Almost a year after the Why Democracy film Taxi to the Dark Side won the documentary Oscar, revelations are still emerging about the US military's treatment of prisoners and the government's role. The latest is a US Senate committee report (co-issued by Michigan Senator Carl Levin and a certain Arizona Senator named John McCain) that faults top Bush administration officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, for the abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and elsewhere.

There have been a lot of postmortems on Thabo Mbeki, who resigned as president of South Africa under great pressure both from within his party and outside. I like this one from The Atlantic, which offers up some good numbers through which to examine Mbeki's acheivements and failures:

Few people pay attention to Canadian politics at the best of times, so it should be no surprise that the U.S. Obama-McCain dustup has utterly overshadowed the October 14 Canadian federal election.

Berkeley economics professor Pradab Bardhan has an interesting piece about the recent rise of Russia's and China's economies, and how they affect the attitudes of developing countries toward democracy.

Much has happened in the year or so since the Why Democracy film Dinner With The President, about democracy in Pakistan, was pronounced edited, titled and ready to screen. There have been riots, protests, standoffs, an assassination, an election, and, as of today, the president referred to in the film's title, Pervez Musharraf, has resigned, a move designed to help him avoid the ignominy of an impeachment.

Blame Russia? Perhaps: Russian forces continue to pummel Georgia in spite of international pleas for restraint. But, as usual, the situation is far more complicated than what most media describe.

Journalist Roger Cohen's short, plaintive op-ed on Radovan Karadzic, finally arrested on war crimes charges, somehow captures the climate of fear during the war in Serbia and the remorse and regret that lingers more than a decade later.

It is reasonable to assume that Zimbabweans are greeting the deal between Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC with something less than hope and/or elation. As the Guardian wryly observes in an editorial, talk is about the only thing that's cheap in Zimbabwe these days.

My post yesterday ruminated briefly on the United States's declining global image, and so I was interested to read Thomas L. Friedman's column in the New York Times that reflected upon the potential consequences of a less-influential US.

The just-released footage of an interrogation at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is quite compelling. It remains to be seen whether the video will have the same impact as the photos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but its content certainly does nothing to heal the United States' wounded reputation around human rights.

Captured on cameras hidden in a vent, the footage shows Canadian Omar Khadr, then 16, weeping and in serious distress. The interrogation methods used on him included prolonged, multi-week sleep deprivation.

Ongoing hearings in the US have revealed much about the interrogation techniques employed at various US-administered prisons in the world (the main focus of the Why Democracy film Taxi To The Dark Side). The latest information, which might have seemed shocking just five years ago, is that classes on Guantanamo interrogation methods were informed by Chinese Communist methods in the Korean War.

From the New York Times:

The New York Times offers a good analysis of the connections between South African President Thabo Mbeki and his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe, and examines Mbeki's seemingly odd (or nonexistent) diplomacy:

As the so-called election looms in Zimbabwe, international pressure is increasing and (now ex-) presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai calls again for negotiation. And although South African President Thabo Mbeki has been criticized his lack of action in the face of the growing horror in Zimbabwe, his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, has spoken out, calling the situation "a tragic failure of leadership."

Months after Zimbabwe's elections were held and results delayed, the usual result seems to have finally set in: using force and intimidation, Robert Mugabe has pushed his opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, out of the race, while the UN looks on. Tsvangirai has dropped out of the presidential runoff and has sought refuge in the Dutch embassy.

The secret US policies that endorsed the shocking treatment of prisoners of the war on terror (as documented in the Why Democracy documentary Taxi To The Dark Side) have their domestic-policy equivalents in security legislation in various countries around the world. In the US it is the Patriot Act, and in the UK it is the Counter Terrorism Bill. The latter bill is drawing much attention as it comes up for renewal with the government attempting to raise the pre-charge detention limit to 42 days from 28.

Climbers brought the Olympic flame to the top of Mt. Everest, a location that China had no trouble keeping under control. Indeed, Kerry Brown at OpenDemocracy observes that, with the coming weeks entirely stage managed, China has acheived a PR coup by getting the bad news over with before the event, and as such lowering expectations.

After an ignominious world tour, the Olympic torch arrived in China, where there will probably be less bad press, but not necessarily less badness.