Old-School Code of Trust Ruined

Here's an article by John Hughes,former editor of The Christian Science Monitor/Pedram

The WikiLeaks dump of US embassy cables last month was a reckless act. It is a far cry from the responsible reporting on foreign affairs with which I am familiar.When I was the State Department spokesman in the Reagan administration, Bernard Kalb, then diplomatic correspondent for NBC, called me about a tip that the bad guys in Beirut, Lebanon, had captured and were holding an American CIA officer.


“Bernie,” I said, “I’ll only talk off the record about that.”
“No way,” Bernie replied, “If it’s off the record I can’t use it.”
“Well, that’s the deal,” I said. “See what your network says.”

The network agreed to the deal. I told Bernie that the officer being held was the CIA station chief in Beirut. We didn’t know whether the captors knew of his CIA association. If Bernie went with the story, the officer would certainly be killed. Honorably, the network did not run the story. Sadly, the captors tortured the officer, discovered his identity, and killed him.
The importance of relationships:
That was a classic example of trust between a diplomatic correspondent and a government official. It is the kind of relationship observed regularly between State Department officials in Washington and US diplomatic correspondents.
Sometimes the journalist is checking out a questionable rumor. Sometimes the diplomat is offering background on a situation that for good reasons cannot then, or ever, be made public. For example: Dissidents given secret sanctuary in a US embassy; a foreign diplomat barred from travel because he is actually a high-ranking intelligence officer recruiting American nuclear scientists; US diplomats caught outside the US Embassy in Tehran when it was seized by extremists, but hidden safely for months by diplomats of other countries.
Exchanges and agreements between responsible journalists and senior diplomats go on each day with clear understanding about what can, or should, be published.

The consequences:

Many of the cables revealed by WikiLeaks are of little consequence. In many respects the dispatches to Washington of US diplomats abroad echo the work of foreign correspondents. They report on formal discussions with foreign leaders, then attempt interpretations of what the motives and intentions of foreign governments may really be.
The peccadillos and peculiarities of a foreign head of state may be useful to chronicle.

One cable referred to Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and its president, Dmitry Medvedev, as Batman and Robin. Mr. Putin was not amused. But Russia is hardly likely to sever diplomatic relations. Another embassy cable lauded French President Nicolas Sarkozy as a sturdy friend of America, but also called him “mercurial.” Half a dozen French columnists might have written the same thing.
As one of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s foreign counterparts told her: “You should see what we say about you.”
Disclosure of US moves to remove a Pakistani stockpile of highly enriched uranium is much more significant. Working to keep such material from hostile hands may have been immensely important. Revealing it may jeopardize that effort.

Similarly, reports that Arab leaders privately urged the United States to take out Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity can hardly have resonated well in their capitals. During my stint in government I sat through many meetings in foreign capitals with heads of state who blasted rivals and other governments but who in public proclaimed lasting friendship with the same characters and entities.
Trusted diplomatic correspondents know how to garner information and inject their dispatches with depth and detail without embarrassing sources that must be protected.
WikiLeaks’s indiscriminate dumping of tens of thousands of purloined classified documents into the public domain for friend and foe to read is neither responsible journalism nor does it strike a blow for transparency. It is the work of a politically motivated activist intent on doing America harm.


John Hughes, a former editor of the Monitor, writes a biweekly column.

خاطرات شیرین بیمارستان رازی

اگربگویم بخش پوست بیشتر از هربخشی در اینترنی به من سخت گذشت،باور می کنید؟ مساله فقط به آن تصادف در مدخل بیمارستان رازی بر نمی گردد...فقط به برنامه بسیار شیرین کشیک های ریخته شده توسط چیف محترم برنمی گردد (فکر کنم چیف خوش تیپ دوره ی ما در حین نزدیکی با دوست دختر مربوطه این برنامه را تنظیم کرده بود،زیرا تنها نکته ای که در برنامه لحاظ شده بود حداکثر لذت برای ایشان و دوست دخترشان و3قمرشان بود !)..نه کشیک  دادن با آن دختر کامرونی که همکاری بسیار صمیمی با من داشت!!...نه... هیچ کدام از آن حوادث تلخ ونه هیچ یک از آن آدم های آشغال من ر ا آنقدر آزرده نکرد که...آن دوست قدیمی،آن به اصطلاح دوست...این یادداشت کوتاه گرامیداشت خاطره ی آزاردهنده ی توست .یادت می آید روز آخر برایم کشیک گذاشته شده بود و من با توجه به عنایات ویژه دکتر روغنی باید تا ساعت 8 صبح به صورت فیکس در و دیوار رازی را به دقت ورانداز می کردم و راس ساعت 8 کلیه وسایلم را بار میزدم و با شادابی ونشاط بخش معظم داخلی در گوشه ای دیگر از شهر ،در بیمارستان امیراعلم شروع می کردم. یادت می آید  کشیکت یک روز قبل از من بود،یادت هست که از تو خواستم (با توجه به باز بودن برنامه روز بعدت)کشیکت را با من جا به جا کنی؟ یادت هست چه  به من گفتی؟ ارزشش را داشت که این همه دروغ بگویی دوست من؟؟

