the talking dog offers a quick and dirty corrective to those of us currently feeling like we are drowning in a surfeit of irony.

Its No Longer Ironic that We are OFF the UN Human Rights Committee

Jack Miles:

" Prisoners have a special place in the Christian imagination. It matters that Jesus himself was a prisoner. To speak the language of American law enforcement, his death was a death in custody. His most influential followers, Peter and Paul, were also prisoners. They too died in custody. John the Baptist, who first acclaimed Jesus as Messiah, was beheaded in a Roman prison. Christianity is a religion founded by men in deep trouble with the law, men familiar with the inside of prisons, whose message was "the last shall be first, and the first last."

In religious ethics as formulated in our monotheistic traditions, what is owed to the neighbor is simultaneously owed to God himself. The Christian way of imagining this double duty exploits the fact that Christianity’s God has appeared in human form. Thus, when doing good deeds for our fellow human beings, we as Christians seek to imagine that we are simultaneously doing them for Christ in person. Jesus taught his followers to imagine themselves hearing his voice saying, "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you came to me," and finally: "I was in prison and you visited me" (Matthew 25:35-36).

Allow me, if I may, at this dark and shameful moment in our history, to linger over the last entry on that list: "I was in prison and you visited me." Jesus gives every item on his list twice—once in a positive formulation, for praise, and once in a negative formulation, for blame. Thus, "I was in prison and you did not visit me." Can you imagine what it is like to be in prison waiting for a visit that does not come? But let me ask an easier question: Do you know where the nearest jail is? "

Luke 10:30-37 also seems an appropriate text on which to reflect in these days.

" They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. "

(via Body and Soul)

I return from Sudan five days ago and the North and South sign a peace agreement. Coincidence? Well, yes.

I actually wish the signing had taken place three or four months further down the line. The ceasefire between North and South is holding and waiting a few weeks wouldn't have been a deal breaker. However, the extra weeks would have provided everybody - North, South, UN, NGOs, USAID, other donors - with a little more time to plan (and begin implementing) how to deal with the four million refugees and internally displaced.

Recent history suggests that when a peace agreement is signed, people get up and move. And in southern Sudan there is nothing there for them to move to. There is insufficient water, insufficient food, insufficient governance, and a history (recent and historical) of ethnic strife. Another crisis in Sudan is about to begin, about which I will try to have something constructive to say.

And that whole Darfur thing ain't getting any better.

" This is a time for elected leaders to stand up and say the 1913 law is outrageous and this policy is outrageous. "

I am certain that this would be very, very funny - if I knew who any of these people were. The following quote is offered in order to entice Mrs Martial to click through:

[Are you kidding me? I'm so pathetic, other rhetorical devices mock me. Polysyndeton calls me a pussy. Synecdoche spits at me whenever I walk by --ed]

But seriously, folks: Extreme Ironing. No, really.

"Hope you like chicken and rice," she said as we got ready to leave Nairobi. "Every meal in Sudan, just you wait." I do like chicken and rice, but I think I won't be cooking any of either for a while now that I'm back.

The second night we were in Yei we entered the common room for dinner to find that one of the compund's chickens was roosting on the back of a chair. It was captured and introduced to me.

" This chicken is named 'Tomorrow'. "

We drove up to Yei in southern Sudan with a Canadian doctor, heading out to a training center in the next big town, Maridi. He had a conversation that went like this, with responses by an old Africa hand in italics:

OK, no internet. Check. No television, right? Check. What do people listen to on the radio? Lower your expectations. No radio? Check. Newspapers? Lower your expectations. Not even any newspapers? Check. What the hell do people do? You've got a bag full of textbooks. Read 'em.

We arrive in Yei, pull into the NGO compound, and climb out of the landrover. There, in the middle of the yard, is a satellite dish.

What the hell is that? The women do the washing in it.

Yei's first FM station had just begun to broadcast a few days before and you can get radio stations from Uganda. The satellite dish pulled in a feed from Dubai with CNN. There is even an internet cafe up in Maridi (and the next NGO compound had intermittent internet access, but you had to beg; I didn't bother).

