Here is Omar Khadr’s explanation to the as to why he fired his lawyers last week and declared he doesn’t recognize the authority of the Gitmo military tribunal process, as told to the tribunal itself (via CP):

Your honour, I’m boycotting this military commission because, firstly, the unfairness and unjustice of it.

I say this because not one of the lawyers I’ve had, or human rights organizations, or any person, ever say that this commission is fair or looking for justice, but on the contrary they say it’s unfair and unjust and that it has been constructed to convict detainees, not to find the truth (so how can I ask for justice from a process that does not have it or offer it) and to accomplish political and public goal.

And what I mean is when I was offered a plea bargain, it was up to 30 years which I was going to spend only five years so I asked why the 30 years. I was told it make the U.S. government look good in the public eyes and other political causes.

Secondly: The unfairness of the rules that will make a person so depressed that he will admit to alligations [sic] made upon him or take a plea offer that will satisfy the U.S. government and get him the least sentence possible and legitimize this sham process.

Therefore I will not willingly let the U.S. government use me to fulfil its goal. I have been used many times when I was a child and that’s why I’m here taking blame and paying for things I didn’t have a choice in doing but was told to do by elders.

Lastly I will not take any plea offer because it will give excuse for the government for torturing and abusing me when I was a child.

Saramago's Jesus

Back in 1962, Hugh Hefner wrote an editorial in his wildly successful skin rag that came to be known as the “Playboy Philosophy.” It’s a long, rambling and well-composed defense of what the magazine does, and among the many things Hefner wrote in it was this:

It was disconcerting when we first discovered that many of those who consider nudity and obscenity nearly synonymous often drag God’s name into the act—this struck us, and strikes us still, as a particularly blatant bit of blasphemy. The logic that permits a person to call down God’s wrath on anyone for displaying a bit of God’s own handiwork does, we must admit, escape us. If the human body—far and away the most remarkable, the most complicated, the most perfect and the most beautiful creation on this earth—can become objectionable, obscene or abhorrent, when purposely posed and photographed to capture that remarkable perfection and beauty, then the world is a far more cockeyed place than we are willing to admit.

Perhaps the rise of the religious right in the US as a political force over the last generation has put the fear of Old Testament God into the folks at Playboy; perhaps the magazine has just grown stodgy and old. But the publication’s declaration that it’s going to discontinue its Portuguese edition because the cover of the latest issue features Jesus holding a topless young lady is a clear sign that the Playboy Philosophy no longer applies.

This cover, part of a pictorial set that places Jesus in sexually suggestive situations that appears inside the issue (more pics here), is a tie-in to the recently deceased Jose Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

The book, which I haven’t read, evidently portrays Jesus as humanly fallible, and susceptible to earthly desires. Not very different, from what I can tell, from Kazantsakis’ Last Temptation of Christ. In that it’s hard to imagine Playboy shutting down an edition of its magazine for running stills from the 1988 movie of Last Temptation, I would say the magazine has either become hypocritical, or made a rash decision.

Not to mention that Saramago is a cultural god in Portugal, especially now, in the wake of his death. I would say Playboy made a mistake in potentially alienating the country from its brand by censoring Saramago, but given how quickly the company was willing to shut down the Portuguese edition, I’d say it doesn’t much care about the Portuguese market.

Playboy is, of course, free to censor itself all it wants, so long as it doesn’t attempt to censor anyone else. But given the print magazine’s struggle to find relevance in the age of Internet erotica, you’d think it would be happy to court controversy, to ruffle a few feathers and in the process attract some much-needed attention to itself. But apparently you’d be wrong.

CNN reports:

The highest-ranking official accused of collusion with gangs that terrorized the central city of Chongqing has been executed, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported.

Wen Qiang, 55, former director of the Chongqing Justice Bureau, had been convicted of corruption charges involving organized crime, Xinhua said. He was sentenced to death by a lower court April 14 for accepting bribes, shielding criminal gangs, rape and failing to account for his cash and assets, the news agency said.

Wen lost an appeal May 21. He was executed in Chongqing on Wednesday.

Setting aside the debate over the death penalty for the moment, I think China may be on to something here in its approach to corruption in government. The highest-ranking official got the stiffest penalty — the exact opposite of what we do here in the West, where the highest-ranking officials are protected and mid-level fall guys are sent to prison.

Note, also, that the “godmother” of the organized crime ring that Wen Qiang was involved in received only 18 months in jail. The courts saw a government official’s involvement in a crime ring as a far more serious crime than actually running a crime ring — and rightly so. This guy was the equivalent of a state prosecutor, after all.

In theory, the same principles should apply in the West. But to believe that they do would be delusional. Just look at Plamegate — Scooter Libby was convicted for a crime that any reasonable person would conclude fell on the shoulders of Dick Cheney. And in Canada the sponsorship scandal was even more egregious: A bunch of advertising execs went to jail, but the prime minister who presided over the government that handed out $100 million in taxpayers’ money to political allies in Montreal was absolutely immune from criticism, and even had the temerity to mock the inquiry into the scandal with a lesson in the protocols of receiving golf balls as gifts.

So China’s philosophy of actually holding accountable the people it pays to be accountable is commendable. One has to wonder, though, how far up the ladder that philosophy holds: If Premier Wen Jiabao was found to be running a smuggling racket, would China put him to death?

All the same, it would be nice to see our teetering, inflexible, corruption-ridden Western democracies take a page out of China’s book on this one.

My “No Country for Anyone Award” goes to … the Maldives, where in late May a man named Mohamed Nazim declared during a lecture that he was invoking his freedom of conscience, and leaving the Muslim faith. Nazim

was promptly attacked, taken into custody, and has been threatened with death and beheading, or other punishments for choosing his freedom of conscience.  Maldives media are reporting that it is the first time in many hundreds of years that a Maldivian has publicly renounced Islam, since Sultan King Hassan IX converted to Christianity in 1552 and was deposed. The Maldives constitution mandates that all citizens of Maldives must be Muslims.

Some time later, after undergoing “Islamic counseling” at the hands of the Maldivian government, Nazim publicly renounced his apostasy.

Nazim was brought before Maldivian media to make a statement to the press about his “reversion” to Islam, while the police are still deciding whether or not to bring criminal charges against Mohamed Nazim for choosing his freedom of conscience. A Maldivian lawyer previously told the Maldives press that Mohamed Nazim had to be given such government “Islamic counseling” before capital punishment charges were considered against Mohamed Nazim for “apostasy.”

Just as Winston Smith in 1984 could be made to believe that four fingers are really five, and just as he could be taught to embrace the all-encompassing love of Big Brother, so too was Nazim made to believe that his freedom of conscience is a perversity — one that can be easily cured by the all-encompassing love of God. (H/t P.Z. Myers)