It's been a year since the Republican National Convention came to Minnesota to nominate Sarah Palin and ... just a minute, let me check ... oh, yes, John McCain as sacrificial lambs in the election of Barack Obama. Now, using calculators, financial multipliers, legerdemain and Ouija boards, the convention has been declared a success by its organizers and by Twin Cities political and financial leaders.

The convention, they say, brought in $170 million, filled thousands of hotel rooms, made billions of "impressions" on international audiences forced for the first time to contemplate the exotic allure of far-off St. Paul and Minneapolis, and even helped bring Cirque de Soleil to set up a tent along the old rusty train tracks in St. Paul, a city Cirque de Soleil kept calling "Minneapolis."

Of course we are getting circuses. The 2008 GOP convention and the turmoil on the streets that came with it proved that we love circuses. We love circuses so much that we will lock up the town, fence off the streets where blue-hairs march for "peace" between tall barriers under the watchful eyes of police snipers in a state of undeclared martial law while hundreds of citizens are arrested for walking on the street or for not walking on the street, whichever works. We will turn the whole dang place into a circus for $170 million. For that price, you get our hotels, our restaurants, our streets and our civil rights.

But the happy talk coming from the usual suspects won't get rid of the bad taste left behind by the convention, which turned the Twin Cities, and especially St. Paul, into an armed camp of militarized police forces who were told to forget for a week who they worked for, and who put 800 people under arrest. Most of them did nothing to deserve being rounded up in mass arrests, and the vast majority of charges did not stand up to scrutiny and were dismissed.

Some success. Many of the billions of "impressions" made around the world about St. Paul and Minneapolis were not good. They especially weren't even good at home. What's sad is that the convention would have let the Twin Cities shine if peaceful dissent had been permitted without clouds of riot gas obscuring the skylines.

"Maybe it was a financial success, but that could have been accomplished without turning St. Paul into a police state," says Bill Tilton, a St. Paul lawyer who represented the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press during the convention. "We could have brought home the bacon and shown we were tolerant of peaceniks. I'm sorry to say it, but the First Amendment suffered in my city."

In his report to the commission that examined police tactics used during the convention, Tilton wrote that journalists were treated "as badly" here as they have ever been treated in a modern city, and that their arrests were so "widespread [and] unwarranted" that they appeared to have been carried out deliberately.

Most of the arrested citizens, too, were guilty only of being naive: They believed: 1) They could peaceably assemble and peaceably protest against the downward spiral of democracy; and 2) They believed the empty assurances handed out by officialdom that all were welcome to bring their dissent to the street.

In essence, police took a dynamite fisherman's approach, arresting everyone in the water and sorting them out later. The dynamite proved inefficient: Hundreds were wrongly arrested. Many were mere spectators, watching and witnessing. Some were medics or legal observers. Some -- almost 40 -- were working journalists. Some were just trying to get home or to a concert or to a job. Some were just unlucky.

"It was a police-state atmosphere," says Mark Tracy, a bearded pacifist who was heading home after passing out a pamphlet called "My Peace City" when he was told by police he was under arrest. "A lot of people's rights were violated."

Held virtually incommunicado for two days, the 28-year-old college anthropology teacher finally was released from jail with the charges dropped. No one apologized to him or explained why he was arrested.

He may have been busted for wearing a beard.

"Individual freedoms are important, and it is scary when they are stripped away," he says today. "We always assume that people must have 'done something' if they get arrested. But all around the world, people face repression. And for a few days last year, there was repression right here. It's important to stand up for people who face that, and to stand up for our rights, and protect our civil liberties."

Mark Tracy's final RNC report, a year after the smoke cleared and the circus left:

"I don't think it was a success. It wasn't a success at all."

Nick Coleman is a senior fellow at the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University. He can be reached at nickcoleman@gmail.com.