Still, lower your expectations . . .

The first night in Yei, the generator didn't work.

Crossing the border to Sudan from a dusty little town in northern Uganda, the hills of the Congo a stone's throw to your left, you still have to make your way from customs officer to police representative in order to receive the appropriate stamps. The long arm of the State these days extends its reach even here, historically one of the more lawless spots on Earth, with the armies and rebel militias of three nations having spent much of the nineties crossing, recrossing, ignoring these borders.

The offices in Uganda are in low mud huts, reed mats for roofs, similar in all ways to the houses of the local citizenry. There are no signs. You have to ask which buildings you need to visit at the bar, a kiosk with a space out front shaded by tin sheets supported by gnarled posts. A man dressed in jeans and a clean shirt waves toward the next hut and finishes his anecdote before climbing to his feet and following you.

You stoop to enter a dark, cool space, about two meters by two. It's jammed with a bench, a chair, a desk overflowing with forms, and at least two other people waiting to answer a few bored questions about why, where, and how long. The room - even the hard bench - is comfortable after the previous two hours bumping and bouncing north from the airfield at Arua.

Your eyes adjust to the dark. On one wall is a calender from a building supply company, offering images of chandeliers and mahogany dining room sets, wide windows and vistas of the sea. On another is a poster, its bright purple border contrasting with the crude line drawing of a jail cell and prisoner.

Suspects Have Rights!

• don't torture them
• give them food
• give them medical attention
• don't steal their property

Perhaps Uganda could improve its current account balance a bit by exporting some of these posters. There might be a few interested countries out there.

And I see that (on my browser) De Spectaculis appears to have sent everything off the front page and to the archives. That's not the way I have it set. Hmm. (UPDATE: Fixed. That was easy. Too easy . . .)

Arrived home yesterday in good order and in good shape. Had a fascinating time in Sudan, along with a few days in Kenya and two layovers in Uganda (cold beer!). Saw a couple of old friends, some flamingoes, and the bustling, soon-to-be boomtown of Yei.

Kenya is one of the world's great coffee growing countries, but it is nigh impossible to find a decent cup of joe - for two weeks I've been drinking Nescafe. I am really enjoying this morning's mug.

One more thing before I go . . .

From Daily Kos quoting Rush:

" CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men -- "

No, no, no! It was a LIBERTY prank.

Sigh. I wish these guys could keep their revolutionary rhetoric straight.

Your narrator is off to Sudan tonight for two weeks. Having been home for just over a week and having spent most of that time preparing to go right back out, I've been unable to do more than vent a little a spleen (May 4th was a bad day). Being away from the internet completely for two weeks might help me regain some sanity.

Please don't do anything so stupid I actually hear about it.

If Rumsfeld is done - and we're feeling the wind shift in that direction - then the Bush Administration needs a new Secretary of Defense.

So, John Kerry, war hero, you talk a good game . . .

Of course the really savvy political move would be John McCain.

There appears to be some misunderstanding at a fundamental level about the circumstances under which prolonged and dangerous service can be requested of free citizens. It may be my misunderstanding, but I really don't think so.

I take the following two paragraphs to be axiomatic:

Any threat to a democratic polity so severe as to threaten its existence will be met by voluntary mobilization of the citizens. No draft is necessary in this case.

If citizens are not volunteering to meet some "crisis", then the so-called threat is not one which requires the mobilization of the citizenry. If a government fails to impress citizens with the severity of the challenge, then it is not the citizens who are at fault when they refuse to answer the government's call. It is in no way the duty of citizens to shed their blood to clean up a mess made by government. A draft in this case will be a fundamentally illegitimate and immoral use of the State's coercive power.

We have lately seen the power that the executive branch wields in our society. The current leadership have been able to take our nation into a war of choice - not a war of survival - without a substantive debate on whether or not this course was in fact in the national interest. They took our nation to war without any sense of how best to marshal the considerable moral and diplomatic resources at our disposal and thus failed to deploy the most potent weapons in our arsenal. They began this war without a plan for peace, much less a plan for any victory more lasting than the momentary flush achieved on the battlefield.

