The Bush Administration gets a lot of flack from the sinner set for unabashedly promoting religious faith. But new reports out of the Middle East remind us that until Karl Rove starts beating porn lovers and forcing them to drink chicken blood and their own urine, it's still pretty much amateur hour in the White House.

As U.S. forces and many fed-up Iraqis turn up the heat on Al Qaeda in Iraq, the methods of the terror group's morality monitors come into clearer focus. Among them: chopping the fingers off—or sometimes killing—violators of local anti-smoking bans and beating people who engage in the sexually suggestive act of placing cucumbers and tomatoes in the same grocery bag. An aid organization is reporting that people checking out porn at Internet cafés are being beaten and killed, citing a particular instance where a young student was bludgeoned with an iron bar and forced to drink chicken blood and his own urine. (For a far more disturbing report on Al Qaeda's treatment of the innocent, click here.)

The religious police have also been on a tear over in Islam's HQ, Saudi Arabia. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is coming under fire for overboard behavior, which may have led to the deaths of two men in their custody—one suspected of using alcohol, the other of being in public with a woman to whom he was not related. In a report yesterday, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef rolled his eyes at the uproar over his guardians of Islamic behavior: "You should know that the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice is one of the pillars of Islam. If we are Muslims, we should accept that. If we're not, well that's another matter."