US Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Afghanistan today to attend the inauguration of the country's first Parliament in more than 30 years and visit US troops. Cheney joined President Hamid Karzai and other dignitaries at a ceremony to swear in parliamentarians elected in September in the first parliamentary elections in Afghanistan since 1969. (AFP, Dec. 19)

But Human Rights Watch issued the following press release warning of a dark side to this ostensible move towards democracy:

On Monday, Afghanistan’s first democratically elected parliament in more than three decades will convene in Kabul. But many of the new legislators, including up to 60% of deputies in the lower house, are directly or indirectly connected to current and past human rights abuses.

Glad some hearty souls are keeping the anti-globalization flame alive, even in the post-9-11 world, and even under the heavy hand of the Chinese state. From AP Dec. 17:

Police removed hundreds of protesters who staged a sit-in that shut down one of Hong Kong's busiest streets Sunday—one day after demonstrators went on a violent rampage outside the venue for the WTO meeting in Hong Kong.

Our readers are aware that the leaders of the San José de Apartado Peace Community in Colombia have been forced to take refuge in a camp they have dubbed San Josecito (Little San José) since their village was occupied by the army following a massacre of Peace Community leaders in February. More leaders have been assassinated since then. Now come threats of yet another massacre. This urgent Dec. 15 alert from the Peace Community comes to us via the Colombian independent human rights network Red de Defensores:

At 9 AM on Dec. 14, at the bus terminal [in Apartado, the municipal seat], an inhabitant of Buenos Aires [one of the hamlets of the Peace Community] was approached by a paramilitary, who said: “I want to warn you...to get your family out of San Josesito by the end of the year, because we are planning to carry out a new massacre, it will be between the 24th and the 31st or thereabouts, we are negotiating with the police and the army so that they will not be mobilized and we can enter and leave freely, carry out the massacre rapidly...

From ITN:

A teacher has been shot dead in southern Afghanistan by suspected Taleban guerrillas after he ignored their orders to stop teaching girls.

The attack was carried out by two armed men who arrived at the secondary school in the Nad Ali district of Helmand province by motorcycle, Helmand police chief Abdul Rahman Sabir said.

"They dragged the teacher from the classroom and shot him at the school gate," he said.

From Socialism Now, the website of the Left Worker Communist Party in Iraq:

We denounce the Coward Terrorist Act
Of Kidnapping Two of our Comrades by a Militant Gang in Baghdad

On the morning of Wednesday, December 7, 2005 an armed gang of disguised men attacked our party office in Baghdad. The attack has caused the kidnapping of two comrades; Akram Faleh Khattab and Basim Khamees who were then present at the office. They were taken away to an unknown destination.

Our party, while investigating this kidnapping and its circumstances, warns the criminal gang of causing any harm to our comrades and demands their immediate release.

We recently noted how Ethiopia and Eritrea, as they mutually demonize each other, are both engaging in a crackdown on their own media. Now the Committee to Protect Journalists, in their year-end report on imprisoned journalists worldwide, finds the two Horn of Africa rivals to be the worst offendors after China and Cuba. Uzbekistan was in fifth place, while the nasty and ostracized dictatorship of Burma was tied for sixth with the Leader of the Free World—that's right, none other than the good ol' US of A.

Alert Oliver Stone. But this piece by our frequent contributor Dr. Michael I. Niman (which originally appeared Nov. 10 in ArtVoice of Buffalo, NY, and is archived on Dr. Niman's website) makes a disturbing case.

Who Killed Pat Tillman?

by Michael I. Niman

The American mass media are like tired old dogs, dutifully fetching official lies on command, dropping them like bones at the feet of an unsuspecting public. We in turn reward them by buying both the products and the myths that they sell to us. Eventually, however, the products fail and the myths unravel. When, despite the support of a compliant press, the government’s popularity wanes sufficiently, however, even old dogs can come up with new tricks, reviving the lost art of investigative reporting.

Take the Pat Tillman case. Remember him? He was the star NFL Defensive Back who, after the 9/11 attacks, walked away from his $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist as an elite Army Ranger and go off to Afghanistan to whip some terrorist butt. No matter what your opinion on the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, or your theory on who was ultimately responsible for the 9/11 attacks, Tillman was clearly acting as a selfless hero, in the traditional sense of the word. The media sang only one song at the time – dirtbags in Afghanistan did this to us, and “deterrence

The discovery of yet another clandestine torture center run by the Shi'ite-dominated Interior Ministry provides helpful propaganda to the Sunni jihadis. Around it goes. From Newsday, Dec. 13:

BAGHDAD - Five Islamic extremist groups denounced Iraq's parliamentary elections this week as a "satanic project" but stopped short of an explicit threat yesterday to attack polling stations.

Despite ongoing violence that killed at least 15 people, soldiers, patients and prisoners began voting yesterday, three days ahead of the general population.