البته با هیچ منطقی نمی توانستم از تو انتظار قبول بی چون و چرای این درخواست را داشته باشم، این خیلی خودخواهانه و غیر عقلانی است

اما خب من به دروغ حساسم، به هیچ وجه نمی توانم حتی یک لحظه تظاهر کنم  که تو را دوست خود می دانم...تو برای من کسی هستی مثل بقیه آدم های روزمره ی زندگیم....اگر دیگر مثل 6 سال قبل تو را دوست خودم نمی دانم ، باید از من تشکر هم بکنی، حداقل این است که با تو صادق هستم .حالا به دینامیک حاکم بر روابط انسانی بیشتر واقفم،.اکنون می دانم یک دوست  قدیمی به چه  بهایی فروخته می شود

60 Years With One Last Breath

This story about Thomas Lynch just reminded me of the debated subject of the unknown martyrs' Burial in Tehran universities.Maybe it can shed light on the psychiatric aspect of the matter.Of course if we don't follow the decent policy of making a melancholic poet out of all students !

Born to a family who ran a funeral home in small-town Michigan, the poet Thomas Lynch began pondering aging and death at a young age, as a child leafing through the gory pages of his father’s mortician texts.

“A lot of 15-year-olds think they’re going to live forever,” he said. “But when I was 15, I sort of knew I wasn’t, because I spent a lot of time at the funeral home.”
Mr. Lynch eventually joined his father’s funeral business, and now two of his sons run it. Mr. Lynch, in his early 60s, still helps out. The day we spoke, he had spent the morning on a long drive north to pick up a friend who’d died. Mr. Lynch loaded the familiar body onto the stretcher himself.
“Making the drive, bringing him home, was good duty,” he said. “Having something to do is a blessing.”
A National Book Award finalist, for “Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade,” and the subject of a 2007 “Frontline” documentary, Mr. Lynch has just published his fourth collection of poems, “Walking Papers.” It is a pilgrimage of sorts through growing old and facing death — subjects that caregivers know all too well. His upfront, unvarnished style is likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life’s most important questions.
In the book’s title poem, Mr. Lynch advises an ailing friend to put aside his lab reports and explore a different type of medicine:






I say clean your plate and say your prayers,


go out for a long walk after supper


and listen for the voice that sounds like you


talking to yourself, you know the one:


contrapuntal, measured to footfall, true


to your own metabolism. Listen –


inspiration, expiration, it’s all the same,


the sigh of creation and its ceasing -


whatever’s going to happen’s going to happen.






Mr. Lynch addresses the impermanence of life, evident in everything from farm animals to his own aging body, which he imagines dead in his bed, “a little purple on the side I sleep on.” He reminds readers that enduring death requires simply being present and handling the tasks before us: baking casseroles, writing obits, digging graves.
Mr. Lynch insists that the prospect of his own death still scares him. Yet, he told me, “Mortality as a condition is one that I don’t think we should rail too much against. Living as if you’re going to be dead sometime is more sensible than living as if you’ll live forever.”
As a child, Mr. Lynch recalls, he was regularly called out of school to help out during memorial services. The constant parades of pallbearers taught him that funerals have less to do with the dead, more to do with what the living do about the fact that loved ones have died.
Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another, Mr. Lynch believes. “If we want to avoid our grief,” he said, “we simply avoid each other.”
Mr. Lynch writes that we’re “born with our last breath in us.” “Walking Papers” brings us up against this fact and, through the simple rhythms of small town life, tells us that’s O.K.

@nytimes
by : Mary Plummer