AFGHANISTAN: U.S. 'sub-zero' in world opinion

The U.S. military and its allies in Afghanistan have to do a more thorough and public investigation when civilians are killed by multinational forces in their fight with the resurgent Taliban, the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights said Wednesday in San Diego.

Louise Arbour, a Canadian lawyer and former war-crimes prosecutor whose four-year term in the U.N. post expired in June, said the U.S. and NATO forces are deeply alienating the Afghan people and undercutting Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

"It's just not good enough for the Army to say, 'We've done an investigation and, contrary to what other people say, it was insurgents who were killed,' " Arbour said in an interview before a speech at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego.

Arbour said that civilian deaths, particularly those caused by aerial bombing, may be pushing people to side with the Taliban, even though the Taliban are known for ruthlessness.

TUNISIA, SAUDI ARABIA: Press freedom on the run

On Saturday evening, Tunisian Web journalist Slim Boukhidir was heading to a local Internet cafe in the city of Sfax when he was stopped by a group of men and stuffed into a French-made automobile.

He was taken first to a police station and then he found himself back in the car and heading outside of the city and into the rural hinterlands.

The car stopped and the journalist, who was freed last July after spending eight months in prison for publicly criticizing President Zine el Abidine ben Ali, was released without harm.

But not without a warning, according to an account he gave to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists:

After leaving the police station, they started insulting me and threatened to inflict on me the same fate of Libyan Internet journalist Daif Al Ghazal, kidnapped and killed in neighboring Libya in 2005.

The U.S. gets all hot and bothered about human rights abuses and suppression of speech in places such as Iran or Syria. But it has remained relatively silent about an apparent uptick in repression of journalists among its allies in the Arab world, like the staunchly pro-American Tunisia or Saudi Arabia.

ISRAEL: End of Shmita year

Next week, the Jewish year is coming to an end.

5768 has been a Shmita year, a special sabbatical observed every seventh year, during which land owned by Jews in the Land of Israel is left to lie fallow, its fruit forbidden, and most agricultural activities are forbidden. In modern times, most fresh produce in Israel is either grown in the sixth year, or grown outside the biblical geographic boundaries of the Land of Israel, or on lands owned by non-Jews- permanently, or temporarily.

Another lesser-known component of Shmita (literally 'to release', or 'drop') applies to all Jews, not only those living in Israel. "At the end of every seven years...every creditor shall release that which he has lent to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor and his brother because the Lord's release has been proclaimed" (Deuteronomy 15:1-2). In short, a debt amnesty; any private loans left outstanding at the end of the sabbatical year are considered forgiven. 

EGYPT: Judges victims of police brutality, report says

In reports of another show of Egyptian police brutality, two judges were allegedly beaten by three police officers Monday in the departure hall of the Luxor airport on grounds that they did not carry valid tickets.

According to a report in al-Masry al-Youm daily, the police tried to force the justices out of the departure hall after refusing to acknowledge their electronic tickets. The judges were insulted and punched by the policemen, according to the newspaper.

A police source speaking to the local press on condition of anonymity said that negotiations were underway to reach reconciliation. Yet, the judges said no reconciliation was conceivable and that the cops should be prosecuted.

(In photo at right, riot police chase a man during protests in the northern city of Mahalla earlier this year.)

The incident again calls attention to Egypt’s poor human rights record -- even those who mete out law and order may not be immune to abuse and humiliation. According to local human rights organizations, torture is practiced systematically by Egyptian police.

IRAN: Facts and Ahmadinejad's political rhetoric

As Americans are repeatedly being reminded during this marathon political season, all politicians stretch the truth.

But sometimes their bending of facts goes over the line.

During a lively interview with the Los Angeles Times in New York on Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiled amicably and graciously accepted a Los Angeles Dodgers cap as a small token of Angeleno courtesy.

But as politicians do throughout the world, he also made several statements that did not entirely square with publicly known facts.

[UPDATE, Sept. 24, 2008, 3 a.m. PST: A number of commenters below appear to believe that this blog item was the only article that came out of the interview. In fact, a news article and a partial transcript were also published in the paper and posted to the website. Click links above to access them.]

For example, responding to a question about Iran's economy, Ahmadinejad stated that "we do not have poor people or people who live below the poverty line to the extremes that you find in the United States," an assertion that raised eyebrows among Iran experts. 

Despite great successes in increasing literacy and public health, grave poverty still exists in the Islamic Republic, especially in rural areas on the country's eastern, southern and western fringes and in certain urban pockets.

According to the CIA World Fact Book, 40% of Iranians live below the poverty line. And 7.3% subsist on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank, even as inflation has spiraled so high in Iran that authorities are planning to lop several zeros off the Iranian rial, the national currency.

