With Kyrgyzstan taking another step toward shuttering the Manas air base, there's increasing speculation that the Obama administration is considering resuming military cooperation with Uzbekistan, which expelled the U.S. in 2005 in the midst of a diplomatic feud over the country's human rights record. Christopher Flavelle writes in Slate:

The shifting landscape around Afghanistan is closing off options for Obama, who must now begin to think about unsavory compromises if he wants to make progress in the Afghan campaign. [...]

President George W. Bush, though largely indifferent to public opinion, could afford to do the honorable thing in 2005 by walking away from an ugly regime in Uzbekistan, when Afghanistan was looking better and the base in Kyrgyzstan was still available. Obama, whose inauguration speech promised that the ideals of rule of law and rights of man "still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake," may have to let his image suffer because he lacks the options of his predecessor.

Obama may still be spared this unpleasant choice. Analysts tell Eurasianet the Kyrgyz move is likely a ploy to get Washington to pony up more cash for the base, though some recent statements from the U.S. military indicate that Kyrgyzstan may have overplayed its hand.

Hopefully the Uzbekistan option is being floated by the Obamans as a bargaining chip with Kyrgyzstan and won't actually come to pass. Kyrgyzstan's not exactly Canada but Uzbekistan is in a class of its own as a human rights abuser and Fred Kaplan's 2005 arguments for why the U.S. should steer well clear of the place still hold.

Given all his encouraging human rights rhetoric, it would be nice if Obama could just minimize his dealings with post-Soviet dictatorships. Besides, his campaign manager and his secretary of state's husband have them well covered.

VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO/AFP/Getty Images

While other European countries have sharply criticized the U.S. torture of terrorist suspects but balked at the idea of taking in inmates from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Portugal's government has enthusiastically backed the proposal.

Time's Jeff Israely reports that this is a very personal issue for the country's leaders, many of whom were victims of torture themselves under the country's mid-twentieth century dictatorship:

Former President Mario Soares, who was tortured and eventually exiled for his anti-fascist activities, remembers the interrogations and torture only too well. "I was made to go three days and three nights without sleep," he says of the kind of sleep deprivation tactics that have taken place at Guantanamo. Soares, now 83, has called Guantanamo "the scandal of all scandals" of the Bush administration, and says Europe must now help Obama close it. "Other countries must not be so egocentric," he says.

Domingos Santos a longstanding leader of Portugal's Communist party, also knows what's at stake. He was a victim of secret police beatings during the junta's rule. Deprived of sleep and forced to spend days in a tiny windowless cell without a bed, Santos remains an outspoken critic of the U.S. base at Guantanamo. Terrorists need to be punished, he says, but torture is never justified. "We could take some [prisoners in Portugal] on grounds of human rights because of Guantanamo is a cancer which is afflicting society," he told TIME.

Even setting aside Turkey's record with its Armenian and Kurdish minorities for a moment, it's a little rich for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to be so aghast at the idea of sharing a stage with a human rights abuser.

Almost exactly a year before Erdogan's outburst at Davos, in which he lambasted Israeli President Shimon Peres over Israel's actions in Gaza, he was literally rolling out the red carpet for Sudan's genocidal president and indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir in Ankara.

So when did "killing people" become a problem for him?

There's good reason that Darfur is a household name. After over five years of crisis, little has improved, and by some measures, things are worse than ever. Now add this to the mix: a report by the Darfur Consortium says that slavery -- the abduction of men, women, and children for physical and sexual labor -- is rampant.

In addition to how despicable slavery already is, (for more on the contemporary slave trade, check out Benjamin Skinner's FP piece from March 2008) this is also another reason to worry about the Darfur crisis' evolution. Just look next door to Uganda and you can see how slavery tears a society apart. There, the abductions of children by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army have forced an underground society of young people who walk miles each day to find safe haven in cities and towns, for fear of abductions in the village homes.

