Human butchery.(on the right)(against Islamic Law and human torture)

NEW YORK, MARCH 18

THE week gone by has been incessant in its reminders of human depravity, the collectivization of which was a specialty of the century gone by. There were singular acts of cruelty in old Russia, and indeed in Bismarck's Germany, but it required the resources of modern states to transform these into the Gulag of Stalin and the death camps of Hitler. Mr. Jan Egeland, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator in eastern Congo, reports that bloodshed there is the worst current humanitarian crisis. The toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has amounted to "one tsunami every six months." In December the tsunami killed 300,000 people.

A U.N. report tells of the kidnapping of hundreds of civilians from rival ethnic groups; some are tortured, the rest are forced to work as porters or sex slaves. "Several witnesses," according to Reuters, "reported cases of mutilation followed by death or decapitation."

Concurrently, Porter Goss, the head of our CIA, was reassuring Sen. Carl Levin that the deaths of four prisoners in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were hideous abnormalities. "We don't do torture," Goss said; we draw the line at "professional interrogation." A major reason for not engaging in torture, he explained, is that "torture is not productive," whereas with professional interrogation we have had demonstrated successes in averting attacks and capturing terrorist suspects.

We can, I think, accept that disavowal. As long as the kind of thing that happened at Abu Ghraib gets front-page attention and universal denunciation, bringing the perpetrators to trial and imprisonment, we are relatively chaste. But the question arises whether the U.S. and indeed the other Westem industrial democracies are working convincingly to elevate human cruelty to the rank of infamy, where it belongs.

Consider the report last week in the New York Times, a feature on "A World of Ways to Say 'Islamic Law.'" We read of the Sharia, which is the Islamic code of justice, and its concern for enforcing the law. One form of punishment against adulterers is stoning--stoning the offender to death. But listen to a detail or two from the Iranian penal code: ...