Afghanistan Latest: US and NATO Move Towards Perpetual Commitment

Success/withdrawal is dead. Long live the new date for success/non-withdrawal.

The amnesia in most of the reporting on this week's NATO summit on Afghanistan is quite remarkable. No one mentions that, only weeks ago, President Obama's policy was for a total pull-out of US combat forces by July 2011. Instead the assumption --- pushed by the US military --- was now established: troops would remain until 2014.

And now, even more remarkably, the media is pulled along with yet another narrative: "NATO and American officials also warned that if Afghanistan had not made sufficient progress in managing its own security, 2014 was not a hard and fast deadline for the end of combat operations."

It will be a perpetual transition.

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The Latest from Iran (21 November): Human Rights and Missing Constitutions

2025 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Tehran Azad University student activist Amir Ahmad Monazemi has been sentenced to one year in prison and 74 lashes. Monazemi was arrested last December at the mourning ceremonies for Grand Ayatollah Montazeri and was held for one month before being freed on bail.

1950 GMT: Human Rights and the Hikers. So is this the other half of an Iranian strategy? Yesterday Mohammad Javad Larijani, the high-ranking Iranian judiciary official, was on American television with his assertion that he would like to see a resolution of the cases of detained US hikers Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer before a trial.

Today the lawyer for Fattal and Bauer, Masoud Shafiee, was told that they and the third US hiker Sarah Shourd --- released in September on a guarantee that she would return for trial --- would be in court on 6 February.

Possible translation? Tehran just gave the Americans a 2 1/2-month window for a negotiated release of Fattal and Bauer.

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Iran Videos: Judiciary's Larijani on Detained Sotoudeh and on US Hikers

In his public-relations tour in New York, Mohammad Javad Larijani, the head of the human rights section of the Iranian judiciary, explains to NBC television that attorney Nasrine Sotoudeh was detained in early September as "a threat to national security". The threat? "She indulged in propaganda against Islam."

In the second video, Larijani sets out a careful position on the three US hikers detained in July 2009.

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US Newsflash: Kentucky To "Rely on Almighty God" for Homeland Security (AlterNet)

Nearly every member of the Kentucky House of Representatives and Senate has signed a court brief demanding that the state be permitted to acknowledge “reliance upon Almighty God” in its Homeland Security department.

The controversy started last year after Franklin Circuit Court ruled that provisions in two laws requiring the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security to acknowledge God were a violation of church-state separation.

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Iran Witness: Sara's Return to Her Homeland

I have known of Sara for months through social media. However, I did not realise that she had recently gone back to Iran until her account appeared yesterday on Arshama3's Blog.

This is a fascinating, illuminating, and sometimes frightening account well worth reading to the conclusion of Sara's trip. Her final paragraphs:

I want to thank anyone reading this for reading. If you have any questions, please ask. I will answer them as good as I can. I know I have forgotten things or left them out, to not make a too long story.

Also I want to ask your (continued) support for Iran.

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Iran Video: US TV's June 2009 Interview with Attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh

An Internet-based resurrection yesterday....

In June 2009, the US network NBC carried a 99-second profile of and interview with defence attorney Nasrine Sotoudeh as part of a feature from Iran, "Behind the Veil". 

Until yesterday, I never knew of the programme --- which aired days before the Presidential election --- let alone the interview. But then, possibly because Iran's top official for human rights, Mohammad Javad Larijani, spoke with NBC as part of his PR campaign in New York, someone decided to bring the clip to everyone's attention.

So Nasrine Sotoudeh, who sits in a Tehran prison for no apparent reason other than defending the accused, makes an appearance of freedom:

Israel-Palestine Analysis: The Wishful Thinking Beyond Washington's Bribe to West Jerusalem

Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, has criticised both West Jerusalem and Washington over the recent US package of "incentives" to Israel in exchange for a 90-day freeze on West Bank settlement construction.

Is the package a bad idea? Possibly, but if you do not have an alternative of showing progress with the Netanyahu Government, then you either offer the carrot or wield the stick. Perhaps the Obama Administration could have challenged the "security-first" approach which Israel perpetually re-produces to impede a two-state solution. But it did not so, leaving the "bribe" as the only option. Kurtzer's argument may have intellectual merit, but in this context, it is just wishful thinking.

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The Latest from Iran (20 November): A Curious "Stability"

2033 GMT: Rafsanjani Watch. And so, at the end of the day, back to the start and our special analysis....

Mehdi Hashemi, the son of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, has edged closer to calling the Government's bluff on arresting him if he leaves London and steps foot on Iranian soil. Hashemi, in a letter to Prosecutor General Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, has said, "If you stop bargaining, I'll return to Iran to expose the liars."

2030 GMT: More "Unity" from Parliament? Ali Asgari, known as a hard-line conservative MP, has said "getting to power by immoral acts is to be condemned" and reformists should not be excluded from the Iranian system.

2020 GMT: Execution Watch (Tour of Europe Edition). Khabar Online reports that 36 Iranian lawyers will soon be visiting the European Judicial Centre. Ostensbly, the tour is to discuss comparative law; however, the specific intention is tipped off in a passage about the death sentence imposed on Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.

The Iranian attorneys will explain that execution is a legal sentence for the murder of Ashtiani's husband (actually, the sentence was initially imposed for adultery and Ashtiani was subsequently convicted of complicity in the murder, not of committing it), that execution by stoning has been suspended, and that very few people in Iran receive the stoning penalty.

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Iran Special Analysis: Grand Ayatollahs, Rafsanjani, and the Supreme Leader's Struggle for "Authority" (Azadi/Lucas)

At least nine of Qom's 12 Grand Ayatollahs have either rejected the Supreme Leader or have serious issues with him and/or his handling of the Government. Those are not good numbers for a Khamenei who wants to, once and for all, establish his authority atop the Iranian system.

Some might say that the senior clerics are peripheral in a political contest where the President and institutions like the Revolutionary Guard are trying to express and sometimes impose power. However, as long as Iran is an "Islamic" rather than "Iranian" system, the maraje carry at least a significant symbolic role.

The Supreme Leader knows that, which is why the path to Qom has been worn out in the last few weeks. And now he has another date to ponder: the 1st anniversary of the passing of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri is next months, coming only days before the religious ceremony of Ashura. Those who cannot come out on the streets to express political frustration and opposition may be considering such a display for the religious commemoration of Montazeri's death.

Security is declared, but so is the threat of sedition. Current Presidents cannot completely vanquish former Presidents. The dead still retain authority and acclaim while the living desperately seek it.

It is a most curious "stability".

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US Security: When Grandma --- and She's Not a Muslim --- is Strip-Searched, Then It's TIme to Protest (Serwer)

The Transportation Security Agency's new airport passenger-screening procedures, which force airline passengers to submit to a full-body scan or an invasive frisk, is turning Dick Cheney’s biggest fans into latter-day Ben Franklins.

The conservative, torture-friendly Washington Times, declared that "a balance must be struck between reasonable security measures and the maintenance of a free society." Abu Ghraib was a fraternity prank, but getting frisked at the airport is a sign of, to quote the Times, "Big Sister's police state." Hatred of the TSA makes for strange bedfellows, with some conservatives now sounding like card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"We're giving Americans two unpalatable options now," says ACLU legislative counsel Chris Calabrese. "They can either submit to a virtual strip search or a very aggressive grope. We've never seen that before."

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