Now, imagine trying to rehabilitate those children. Abducted children -- and now in Darfur, men and women too -- have been robbed of their will, their security net, and their lives. That's a lot of rebuilding, and it means that the conflict is just that much more entrenched. In Uganda, government and neighboring troops have been looking to stop the Lord's Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony since 1986. The 200,000 abducted children have no other sense of normality than this.

If slavery is indeed now a staple of Darfur, as evidence seems to indicate, that means that peace agreements, peacekeepers, and even aid won't be enough to stop the conflict. Peacekeepers, for example, will have to grapple with the presence of civilians among rebels contingents. Peace agreements will need to include extensive emancipation of souls.

The line between the ambiguous sides of this conflict has just become even more blurred.

Photo: THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images

The AP reports on a new campaign by musicians, including Rage Against the Machine and Massive Attack, to ban the practice of using loud heavy metal, hip-hop, and even children's songs to psychologically break down detainees for interrogation. Apparently, not every band has a problem with the practice, though.

Bassist Steve Benton of Drowning Pool, whose 2001 hit "Bodies" is a particular favorite of interrogators, had this to say:

"People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that played over and over it can psychologically break someone down," he told Spin magazine. "I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that."

Having only a vague recollection of these guys, I looked up Drowning Pool's entry on AllMusic.com, which features a picture of the band posing with Barack Obama. I'm guessing that was a very weird meeting.

Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images

When Rwanda's chief of protocol, Rose Kabuye, stepped off a plane in Frankfurt Sunday, she was greeted with an arrest warrant. Kabuye and eight other associates of current Rwandan President Paul Kagame have been indicted by a French court for inciting genocide.

The row between France and Rwanda is about as ugly as a diplomatic feud can get. Rwanda accuses France of supporting the 1994 genocide that left 800,000 dead. France accuses Kagame of inciting the genocide in a bid to win power. Diplomatic ties have been hopelessly severed.

So where does the truth lie?

The timeline looks pretty straightforward: French troops defended and funded the Hutu government of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana in the years leading up to the genocide. In 1993 those troops left, but when the killing of the Tutsi minority spun out of control, the French again sent soldiers. This time the French "Operation Turquoise" carried a U.N. mandate to create safe humanitarian zones meant to guard the civilian population.

But Rwanda's current government begs to rewrite the details. A two-year investigation with hundreds of witnesses released this August found that more than 30 French government officials were involved in arming Hutu militias and planning the genocide. French troops used the safe humanitarian zones to help Hutu genocidaires escape. The French government was allegedly motivated by a near-paranoia about protecting a pro-French Hutu government from a n Anglophone Tutsi regime.

Then there is the French version: Paul Kagame, a former Tutsi rebel group leader, sparked the genocide of his own volition so that he could come to power.

That is all complicated enough, but here's the messy bit: Both sides probably tell some piece of the truth. The Rwandan investigation is robust and damning, and the French at least raise a good point that Kagame has proven something of an authoritarian in office, with a whole list of human rights abuses under his watch.

Think this is all just ancient history? Think again. The conflict following Rwanda's genocide never ended -- it just moved next door.

There are more slaves on the planet today than at any time in human history. But a landmark case in West Africa this week should give thousands of them a rare dose of hope. A court in Niger found the country's government guilty of failing to protect the rights of Hadijatou Mani, a 24-year-old woman sold into slavery at the age of 12.

Mani says she was sold as a young girl to a man for $500 and forced into domestic and agricultural work for a decade. Her master raped her repeatedly, and she bore him three children. She was freed in 2005 and, with the help of Anti-Slavery International, brought the case against the government for failing to protect her. In the judge's decision, he ordered the government to pay Mani about $20,000.

