From Monday’s Wall Street Journal. As you read, remember we have preserved Islamic law in the constitutions the State Department helped draft for Afghanistan and Iraq:

A Loophole Emerges In Yemeni Campaign Against Extremists A Judge Sympathetic to U.S. Frees 19 of Its Enemies; Islamic Law Allows Jihad SANA, Yemen — The U.S. has spent millions of dollars in Yemen to help the government crack down on Islamic extremists who want to wage violent jihad against nonbelievers. There is just one problem with the strategy: It is not clear that jihad is illegal in Yemen. Last month a Yemeni judge, sitting on the state’s special terrorism court, ruled that 19 defendants who had traveled to Iraq to kill American soldiers and fight alongside al Qaeda there had done nothing wrong. The defendants — 14 Yemenis and five Saudis who had been caught with guns and fake Iraqi passports — made no attempt to deny their connection to al Qaeda in Iraq. They openly praised Osama bin Laden, and bore wounds from fighting American and Iraqi troops. Yet Judge Mohammed al-Baadani, a 40-year-old jurist with family in the U.S. and a history of handing out prison sentences to al Qaeda fighters plotting attacks in Yemen, acquitted the defendants. His argument: “Islamic Sharia law permits jihad against occupiers” of Muslim lands.The judge’s ruling prompted an immediate appeal from Yemeni prosecutors, and it outraged senior officials at the U.S. Embassy here. “I personally raised the issue with the President of the Republic and the Ministry of the Interior,” says Nabeel Khoury, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy. Yet Judge al-Baadani says that he couldn’t have ruled any differently. Yemeni law — a mixture of British colonial law, local ordinances and Islamic Sharia law — is murky on the subject of when it is permissible for Yemenis to take up arms with fellow Muslims. The country also has a long history of allowing its young men to go off to fight alongside fellow Muslims battling foreign forces in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya. For many Yemenis, jihad against foreign occupiers is an Islamic duty. Even prosecutors didn’t charge the 19 men with any crimes related to their Iraq activities. Instead, they were charged with plotting attacks against a Western hotel in Aden and other more nebulous “Western targets.””The prosecution showed no evidence of this plot,” Judge al-Baadani says. The controversial ruling highlights the challenge the U.S. faces in the Arab world when it comes to stanching the flow of violent jihadists into Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon. An internal study, prepared by the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. troops in the Middle East, estimates that about 130 foreign fighters cross into Iraq each month. Though small in number, these fighters account for some of the most horrific and divisive attacks, military officials say….