Several thousand people in Georgia rallied against the incumbent government of Prime Minister Mikhail Saakashvili this weekend after videos from government-run prisons depicted appalling torture of inmates. Pushed out on September 18 by the opposition leader, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the videos document savage beatings and sexual assault against prisoners by guards who were seemingly enjoying themselves (warning — graphic depiction of sexual assault):

PRISONER: “Please don’t video tape it. I will do everything you ask for!”

GUARD: “What will you do?”

PRISONER: “Please stop!”

GUARD: “It is already videotaped. Did it hurt? Did it hurt a lot? Did your ass hurt?” …

Prisoner is chained to cell bars, wears a head protection, so he can’t hurt his head hitting it on the cell bars. This time there is no guard in the cell itself. The guard asks the same question over and over again. The prisoner was raped with a broom and is abased by the guard.

Given the scale of the protests and the upcoming election on October 1, the scandal — dubbed Georgia’s Abu Ghraib — appears primed to shake up the Georgian political scene. The videos, together with past reports of prisoner abuse, appear to implicate several officials high-up in the Saakashvili government. Moreover, they cement the broader perception of lost democracy and reversion to one-party rule in Georgia, as the government’s respect for human rights has been in decline in recent years, despite the fact that Saakashvili rose to power as part of a democratic uprising:

Georgia’s human rights record remained uneven in 2011. The government used excessive force to disperse anti-government protests in Tbilisi, the capital, in May, and prosecuted dozens in misdemeanor trials without full respect for due process rights. The authorities failed to effectively investigate these events and past instances of excessive use of force. Other concerns include restrictions on freedom of association and media, as well as forced evictions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in state-owned temporary housing.

The evidence of torture and authoritarian backsliding in Georgia presents a serious problem for American neoconservatives, who have embraced Georgia as a democratic bulwark against Russia and potential NATO ally after the latter’s 2008 invasion of the small, post-Soviet republic. The Romney campaign has pledged to confront Russia on Georgia-related issues. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said this month that he “admired the remarkable progress made by Georgia under [Saakashvili's] leadership,” adding that the Georgian President was a personal friend and a “friend of the United States.” He also wrote that “the partnership between the United States and Georgia rests not on individuals alone, but on our shared commitment to a set of mutual interests and universal values, including democracy, rule of law, and human rights.”

Our guest blogger is Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Program Manager at Refugees International.

Poverty and malnutrition are chronic in the countries of the Sahel, a region in northern Africa stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and the surrounding area is hardly a paragon of political stability. This year, however, a confluence of man-made and natural disasters has sent the region into a tailspin.

As a result of erratic rainfall and high food prices, 18 million people across the Sahel do not have enough food coming into the final months of the “lean season” — the period before harvest when food stocks are nearly depleted. A shocking one million children under five are at risk of starvation.

Compounding the crisis, the eruption of violence in Mali resulting in a military coup earlier this year has displaced over 440,000 people. Many have fled to those areas hardest hit by the nutrition crisis, where food and water are scarce and where local populations themselves are struggling.

Although the Sahel’s dual crises have been going on for months, so far the U.S. and its allies have largely shied away from any major intervention. The U.S., which long viewed Mali as a model of democracy in West Africa, was caught flat-footed as events took place. Despite millions of dollars in development aid and counter-terrorist programs, the U.S. failed to grasp the extent to which the country’s weak institutions, and the lack of public support for its civilian government, made it vulnerable to threats and shifting power dynamics unfolding across the region.

The U.S. has now suspended development aid to Mali given the lack of a legitimate government, and it has limited humanitarian assistance to the north due to continuing insecurity. But allowing the situation to languish risks both the further loss of control to Islamic extremists, and the lives of innocent civilians caught in the middle. On the other hand, a military intervention — as proposed by regional bloc ECOWAS — brings its own perils, including further escalation of the conflict and curtailment of humanitarian aid.

Going forward, establishing security in Mali surely remains a priority for the Obama administration, but a more comprehensive strategy is needed. On Wednesday, the day after President Obama’s speech to the General Assembly, the U.N. will convene a high-level meeting on the Sahel — and it is here where the U.S. should set out a clear, comprehensive plan. In particular, the following three points should be addressed:

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American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen has been pushing a recent finding that President Obama has not attended about half of his daily intelligence briefings as evidence that “national security has not necessarily been” Obama’s “personal priority.” Theissen based his claim on a recent study by the conservative Government Accountability Institute, which said that Obama has attended only 43.8 percent of his Presidential Daily Briefs, or PDBs. “By contrast,” Thiessen wrote, “Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.”

This particular statistic, however, doesn’t mean a whole lot. President Obama may not physically get briefed by intelligence officials every day but he does receive and read the PDBs, a point Theissen himself acknowledged when reporting the White House’s response to the charge.

“This is how it was done in the Clinton administration,” Thiessen’s Post colleague Dana Millbank noted, “before Bush decided he would prefer to read less.”

Yet Dick Cheney, John McCain, the right-wing blogs and others picked up on Thiessen’s hook anyway, not seeming to care that the charge has little credibility. The claim eventually made its way to an attack ad by Karl Rove-led SuperPAC American Crossroads which caused Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler to get involved. Kessler called the attack “misguided,” noting that President Reagan rarely attended daily intelligence briefings:

Clearly, different presidents have structured their daily briefing from the CIA to fit their unique personal styles. Many did not have an oral briefing, while three — two of whom are named Bush — preferred to deal directly with a CIA official. Obama appears to have opted for a melding of the two approaches, in which he receives oral briefings, but not as frequently as his predecessor.

Ultimately, what matters is what a president does with the information he receives from the CIA. Republican critics may find fault with Obama’s handling of foreign policy. But this attack ad turns a question of process — how does the president handle his intelligence brief? — into a misguided attack because Obama has chosen to receive his information in a different manner than his predecessor.

As it turns out, no president does it the exact same way. Under the standards of this ad, Republican icon Ronald Reagan skipped his intelligence briefings 99 percent of the time.

It should come as no surprise that Thiessen is hawking “bogus” claims, as his own newspaper described the daily intel charge, and it’s unlikely he will show any signs of remorse. And while the Post should be commended for publicly calling out one of its own and shaming Thiessen, the paper is ultimately responsible for publishing his false claims and baseless attacks. As former Washington Post writer Dan Froomkin said in response to Kessler’s article today on Twitter, the Post op-ed page “is a facts-optional zone. Shame on them.”