All the while, our grasshopper legislators fiddled away their cares and responsibilities.

Our current leaders led us into this war through appealing to our most sacred values, but with no honest commitment of their own. The paucity of real discussion about how best to serve the national interest, the contempt with which questions and challenges are met, the lack of any attempt to forge national and bipartisan consensus in the face of what they promote as a crucial threat, all prove to demonstrate the mendacity at the heart of their design.

If this were a war for survival, that our governors could show such a disregard for civic duty would constitute the most severe dereliction of duty this side of active subversion. As it stands, their failures have led us to the very edge of the worst possible defeat: a defeat of this nation's ability to promote our national interest through our demonstrated values. There may still be victories to be won in this war, but the necessary ones, the ones which will lead to a more just and more secure world for our children, seem to be out of our reach for the foreseeable future.

And now, perhaps, they - executive and legislator - will ask us all to fight and some die for their folly? If every misjudgment of the executive, if every legislative delinquency, can lead to an indiscriminate and forced service, then I humbly submit that we ought to change the form of government to make this impossible. The imposition of a draft upon the still free citizens of the United States is grounds for revolution.

Arkhangel of Better Angels of Our Nature offered a highly touted - if also much criticized - plan for "Victory", one piece of which is "Intense Cultural Training":

" [U]pon arriving in the CENTCOM theatre of operations, troops destined for duty in Iraq receive a five-day course familiarizing them with Iraqi customs and courtesies and the role of religion in the society. "

and from the follow-up

" Yeah, you can snicker at the 5 days, but, frankly, that's five days more than what we're getting now. "

A few months ago, on a lark I sat down with a few colleagues and we developed a curriculum for a three-day cultural sensitivity training, including a module on human rights. We reasoned that, as trainers in the field of conflict analysis and impact assessment and as people who actually visit conflict zones, we ought to be prepared in case anybody asked. The point here is that five days is two more than a group of professionals thought we'd need. Not that we wouldn't take the extra two days - we're greedy like that.

In any case, in the interest of as much brevity as possible in this wired and all too fast world, here follows "the Five Minute Cultural Sensitivity and Human Rights Training":

Treat every man as though he's your father's boss.

Treat every woman as though she is your grandmother.

Treat every boy younger than you are as though he is your kid brother.

Treat every girl younger than you as though she is your father's boss' daughter.

. . .

Treat every professional as though he or she is a professional.

Treat every local as though he or she is an expert.

. . .

Apologize every time you do screw up. Be sincere. If you aren't sincere, that is another screw up. Apologize.

. . .

Keep smiling.¹

. . .

¹ People underestimate this, but it is the single best way to keep tensions down. You are reminded that the person standing in front of you is a human being, with feelings and desires. You remind them that you're a human being too. In any situation short of an actually ongoing firefight a smile is your best weapon. And in my case, its my only weapon - so it had better work.

Imagine a prison. There are three types of people in the prison: Guards, Prisoners, and Interrogators

The goal of the Interrogators is to have the Prisoners talk to them. The tools the Interrogators have at their disposal are positive and negative reinforcement.

First, the Interrogators talk to the Guards. They use positive reinforcement on the Guards. The Interrogators encourage the Guards to abuse the Prisoners by praising them when they do so.

Second, the Guards abuse the Prisoners. The more the Guards abuse the Prisoners, the more the Interrogators praise them. The more the Guards abuse the Prisoners, the more the Guards praise one another. The more creatively the Guards abuse the Prisoners, the more praise they get from both Interrogators and Guards.

