A commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards died after an ambush on Sept. 20 by Ahwazi militants. Mehdi Bayat was killed near the Revolutionary Guards base in Hamidiyah, near Ahwaz City in western Khuzestan province, where Iran's Ahwazi Arab minority have launched a struggle for autonomy or independence. Bayat was a commanding officer responsible for training members of the Bassij militia in Khaffajiyah. The town of Khaffajiyah has witnessed a number of disturbances by Ahwazi Arab groups which have been brutally put down by the Revolutionary Guards' elite Ashura Brigades.

Former US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan famously spills the beans in his new memoir, The Age of Turbulence: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." (London Times, Sept. 16) On her blog Sept. 25, Arianna Huffington lauds leftist icon Naomi Klein for calling out Greenspan on this point in a Sept. 24 interview with him on Democracy Now: "Are you aware that, according to the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions, it is illegal for one country to invade another over its natural resources?" (Contrast Ann Coulter's "Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil! What do Hollywood celebrities imagine fuels their private jets? How do they think their cocaine is delivered to them?")

From the Center for Constitutional Rights, Sept. 24:

On September 24, 2007, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) submitted a petition to the Supreme Court asking it to intervene in the case of Libyan Guantánamo client Abdul Ra'ouf Al Qassim and prevent his transfer to Libya, where he would likely be tortured and possibly killed.

From the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 25 (links added):

WASHINGTON — A decision Monday night by a military court of review will pave the way for the Pentagon to restart its terrorism tribunals for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

On Sept. 14, dozens of immigrant workers from Haiti marched through several localities in the northwest of the Dominican Republic to demand their basic rights. The protesters, most of them undocumented agricultural workers, held signs showing newspaper articles about oppressive working conditions in the plantations. The protest was intended to be part of international observances of the Week of the Immigrant, according to the Jesuit Regino Martinez, coordinator of the organization Border Solidarity. After the march, the workers, accompanied by their wives and children, gathered in the Catholic church in Ranchadero, Montecristi province, where Martinez celebrated a mass. (El Universal, Mexico, Sept. 14 from EFE; AlterPresse, Sept. 18 from EFE)

On Sept. 21 the Mexican government's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) urged President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa to start "the gradual withdrawal" of the military from a high-profile anti-crime campaign he launched at the beginning of the year. The CNDH based its recommendations on its finding that 78 soldiers, including a colonel and a general, had been involved in human rights violations during the campaign; the abuses included rape, torture, arbitrary detention and murder.

Employment and wages declined in Mexican maquiladoras (tax-exempt assembly plants producing for export) during the 2000-2006 administration of former president Vicente Fox Quesada, according to a report by Huberto Juarez Nunez, an economics analyst at the Distinguished Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP). Employment in the sector is now at about 1.21 million, down some 135,000 from the number in 2000. The assembly plants are weak even in comparison to the rest of Mexican manufacturing, which grew only 0.6% in the first three months of this year; the maquiladoras declined by 0.1% in the same period.

On Sept. 15, some 100 people rallied outside the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, a privately-run immigration prison, to protest the treatment of immigration detainees. The rally culminated a week-long 105-mile march through six counties, organized by the Prison & Jail Project, a 15-year-old civil rights and prisoner rights advocacy group based in Americus, Georgia. The group's annual "Freedom Walk"—now in its 12th year—highlights racial and social inequities in the criminal justice system in rural southwest Georgia.