At the zoo, that is.

For once I'm actually glad that a story  all over  the lefty press is being ignored by the mainstream media, because this doesn't actually deserve the legitimation that would inevitably come with wider circulation.

From the press release:

President George W. Bush will be presented with the "International Medal of PEACE" by Dr. Rick Warren on behalf of the Global PEACE Coalition during the Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health, to be held at the Newseum in Washington, on the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day, Dec. 1.  This award is in recognition of the President's tireless efforts and unprecedented contribution to the fight against HIV/AIDS and other diseases.

But a lot of sources linking to this seem to have missed a key part of the story -- the capslock. Apparently Rick Warren has taken a page (the painfully contrived acronym page) out of Bush's own playbook. Bush didn't receive the "International Medal of Peace," he received the "International Medal of P.E.A.C.E" --

P as in Promote reconciliation,
E as in Equip servant leaders,
A as in Assist the poor,
C as in Care for the sick and
E as in Educate the next generation.

Sneaky, isn't it, how all of those phrases, surely picked out of thin air, just happen to begin with words that begin with letters that spell something that is the total opposite of this president's legacy. But if P.E.A.C.E. is just an acronym, surely we can come up with some better suggestions for what it might stand for, right?

Here, I'll start:

Perpetuate lies and misinformation
Enlarge the scope of your own authority
Award contracts (and bailouts) to your pals
Commit international war crimes
Embarrass your country

I know some of you out there can do better than that! And, as long as we're in the business of awarding acronyms, I'll be waiting for my Pretty Unedited Lazy Inchoate Tangents with Zero Earthly Relevance, thanks.

There is a brilliant and much-needed piece at Commonweal that highlights the relationship between faith, sex, and violence at Guantanamo. Michael Peppard pulls from a variety of sources to recount torture techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan that specifically targeted detainees' religious beliefs. These tactics mostly fall into two categories - desecration of the Qur'an and deploying sexuality to make detainees impure, preventing them from being able to pray.

My description is too whitewashed -- it's important to read the original accounts:

Former detainees say [the Qur'an] has been handled with disrespect by guards and interrogators-written in, ripped or cut with scissors, squatted over, trampled, kicked, urinated and defecated on, picked up by a dog, tossed around like a ball, used to clean soldiers' boots, and thrown in a bucket of excrement. A Russian ex-detainee, Timur Ishmuratov, remembers how it would be laid on the back of a handcuffed, bent-over prisoner, so that it would fall to the ground if he stood up. With just a Qur'an and a pair of handcuffs, a Muslim detainee could in this way be made to torture himself.

And then:

In Inside the Wire, former Army translator Erik Saar recounts a shocking exploitation of Islamic rules about ritual impurity. Saar was translating for a female Army interrogator who was having trouble getting information out of a young Saudi detainee named Fareek. She told Saar that she wanted to break the strength of Fareek's relationship with God: "I think we should make him feel so fucking dirty that he can't go back to his cell and spend the night praying. We have to put up a barrier between him and his God." So she did a striptease. When Fareek wouldn't look at her, she walked behind him and "began rubbing her breasts against his back." According to Saar, she told Fareek that his sexual arousal offended God. Then she told him that she was having her period, and showed him her hand covered in what he thought was menstrual blood (it was red ink). She cursed him and wiped it on his face. As she and Saar left the room, she informed Fareek that the water to his cell would be shut off that night. Even if he managed to calm himself down, he would be too defiled to pray. As for Saar himself, he writes that "there wasn't enough hot water in all of Cuba to make me feel clean."

So, are these "non-contact techniques" torture? As Peppard asks, "Could they really be as bad as what happened at Abu Ghraib, as bad as waterboarding or sexual violation?" I answer an unequivocal yes. Sadly, the fact that these techniques became so widespread in the American detainment and interrogation actually indicates just how torturous they are -- if they did not cause deeply excruciating pain to the detainees, they would not have become so embedded in the culture of violence of these institutions. It's by now quite apparent that the interrogators had no qualms about physical torture -- so we can't claim that they engaged in this spiritual and psychological torture as a "milder" alternative to practices like waterboading or sexual violence.

These prisons have used their detainees' religious faith, ritual purity, and spiritual practices to invent forms of violence new to the modern world. Part of our national response to the cruelty perpetuated during the past eight years must be a particular attention to these new forms of violence and an explicit and enforced commitment to never again twist an individual's spiritual life into an instrument of their pain.

As Josh said this weekend, why aren't we doing this more like the Brits again?

