Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Meet David Remes, a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling and pro bono attorney for 15 Yemenis held at Guantanamo. Since 2005, Remes, who is half Yemeni, has been a high-profile member of the legal team challenging captives' detention at Gitmo.

And now, click here -- if you dare -- to see Remes at a recent news conference where, for some inexplicable reason, he decided that dropping trou' was a good way to show the assembled press corps just what his clients have had to endure.

Just what comparison was he trying to draw? That his clients were made to stand around in their underwear? It's an utter mystery. But one enigma has been cleared up: He's not a boxers man.

U.S. Navy/Getty Images

Kudos to the Washington Post for looking into the mysterious behavior of the Yemeni government toward the guys implicated in the USS Cole bombing. As Newsweek reported last fall, Yemen even briefly let Jamal al-Badawi, the al Qaeda planner in charge of the operation, out of prison. All told, "all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials," according to the Post.

The Yemenis defend their actions, saying they have their own special approach to fighting terrorism. A few years, ago, some in the West were even seeing it as a model. But the Post article calls Yemen's terrorist rehabilitation program into question with this devastating quote:

Hamoud al-Hitar, a former Supreme Court justice... suggested that the government had turned lenient because the Cole defendants had participated in a "dialogue and reconciliation program" designed to de-radicalize al-Qaeda members.

Hitar, who oversees the program, claimed that 98 percent of graduates have remained nonviolent. Asked about two Cole suspects who escaped and went to Iraq to become suicide bombers, Hitar shrugged. "Iraq was not part of the dialogue program," he said.

If you're a man in the Banda district of India who beats your wife, demands more dowry, or otherwise mistreats women, you'd better watch out. A posse of vigilante women clad in pink saris may soon come after you, and it's going to be ugly.

The "Gulabi Gang" (Pink Gang) uses sticks (lathis) and cricket bats to "teach erring men a lesson." In one instance, they chased a woman's abusive, alcoholic husband into a sugarcane field and sorely thrashed him. They also go after corrupt government officials. Last year, they stormed a police station after cops refused to register the case of a low-caste man simply because of his social standing.

This area of India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh (the same state from which the late "bandit queen" Phoolan Devi hailed), is notorious for its ill-treatment of women and people of lower castes. Only 24 percent of women can read (compared with 50 percent of men), domestic violence is rampant, and there are just 846 females per 1,000 males (compared with the state's average of 879). Bonded labor (a.k.a. slavery) is common, lower-caste children face open discrimination at school, and government officials are corrupt.

Given these circumstances, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. Gulabi Gang founder Sampat Pal Devi, who was married off at age 9 and had her first child at 13, says:

Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials and police are corrupt and anti-poor. So sometimes we have to take the law into our own hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers. But we're not a gang in the usual sense of the term. We're a gang for justice.

Until the rule of law can be established, it looks like justice will be have to administered via grrrl power.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Someone please explain to me how this is supposed to be justice. A 23-year-old journalism student named Sayad Parwez Kambaksh supposedly goes online, finds an interesting paper, and prints it out. He supposedly brings it to class at Balkh University, discusses it with a teacher and some fellow students. The paper gets copied and distributed. Some students find it objectionable; they say it is offensive and that it insults Islam. They complain to the government.

Kambaksh is arrested in October and put in jail. He says he had nothing to do with the paper. His case goes to trial, but he has no lawyer. In fact, his family is not even aware that he's put on trial. A panel of three judges decides that he should be put to death because the paper he supposedly distributed "humiliates Islam." The Afghan Independent Journalists' Association reports that any paper in question may have downloaded from an Iranian blog, which contained articles questioning the origins of the Koran, among other controversial things.

Now, his case goes to the first of two appeal courts. But Fazel Wahab, the chief judge in the province where the trial took place, says that only President Hamid Karzai can pardon the student, since Kambaksh supposedly confessed to having violated tenets of Islam. Incidentally, Wahab has never read the paper (to be fair, he was also not on the panel that convicted Kambaksh). 

Kambaksh isn't the only Afghan journalist who's gotten into trouble with the law. Ghows Zalmai was also arrested three months ago, charged with distributing a translation of the Koran that clerics did not accept. Religious scholars have also called for him to be put to death.

At any rate, all of this raises the question: Why did the U.S. go into Afghanistan and topple the Taliban, only to have it be replaced with a system like this? So far, no comment from Karzai, who is attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. But he'd better step up.