Niger officially abolished slavery in 1960, but the practice persists throughout the country, with an estimated 43,000 people enslaved. There are believed to be tens of thousands more in bondage across West Africa. Niger's government repeatedly contends that it does all it can to eradicate the practice, but this is the first time a court has held it responsible for looking the other way. There's little chance of thousands more slaves being so lucky as to be freed and rewarded, but if this compels the government to enact (or enforce) more stringent laws, all the better.

Photo: Boureima HAMA/AFP/Getty Images

CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images

Mo Ibrahim is a rare breed of African billionaire. On a continent far too often associated with the Mobutu Sese-Sekos and Charles Taylors of the world (whose fortunes came from commodity wealth, skimmed gracefully off the state budget), Ibrahim did it differently. A Sudanese telecoms entrepreneur, he earned his respect and big bucks as a businessman.

Now Ibrahim has set himself on a far more difficult task: fixing African governance and changing the continent's culture of corruption. A politician in Nigeria once described it to me like this: In a continent where so many are poor, when you see the chance to secure a financial future, you take it. Unabashedly, many politicians have done so. In 2006, Transparency International estimated that $140 billion of misappropriated African money was invested abroad.

Ibrahim just may have found one of those rare strategies that is perfectly suited to the problem. Need an incentive for good governance? How about the more than $5 million that the Mo Ibrahim Foundation now offers to its yearly prize winner, a head of state who has recently left office. The qualifications are simply good behavior: attention to economic development, human rights, public health, transparency, rule of law, and security.

It's still nothing compared to the potential payoffs for corrupt leaders, (during my time in Nigeria, a former governor was arrested for having amassed $35 million in foreign accounts, though his official salary was just $25,000 a year) but it is a well-earned reward for those who resist this path. This year's winner, former Botswanan president Festus Mogae, oversaw economic growth and enormous progress in battling the stigma attached to HIV/AIDS patients.

The prize has been criticized by some for rewarding behavior that should just be expected as something extraordinary. But the most important aspect the prize has is not the reward itself, but the chance to tell the other story about African leadership -- to the continent itself and to the world. As Ibrahim explained to the New York Times, we all know about the Mugabes of Africa, but they're only part of the story.

massacremap.com

The makers of this week's map want to remind visitors to Beijing of the violent history lurking behind the glitz and glamor of the Olympic Games. Freedom House's Ellen Bork along with the Weekly Standard's design director Philip Chalk and Tiananmen survivor Tian Jian have created this map for Beijing tourists interested in visiting the sites of the June 4, 1989 massacre of the Tiananmen Square protestors. Each number shows the place where where one of the 176 victims were killed or the hospitals to which their bodies were taken.

You can find information on the victims here and read Bork's explanation of the map at the New York Sun's site.

Once middle-aged British intellectuals started paying to be waterboarded, it was only a matter of time before the controversial interrogation technique became a tourist attraction. Just next to the famous amusement park in Brooklyn's Coney Island, visitors can now experience the new "Waterboard Thrill Ride":

It looks at first like any other shuttered storefront near the boardwalk: some garish lettering and a cartoonish invitation to a delight or a scam — in this case there’s SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “It don’t Gitmo better!”

If you climb up a few cinderblock steps to the small window, you can look through the bars at a scene meant to invoke a Guantánamo Bay interrogation. A lifesize figure in a dark sweatshirt, the hood drawn low over his face, leans over another figure in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered by a towel and his body strapped down on a tilted surface.

Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit’s nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!

Artist Steve Powers, the installation's creator, intends it to be a provacative political commentary but -- this being Coney Island -- some visitors seem to find it legitimately entertaining.

It's truly disgusting that this freak-show huckster is making a buck by depicting torture for entertainment while the U.S. government is actually practicing these techniques. That's Fox's job!

"Expressing concern" is one of the more weasly examples of diplo-speak. It informs the world that a government does not approve of something that is going on while making it explicitly clear that they don't actually plan to do anything about it. Various countries have been "expressing concern" for years over the ongoing massacre in Darfur without much in the way of action to back it up.