This morning the British government delivered an ultimatum to credit card companies to stop charging exorbitant rates in a blatant effort to profit from the economic downturn.

Why can I not imagine that move on Hank Paulson's agenda?

In any case, it's been interesting to see PM Brown's approval ratings bounce back throughout the economic crisis after their free-fall this time last year, which was also based on the economy.

My local metro station was recently plastered in enormous pictures of brightly-colored condoms as a public health campaign to mark World AIDS Day, which is today. The accompanying slogan, "It's up to YOU to prevent the spread of AIDS" (translated, obviously), immediately brought to mind the old Smokey Bear line: "Only YOU can prevent forest fires."

This pop-ification of the anti-AIDS message is so commonplace as to be entirely banal. And some public health experts think it does a disservice to global health concerns.

"AIDS is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it's just one of many terrible humanitarian tragedies," said Jeremy Shiffman, who studies health spending at Syracuse University.

Roger England of Health Systems Workshop, a think tank based in the Caribbean island of Grenada, goes further. He argues that UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the fight against the disease, has outlived its purpose and should be disbanded.

"The global HIV industry is too big and out of control. We have created a monster with too many vested interests and reputations at stake, ... too many relatively well paid HIV staff in affected countries, and too many rock stars with AIDS support as a fashion accessory," he wrote in the British Medical Journal in May.

It's easy, of course, to criticize anything that has been adopted by celebrity culture as a frivolous cause. And to me, disbanding UNAIDS sounds like a terrible idea. But it does seem legitimate to question the place of AIDS in our international health priorities, given facts such as these:

By 2006, AIDS funding accounted for 80 percent of all American aid for health and population issues, according to the Global Health Council.

In Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and elsewhere, donations for HIV projects routinely outstrip the entire national health budgets.

The key is to rebalance priorities without minimizing the very real and continuing global AIDS epidemic. It's true that in the developed world, AIDS today is a manageable disease rather than a death sentence. But it's equally true that infection rates should be FAR lower than they still are. Making anti-AIDS paraphanalia into a fashion accessory is surely not the best way to do that -- but neither is eliminating UNAIDS, or talking as if AIDS is no longer a big deal.

Or so suggests Charles Blow.

I'm very pleased to see his clear presentation of all the under-reported data, especially on HIV infection rates. And I agree that white gay civil-rights activists have long been totally tone-deaf (and some beyond tone-deaf into downright racist) with regards to how their civil-rights rhetoric sounds to African Americans. Thirdly, it's patently clear that the gay marriage movement needs to change their message and strategy, and Blow's insights are very helpful there. For example:

Then, make it part of a broader discussion about the perils of rigidly applying yesterday's sexual morality to today's sexual mores. Show black women that it backfires. The stigma doesn't erase the behavior, it pushes it into the shadows where, devoid of information and acceptance, it become more risky.

But, we have to be careful not to adopt the pragmatic, interests-based logic at the expense of the assertion that the fight for marriage equality is still about the fight for just that -- equality under the law.

I continue to be a little gape-mouthed at the logic of this whole discourse around the "mismanagement" of the war. It's not that I'm disputing that the war was mismanaged -- far from it. From the beginning, I've been really astonished that anyone ever thought that we could just order up the "perfect war" -- in and out in 6 months, solve all our problems, clean up the mess, "Mission Accomplished," and presto! Democracy! But surely, the Iraq war has cured us of any such illusions. Right?

It seems not. All the rhetoric that blames Bush only for "grossly mismanaging" the war while exculpating him for getting us there in the first place is based on the continuing delusion that there could have been that "perfect war" that so many people expected we would have. This is a cherished illusion, I realize. But it's also a fundamental error about the nature of warfare. By starting a war, we are signing up for the devastatingly unexpected, for the unforeseen enemies as well as the foreseen ones, for our own mistakes as well as those of our allies. Because -- pick up any history book -- that's how war goes.

Today's WaPo editorial was a classic example:

Having all but destroyed his presidency through mismanagement of the war, Mr. Bush can now fairly argue as he leaves office that his successor will inherit an Iraqi mission that has been stabilized both militarily and politically.

Now, I generally agree with those who say that it's more urgent to deal with our present situations, both foreign and domestic, than to re-hash the argument over whether we should or should not have gone to war in Iraq. Clearly we did, and we need to deal with the situation at hand. But the WaPo speaks here as though the Iraq War just fell out of the sky, and that while Bush first mangled everything, he has recovered and can now even be proud of the "stabilized mission" that he's leaving #44. The idea that there should never have been a mission to stabilize doesn't seem to cross their minds.