This is the best news I've heard all week:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Taxicabs in the nation's capital will switch to meters from the current confusing zone system of calculating fares, the mayor announced Wednesday. [...]

Visitors and residents have grumbled for years about the lack of meters in district taxis, saying the zone system is confusing and vulnerable to cheating.

Before [Mayor] Fenty's announcement, the District was the only major U.S. city without taxi meters.

The decision to switch to meters or keep the current system was required by a provision inserted in legislation last year by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a longtime critic of zones.

The map used for calculating fares consists of 22 zones radiating outward from the U.S. Capitol. Each time a zone boundary is crossed, the fare goes up a few dollars. Surcharges are added for stops, rush hour travel and extra riders. The base price for a ride within one zone -- whether it's a few blocks or a few miles -- is $6.50.

When I moved to Washington last December and got in my first taxi, I thought I was back in Cairo, where having to haggle over the fare is a daily source of frustration for foreigners and locals alike. Very few people in D.C. have figured out the arcane zone system, which makes it easy for taxi drivers to charge nearly any price they want. Now, they won't be able to get away with it anymore.

I asked Brian Calvert, a reporter for Voice of America Khmer in Washington, to weigh in on today's news that a key lieutenant of the notorious Pol Pot had finally been taken into custody. Here's Brian's take:

The indictment and detention Wednesday of Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's chief lieutenant in the Khmer Rouge, for war crimes and crimes against humanity is the most significant action taken so far by a bedeviled tribunal that was established more than a year ago.

Whether or not his arrest will spell justice, and for whom, remains to be seen.

TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP

Nuon Chea, also known as Brother No. 2, was flown by helicopter Wednesday morning from his home in the mountains of northwest Cambodia and questioned in Phnom Penh, the capital, by judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the official name of the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

Nuon Chea has said he will happily face a trial. But it’s not because he regrets his actions. Rather, he sees a trial as a chance to exonerate his role in the Khmer Rouge, which called itself Democratic Kampuchea. In his view, Pol Pot’s regime was only defending the Cambodian people from Vietnamese agents and American bombs.

In reality, the Khmer Rouge used the fear of a Vietnamese takeover and of U.S. fighting in Indochina as fuel for their insurrection. After they took power, as many as 2 million people starved to death or were executed. The legacy of that regime and the civil strife that followed its ouster has been a war-battered people, a devastated infrastructure, and a country that still hasn't recovered.

Nuon Chea is widely believed to be a chief architect of the regime's murderous policies. According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has been gathering evidence in Cambodia for potential trials for a decade, Nuon Chea held posts as deputy secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party's Central Committee and as a member of the Party's Standing Committee, the bodies most responsible for policies of the regime.

TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP

Given Cambodia’s bloody history, it may be hard for many to imagine why it has been so difficult to bring Khmer Rouge figures like Nuon Chea to justice. The joint tribunal has struggled since its inception, hamstrung by bickering among U.N.-appointed international jurists and their Cambodian counterparts. Nuon Chea is only the second man to be taken into court custody. Since July, the courts have been holding Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his revolutionary name, Duch, the head of S-21, Cambodia's infamous torture center. Also known as Tuol Sleng, it's now a genocide museum for tourists.

The courts are investigating at least three more suspects for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but their names have not been released.

Will there be justice for the Khmer Rouge's victims? We just don't know. The U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, Joseph Mussomeli, recently told VOA Khmer that over the next one or two years, "we'll have at least, I would guess, somewhere around a dozen people being brought up on charges of genocide."

"There were hundreds of people who were guilty of genocide, but, frankly, you have to draw the line somewhere," he added. "You can't have the trial last for 20 years or 30 years, you can't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the trial, but you have to find at least the most responsible for genocide and bring them to trial, and I think we are now on the way to doing that."

We'll know soon enough if he is right.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

Islamabad, PAKISTAN: Pakistani lawyers celebrate the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry by offering sweets to each other outside the Supreme Court building in Islamabad, 20 July 2007.

BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images

Monday marked the start of the murder trial of Hrant Dink, the editor of a Turkish-Armenian newspaper who was shot in broad daylight outside his Istanbul office in January.

Dink's writings on the Armenian genocide had made him a target for both the Turkish government and ultra-nationalist groups. His assassination by an angry 17-year-old six months ago sparked something remarkable in the Turkish public: Thousands gathered to express solidarity with the Armenian minority and outrage against restrictions on free speech and growing ultra-nationalist sentiment. And for a fleeting second, the government seemed dedicated to real reform and perhaps even the eventual abolishment of Article 301, which was used to try to silence Dink and other famed writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak for allegedly "insulting Turkishness."