Third, the Interrogators talk to the Prisoners. They use negative reinforcement on the Prisoners: if the Prisoners talk then the Interrogator will order the Guards to stop their abuse. The Interrogators even invite the Guards to "participate" in the interrogation so that the removal of the aversive stimulus can be immediate and the Interrogator's actual order to the Guard to stop is remembered by the Prisoner.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The whole structure is built upon conditioning the Guards to behave badly. If the Interrogators find a Guard they are unable to condition, they make sure that Guard is moved elsewhere.

The Interrogators themselves need never commit an abuse, they will in fact be more successful if they don't, and they will be on record having ordered the Guards to stop the abuse.

Now imagine that there are two groups of Guards in the prison. One group is lower in the hierarchy than the other one and their jobs are contingent on pleasing the higher group. Which group is going to commit the worst abuses?

. . .

Now back to the real world where such activities remain thought experiments.

We see now why the US has gone to such great lengths to cripple the International Criminal Court.

The objections have never been about trumped up charges wasting the court's time and resources, allowing it to indulge (or to be used to indulge) a cheap and easy anti-Americanism. Instead, this is what our praetorians and their bosses were always afraid of, the day when an American should stand up in the dock to receive the sentence: guilty of crimes against humanity.

More at Orcinus
. . .

(I happen to be opposed to the ICC, but that discussion is for another time when I'm not feeling quite so ill.)

(Cross-posted on Daily Kos)

Kerry's speech Friday was very good, though - necessarily - Iraq specific. His call to "build a political coalition of key countries" and to "convince them that Iraqi security and stability is a global interest" while making it an "imperative we share responsibility and authority" begins the good work of building a framework around which US foreign policy can regain its credibility and effectiveness.

But this speech was only a first step. The world is watching this election. Kerry needs to win back the trust and support of our allies. He needs to be seen to be leading on the most important issues of the day even before he is elected President.

Kerry needs to use the same framework he used Friday to address other major, global security concerns. He needs to speak about Afghanistan and the world's commitments there. He needs to provide a global plan to attack terror and to make clear the responsibilities that every nation must shoulder to combat it. He needs to deal with the issues raised by North Korea, nuclear proliferation, and the danger such proliferation represents to every country.

There are other issues, other countries at war or in the throes of violence, that Kerry could speak to. He should resist the temptation to solve all of the world's problems, or even to address them. These four - Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism, and North Korea - should form the basis for Kerry's - and America's - vision of global security. These four can serve to show the world a blueprint for a new understanding of international collaboration. And on these four, Kerry can chart a course clearly different from the current Administration's.

" I know that some will say that this is an impossible task, but I believe it is doable with the right approach. We must lead but we must listen. We must use every tool of diplomacy and persuasion to bring others along.
[...]
The institutions created more than half a century ago remain useful and relevant. But yesterday's designs are not sufficient to meet today's needs. Our institutions and alliances must adapt to new opportunities and threats. New enemies must be confronted by new strategies. America must lead in new ways.

But even as we contemplate what has changed, we must also remember what has not: Our belief in the rights and dignity of every human being. Our faith in democracy as the best form of government in all of human history. And our confidence in America's capability to lead allies and friends to stand together and build a world more peaceful, prosperous and just than we have ever known before.

That was our mission in Churchill's time. And for all the differences of time and circumstance, that is our urgent need in Iraq today and our enduring mission in the years ahead.

There is pride in that and honor - and if we meet the test, we can have a world that is safer because of American leadership. "

Perhaps this is more properly part of a "Boston Diary", but, hey, it's all the same planet.

When I left for Afghanistan it was still the tail end of winter. We checked the daily forecast to see what sort of jacket we would need. It is now two solid weeks into spring. When we check the forecast it is to see if we need a jacket at all.

This means that now, as I walk about the city, I have to dodge joggers instead of crazy drivers (the bicyclists are equally insane). There are no joggers in Kabul. There are no bare legs in Kabul, not even on men. There sure as damnation are no women in Kabul walking around with bare arms, bare legs, and bare bellies. America is an odd place.

. . .

The day I returned, I slipped into the office for a few minutes to say hi to my colleagues. Walking from the car to our building the first person I passed was a woman in chador. America has a sense of humor!