is an evil man. He's a prime state sponsor of terror," he told a Chicago radio station last week. "So for the speaker to go to Damascus and meet with this guy and treat him with the respect and dignity ordinarily accorded the head of a foreign state -- we think it is just directly contrary to our national interest." 

Leaving aside the deep irony of the Vice President calling someone an 'evil man', will someone please tell Cheney that since President Assad is the head of a foreign state, he is entitled to be treated with 'the respect and dignity ordinarily accorded the head of a foreign state', even if we abhor his regime, and it is obviously in our national interest for Syria to rein in its proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere in order to help stabilize the untenable situation in the Middle East for which Cheney bears direct responsibilty.

Perhaps if Mr. Assad acquired nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, like our friend General Musharraf in Pakistan, President Assad would have his calls answered at the White House.

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision upholding a federal 'partial-birth' ban (Gonzales v. Carhart) is a huge political win for Republicans and is, to a sizable majority of the American people across party, social, regional, racial and economic lines, the correct policy result.  Clearly (and I believe that almost any attorney who is not a member of the Federalist Society will agree with me) it was made for the wrong legal reasons - most obviously that it ignores clear precedent from all previous federal court decisions on the case at hand.  On the other hand, some precedents, such as  Plessy v. Ferguson quite obviously should be broken.

Rudy Giuliani, a GOP Presidential candidate, former federal prosecutor, and vocal supporter of abortion rights when he was the Mayor of NYC, put it best when he said "The Supreme Court reached the correct conclusion in upholding the congressional ban on partial-birth abortion.  I agree with it."  Giuliani didn't say that he stood on the side of "protecting the weakest and most innocent among us" (Romney) or that "it is critically important that our party stands on the side of life" (McCain), he also didn't say that the case was 'correctly decided', a legal term of art of more use to law professors and appellate court practicitioners. 

Giuiliani's definition of "it" meant the congressional ban, not the blatant politics invoked by the Roberts/Scalia/Alito/Kennedy/Thomas court.  At least this time, unlike in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court ruled with the majority of American people.  This is a real loser for the Democratic presidential candidates who should tacking much closer to Barack Obama ("today's Supreme Court ruling ... dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women"); than Hillary Clinton "it is precisely this erosion of our constitutional rights that i warned against when I opposed the nominations of [Roberts] and [Alito]").  Yesterday's majority opinion actually goes out of its way to say that Roe v. Wade is still good law, although it could have ignored the case altogether and still reached the same decision. 

Democrats need to wake up to the fact that Republicans will continue to chip away at Roe and in fact vastly prefer having Roe stand as valid precedent than to enshrining the legal right to a federally funded first trimester abortion into law, because they know (as does any attorney who does not work for Planned Parenthood) that Roe stands on even shakier legal ground than Gonzales v. Carhart. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, definitely realizes this, since he conveniently left out the words 'Roe v. Wade' from "previous precedents."