Is there anything lovelier in human life than the sort of joy expressed by the men on the cover of today’s New York Times? “Lawyers rejoiced,” says the caption, “outside the Supreme Court in Pakistan after the suspension of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was ruled illegal.”

You could say it’s a more beautiful happiness when a mother sees her newborn child, or when a man and woman come together in love. But these things could be argued to be biological. The men on the cover of the Times are erupting over an ideal: that justice should prevail, that the will of the people matters; and that has to be very lovely even to God, if there is a God; and it’s moments like this that actually make people believe in Him/Her.

President Pervez Musharraf’s “critics had accused him of dismissing the chief justice…so as to install someone more likely to bend to his authority as the general was expected to face critical legal challenges this year to his continues rule as president and army chief of staff”—power he seized in a military coup in 1999.

“No sooner had the verdict been read out late Friday afternoon and the 13-member bench filed out, than Courtroom No. 1, packed full, exploded into revelry. Supporters fell upon Mr. Chaudhry’s chief counsel, Aitzaz Ahsan, crushing one another in a joyous scrum—a rare sight in modern-day Pakistan. They poured out of the courtroom, quivering with delight. ‘Mubarak,’ they said to one another, Urdu for congratulations. ‘Pakistan is saved,’ one man shouted.”

Mubarak!

“Asma Jehangir, chairwoman of Pakistan’s National Human Rights Commission and one of Pakistan’s best known lawyers, described Friday’s verdict as much more than a victory for judicial independence. The ruling, she said, restored hope to her country.

“’People had given up,’ she said amid embraces outside the courtroom. ‘They thought the military was invincible, unshakeable, that no one could stand up to them. Well, people have stood up to them.’

“A fellow lawyer handed her a small Pakistani flag, which she took with a smile.

“’It is a message that a dictator cannot get away with everything anymore,’ she went on.”

And on the same page, the cover of the Times, there is, alas, also this: “Rules Lay Out CIA’s Tactics in Questioning: Terror Program Allows Some Severe Methods.”

Seems the Bush White House has ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling last year that all prisoners in American captivity be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention's prohibitions against humiliating and degrading treatment. A new executive order signed by President Bush reinstates much of the CIA’s torture program. “The White House order brought condemnation on Friday from human rights groups, which argued that it helped systemize a program of indefinite, incommunicado detention and used methods that violated international law.”