But when it finally comes time for justice to be served for Dink, things get messy. The trial, which will take place behind closed doors since the main defendant is a minor, is already attracting heavy scrutiny. Human Rights Watch warned recently that evidence presented at the trial may raise questions about possible collusion or negligence on the part of security forces. The real test for the Turkish judiciary will be if it can adequately prosecute all those involved—even if this means lifting the huge rock off some dirty internal dealings. In an article in the New York Times, Fethiye Cetin, the Dink family's lawyer, expressed his concern:

The gang does not consist of these suspects only," Ms. Cetin said of the 18 defendants, according to the news agency. "It is far more planned and organized. There is almost an intentional misconduct of the gendarmerie and police in this incident."

Ensuring that all those involved in Dink's murder are exposed and punished is essential not just for his family, but for Turkey as a country. I'm pretty sure the folks in Brussels will be following this case closely. After all, the last thing Turkey needs is another excuse for Europe to slam the door shut on Turkish membership.

What's your kidney worth to you? Prisoners in South Carolina may soon find that one of theirs is worth six months of freedom. In a new bill before the state legislature, prisoners will be given 180 days off their jail sentences if they donate a kidney or bone marrow. 

The problem is that U.S. federal law prohibits giving donors "valuable consideration" in exchange for organs. In other words, patients in need of kidneys (or middlemen) are prohibited from giving donors money or property in order to prevent an organ market from emerging.

So, does freedom count as money or property? Hard to say. But I think the scheme in South Carolina clearly violates the law because it incentivizes donating a kidney in a coercive fashion, just as a monetary payment would. It preys upon the prisoners' situation, in the same way that offering a poor person money for his kidney does. And since prisons are disproportionately full of low-income people, this is just another way of getting one class of society to provide for the health of a wealthier class—the reason why we don't want an organ market in the first place. 

Of course, the recipient rolls are still beating out the donor rolls by a mile. Perhaps there should be amendments to the law that allow incentives for dead people. Pennsylvania tried to implement a program a few years ago that would reimburse a person's family for funeral expenses if the newly deceased became a donor. Donate a kidney, let your family avoid debt for your goodbye party. Everyone's a winner.

Much has been made of what a bad recent stretch this has been for the White House. First, there was the Walter Reed debacle, then the Scooter Libby verdict. Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill plotted ways to limit President Bush's leverage in Iraq, even as the Bushes were greeted as war criminals on the first leg of their Latin America tour in São Paulo, Brazil.

Certainly, those were all blows to a White House that is, by most accounts, already demoralized. But maybe they were also the sour points that the White House wanted us to see. Even as Walter Reed and Scooter Libby received all the press, what may be the biggest and baddest scandal of the Bush presidency to date began to percolate this week, mostly under the radar.

Early in the week, we learned that two Republican members of New Mexico's Congressional delegation may have pressured former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias on cases that involved investigating Democrats. This brought more attention to the fact that Iglesias was one of eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration late last year. Seven were let go for failing to follow administration policy, and one was fired so that a politically ambitious former aide to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove could take his place, the administration has said.

At the center of all this is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who had the authority to appoint replacements that could serve indefinitely. Today, New York Times scribe Paul Krugman, who admittedly has conspiratorial tendencies, uses his column to reveal data that suggests a wider scandal may involve Gonzales and the U.S. attorneys still in office. Here's the gist:

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats.... Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny."

Yesterday, Gonzales announced that he was removing himself from the hiring process for U.S. attorneys. As Andrew Sullivan notes, that's "an astonishing concession to the gravity of the charges." Sure, to say nothing of the fact that this is a guy who, less than two years ago, was short-listed to become a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The days of the mainstream media being hands off when it comes to Gonzales are over. If more evidence of unethical and potentially illegal actions comes to light, Gonzales may have little choice but to resign. And that would make all the hype over Scooter Libby look pretty silly.

ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP

As noted in today's Morning Brief, The International Court of Justice, the U.N.'s highest legal body, has cleared Serbia of direct responsibility for what it ruled was a genocide during the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia. However, the court did rule that Serbia violated international law by not preventing the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys. The court, which rules on disputes between U.N. member states, has been deliberating on the case since May of last year. In a nuanced statement that took nearly two hours to read, British judge Rosalyn Higgins said the Srebrenica genocide "cannot be attributed to the respondent's (Serbia's) state organs."