IRAQ: Female bomber cartoon stirs anger

The weekly newspaper that calls itself Al Esbuyia, or Iraq Weekly, offers a regular diet of sports, culture, features and sarcasm to readers, and one of its key features is the cartoon that accompanies each new issue. Most of the cartoons poke fun at the hardships endured by regular Iraqis, but some Iraqi lawmakers found the one published Sept. 14 to be not very amusing.

It shows a Muslim woman clad in a burka holding a burning bomb fuse in her raised left hand, a la the Statue of Liberty, who stands beside her. The drawing reflects the growing number of female suicide bombers in Iraq, but members of Iraq's parliament denounced it as an insult to Iraqi Muslim women and voted Sunday to sue the newspaper for defamation.

It's too early to say where, if anywhere, the lawsuit will go. For months, Iraqi lawmakers haven't been able to pass pressing legislation to hold provincial elections or share the nation's oil wealth, so the chances of them getting organized enough to push through a lawsuit like this seem remote.

But the action itself is another sign of the Iraqi government's prickly relationship with the media, which were hobbled for decades under Saddam Hussein. His ouster ushered in press freedom, sort of. Iraqi journalists and media company employees get gunned down, kidnapped, threatened and roughed up with alarming frequency. They also get detained and held, sometimes for months, by U.S. forces.

IRAQ: Sgt. Rafael Peralta to be remembered for bravery, not awards.

If history is any guide, the odds are against the idea that President Bush, or his successor, will overrule the Pentagon and award the Medal of Honor to Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta as several lawmakers and a Latino veterans group have suggested.

It would not be unprecedented, however. President Carter overruled his secretary of defense to bestow the medal on a Marine who fought at Guadalcanal.

But in most cases, the original decision stands, according to a report done by the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress in 1998.

The Marine Corps nominated Peralta for the Medal of Honor for having smothered a grenade during house-to-house fighting in Fallouja, Iraq, in November 2004, losing his life but saving other Marines.

Reconsiderations are best based on the discovery of new facts or some sort of problems with the process, and neither seems the case with Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision late last week to award the Navy Cross rather than the Medal of Honor.

EGYPT: The confusing fate of kidnapped tourists

The fate of 11 Europeans and eight Egyptians kidnapped by masked bandits is unfolding amid sharp rocks and painted caves in a Sahara desert that is at once sparsely majestic and disorientating -- much like the information released about the hostages by the Egyptian government.

In a confusing swirl of developments in recent days, the tourists were reported kidnapped, then freed, then not freed. The latest is that the German government is negotiating to release five Germans, five Italians, one Romanian and eight Egyptians who were snatched Friday near Gilf Al-Kebir in remote southwest Egypt.

“The location of the kidnappers has been pinpointed. It’s a no-man’s land between the Sudan, Libya and Egypt borders,” Boutros Sadiq, Sudan’s undersecretary of foreign affairs told journalists Tuesday. “We are not going to have an operation that harms the tourists.”

AFGHANISTAN: Marine colonel says Pakistani military copter helped Taliban

The Pakistani military flew helicopter missions into Afghanistan to help the Taliban during a firefight with U.S. Marines in 2007, according to a story in DefenseNews.

The story quotes Marine Lt. Col. Chris Nash, who led a U.S. team embedded with Afghan forces in the Tora Bora region on the Afghan-Pakistan border, where Al Qaida and Taliban forces are thought to be hiding.

Nash said that he and his troops did not see the Pakistani copter but received information about it from the Afghan intelligence service, which allegedly had a source in the Taliban camp. The copter flew several resupply missions to a Taliban base 10 to 12 miles inside Afghanistan during the June 2007 fight, Nash told reporter Sean Naylor.

The relationship between rogue segments of the Pakistan military and the Taliban is one of the touchier parts of the alliance between the U.S. and Pakistani governments.

Naylor's story includes a strong denial from the Pakistan Embassy in Washington.

Tony Perry, San Diego

Photo: Marine Lance Cpl. Liab Cheng in the mountains near the Pakistani border. Credit: Steve Hebert Polaris / For The Times 

IRAN: A week of war cries, sanctions talk and protests begins

A perfect storm of controversy and uproar over Iran's nuclear program is coming together this week, with three big events coinciding that could dramatically escalate tensions in the Middle East.

The biggest event, of course, is the United Nations General Assembly meeting, where both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and President Bush are scheduled to speak on Tuesday and a bunch of protests and campaigns against Iran are scheduled to begin.

The board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, is also scheduled to meet this week, with Iran a top item on its agenda.

In Iran, Jerusalem Day is coming up Friday. It's also  Sacred Defense Week, marking the Iraqi invasion of Iran and the beginning of the 1980-88 conflict that shaped the country, as well as annual Army Week. (Iran is keen on such commemorations.)

It's typically a period when Iranian leaders ramp up militaristic, anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian rhetoric that should give those opposed to Tehran's ambitions plenty of rhetorical ammunition to make the case that Iran is a menace to the region.