This statement from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao in response to the International Criminal court's indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide sets a shocking new standard for chutzpah though:

"China expresses grave concern and misgivings about the International Criminal Court prosecutor's indictment of the Sudanese leader. The ICC's actions must be beneficial to the stability of the Darfur region and the appropriate settlement of the issue, not the contrary."

With the Olympics less than a month away, China is unlikely to take any actual action to block the indictment; hence the "grave concern."

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

At a live video conference sponsored by Freedom House today, members of Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change and a number of civil society groups gave updates on the unfolding political standoff with President Robert Mugabe. MDC's chief spokesman George Sibotshiwe, who has been lobbying from the sidelines at the African Union summit in Sharm El-Sheik, called in to say that although unanimous AU action against Mugabe may be impossible, a number of countries, particularly in West Africa, were pushing the MDC's cause.

Sibotshiwe said the MDC is looking for a permanent AU envoy to Zimbabwe, since the mediation efforts of South African President Thabo Mbeki have been disappointing (to say the least):

We're pushing for the apointment of a permanent envoy from the African Union to assist -- diplomatically we have to say "assist" -- President Mbeki. But what we actually need is for the AU to take control of the mediation efforts. You can't get rid of President Mbeki at this stage, but we need someone who is permament, someone who is not a head of state, because what we are finding is President Mbeki has been having to deal with the problem of Zimbabwe part time.

The panelists also discussed the idea of forming a Zanu/MDC "unity" government, which Mbeki and others have proposed. This would presumably be along the lines of the compromise reached after Kenya's disputed election earlier this year. Speaking from Johannesburg, Xolani Zitha, director of the NGO coalition CRISIS, dismissed the idea as "a good deal for Zanu" but not the Zimbabweans who want them brought to justice. I asked Zitha whether a resolution of the crisis would have to include Mugabe and his cronies being brought to justice. He responded that it was high time the African community stop treating Mugabe with "kid gloves":

If the African Union and SADC [Southern African Development Community] are very soft on Zanu-PF, they lend it legitimacy... It's a very sticky situation. The AU and SADC need to set a precedent for how they deal with the impunity of Robert Mugabe. They don't have a record of condemning Robert Mugabe. They've shown him respect -- respect that he doesn't deserve -- to the point where he feels he can work his way out without being taken to task.

All the participants were still hopeful that a political compromise could be reached but noted that with inflation in the millions, conditions are ripe for civil unrest. The last thing the AU wants is the violent overthrow of Mugabe, but years of defending him while Zimbabwe deteriorated may have made it all but inevitable.

Via Andrew Sullivan, some very harsh words from Antonio Taguba, the now-retired general who investigated the Abu Ghraib abuses in 2004:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

I can't speak to the legalities here, but I have a question for readers on the politics. Does throwing around charged phrases like "war crimes" help or hurt Taguba's cause?

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Looks like Sen. Dick Durbin may be taking up the flag of the late Rep. Tom Lantos when it comes to bashing the operations of tech companies in China. Ars Technica's Nate Anderson reports on today's hearing before Durbin's Judiciary subcommittee:

Yahoo, Google, and Cisco all trekked over to the Senate today to sit for an hour under the grandfatherly, but strangely stern eye of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). The subject was 'Internet freedom,' but this turned out to be code for 'censorship in China....' Durbin [was not] convinced, though, that multinational corporations were truly doing as much as they legally could to avoid censoring information.... After Google's Nicole Wong claimed that engagement with China was better than isolation, Durbin said that the answer reminded him of corporate arguments regarding apartheid in South Africa.

Durbin told tech executives to expect some legislation in the Senate similar to the Global Online Freedom Act, which would hold U.S. companies liable for helping foreign governments censor the Net. A recently unearthed PowerPoint presentation in which Cisco Systems executives appeared to be keen to help Chinese officials in censoring the Web (one phrase referred to "combating Falun Gong evil cult and other hostile elements") could give the bill legs.