Bosnia's case rested on the argument that Serbia incited ethnic hatred within Bosnia, armed ethnic Serbians, and actively participated in the war, which killed over 100,000 people between 1992 and 1995. Serbia has always denied the charge, insisting the war was an internal Bosnian conflict. Indeed, Serbia disputed the legality of the whole proceedings, as the U.N. had suspended Yugoslavia's membership at the time in question. Today, however, Judge Higgins ruled that Serbia had inherited Yugoslavia's "legal identity," and was thus bound by the Geneva Convention at the time of the massacre. It's doubtful that most Bosnian Muslims—who were looking for justice, not legalisms, and likely see an ethnic Serb as inseparable from the Serbian state—will be satisfied by this result.

Don't get me wrong. I think Wikipedia can be a great resource for fast information, like background on the Karbala shrine in Iraq or the name of Qaddafi's son that you can't remember. But when we check facts at FP, we deliberately exclude the community-built encyclopedia. There's just too much room for error there, and we've all found inaccuracies at one point or another—some major and some minor, but enough to leave Wikipedia off the list of reliable first sources.

Which is why I'm slightly mortified that U.S. courts are using Wikipedia articles as the basis for decisions. The NYT did a simple search recently and uncovered more than 100 judicial rulings in the past few years that rely on Wikipedia, including more than a dozen in U.S. courts of appeal (the last step before the Supreme Court). The facts gleaned from Wikipedia range from the definition of "beverage," to the official language of the Republic of Guinea, to DHS threat levels (that last one in a case about illegal searches of anti-war protesters).

But the mere fact that Wikipedia can be unstable and continually edited (admittedly with an attribution trail, but a complicated one that's susceptible to manipulation) makes it terribly vulnerable to error. It just shouldn't be used in official decisions, particularly because, as legal scholar Cass Sunstein suggested to the NYT, articles could be deliberately edited in order to influence the outcome of cases. I'm all for the courts embracing the Information Age, and I've always believed that the Constitution is a living document. But Wikipedia is just a little too dynamic for the likes of Lady Justice.  

Saddam Hussein is dead and buried, and the charges against him for the murder of as many as 180,000 Iraqi Kurds have been dropped. Nevertheless, the former dictator held center stage at yesterday's court proceedings for the remaining defendants in the Anfal case. John F. Burns reports for the NYT on how recordings played of Saddam coldly advocating the use of chemical weapons on Kurdish villages prove that the world just said goodbye to a brutal despot.

On one recording, Mr. Hussein presses the merits of chemical weapons on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice-president, and now, the Americans believe, the fugitive leader of the Sunni insurgency that has tied down thousands of American troops. Mr. Douri, a notorious hard-liner, asks whether chemical attacks will be effective against civilian populations, and suggests that they might stir an international outcry.

"Yes, they're very effective if people don't wear masks," Mr. Hussein replies.

"You mean they will kill thousands?" Mr. Douri asks.

"Yes, they will kill thousands," Mr. Hussein says. [...]

Mr. Hussein sounds matter of fact as he describes what chemical weapons will do. "They will prevent people eating and drinking the local water, and they won’t be able to sleep in their beds," he says. "They will force people to leave their homes and make them uninhabitable until they have been decontaminated." [...]

But it was Mr. Hussein's chilling discussion of the power of chemical weapons against civilians that brought prosecutors and judges to the verge of tears, and seemed to shock the remaining defendants. One of the recordings featured an unidentified military officer telling Mr. Hussein that a plan was under development for having Soviet-built aircraft carry containers, packed with up to 50 napalm bombs each, which would be rolled out of the cargo deck and dropped on Kurdish towns.

"Yes, in areas where you have concentrated populations, that would be useful," Mr. Hussein replies.

Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia has created this fascinating Google Maps mashup of the prisons where political dissidents have been locked up by the Tunisian government. When you click on a marker, legal details about the prisoners' cases pop up, along with video from the dissidents and their families.

Tunisia has a long history of human rights abuses and harsh conditions in its network of secret prisons, so publishing this much politically sensitive and hard-to-obtain information  has earned Gharbia plaudits from human rights advocates... along with the inability to return home from his exile in The Hague. The Tunisian government maintains one of the strictest online censorship regimes in the world, so it's hard to know to what extent Gharbia's map is reaching Tunisians inside the country.

Hat tip: Boing Boing