Al Qaeda Morality Runs Amok

SHARING HEARTS AND MINDS Bush and Saudi Prince Abdullah

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.)