Rudy Giuliani, Mayor Of Cairo

I see Giuliani has been elected mayor of Cairo:

CAIRO, Egypt - The footage is shocking: A man lies screaming on the floor of a police station as officers sodomize him with a wooden pole.

Compounding the shock, it turns out that it was the police who made the film, and that they then transmitted it to the cell phones of the victim's friends in order to humiliate him.

For Egypt, the ordeal of 21-year-old Emad el-Kabir has been something of a Rodney King moment — a sudden, stark glimpse of a reality which authorities routinely deny, but which human rights groups say is part of a pattern of police brutality.

But unlike the tape of the Los Angeles police beating up King in 1991, which was aired almost immediately, the attack on el-Kabir happened a year ago, and has only became public months later after an Egyptian blogger posted it on his site and it reached YouTube.

I'm sure it's difficult to see if you're el-Kabir, but this actually is good news. In order to do terrible things, gvernments must keep them secret—not just from their citizens but even from themselves. And it's harder and harder for them to do this. That's why I've always thought Peter Gabriel's Witness project is one of the most cost-effective ideas anyone's ever come up with to advance human rights.

ALSO: This reminds me of a humor piece Mike and I wrote about the Abner Louima incident in New York. It's not in Our Kampf because we felt that even for us it was a little...grim. It's true we were ridiculing the lies of the people who did it to Louima, but past a certain point it's arguably wrong for those who didn't go through it to find merriment in any aspect of this type of human depravity.

That said, if you want to read it, it's still online.