Should a Woman Cover Her Face?

I am absolutely amazed that this article has been published in the Arab News....change is a'comin'....

Should a Woman Cover Her Face?: "Worse still, there is a government body known as The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. It is known generally as the mutawaa, or religious police, and they operate all over the Kingdom without laws or written guidelines.
Their mission is to stop corruption in society, which honestly they have been doing very well. They shut down brothels, crack down on drug traffickers, and detain people who do forbidden things in our cities and towns. For that we give them credit. At the same time, complaints from the public against the narrow-mindedness of some of the organization's members are on the increase. Instead of being something to be proud of, most members of the public fear the organization as if everyone in it were phantoms or bogeymen."

He then goes on to describe an experience than many of us who have lived in Saudi have had:

I personally have had my own experiences with them. The last was a few months ago when one of them approached me and my family in the mall. The shock was not that I found two bearded young men in a public mall, yelling at women who were violating what they believe is a dress code but that the two young men were not members of the commission. “Excuse me, are you from the commission?” I asked one of them after he gave a lecture which in sum was that a woman must cover her face in public as a sign of purity.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked. And I answered, “I am from the media. And my understanding is that every commission member must wear a name tag, according to what the head, Ibrahim Al-Ghaith, said in an interview with Okaz.”
After some hesitation, he said, “No. I am not from the commission. What difference does that make? As a Muslim, you should be happy when a brother Muslim gives you advice and even if I were from the commission, what would you do?” he challenged.
For some reason, I did not want to engage in further discussion with him so I said, “Thank you for your advice” and my family and I walked away. We could still hear him yelling, “The abaya is not on the shoulders!” “Cover your face, woman”!

Now for the most astonishing part of the article:

Yesterday, a local newspaper reported that a member of the commission was sentenced to lashes and imprisonment because he had defamed a woman in public because she did not cover her face. The male member of the family refused to forgive him and brought two witnesses to court who testified that they heard the man use unprintable words to the woman. I personally have spoken to people whose family members have experienced the same treatment from members of this commission. Is this what things have come to in Saudi Arabia?