Room 117 Kabul Hotel

More About Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe

In a June 7 Boston Globe article Pope Benedict XVI was quoted as saying that same-sex marriages are ''pseudo-matrimony," weakening marriage and gay unions are false. The Pope should read Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell  before he says another word about gay marriage. The author was a Wilson Fellow and Fullbright scholar, author and historian who taught at Yale. Boswell’s discovered Liturgies of Same Sex Unions, some of which he translated into English for his book that were practiced by the Catholic Church among others. Apparently these Liturgies were performed in the Greek language throughout what was most of the world at one time. Boswell also claimed that Roman ecclesiastics realized the ceremony was for the joining of two men in a homosexual union.

Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe contains his translation of dozens of liturgical manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Slavic and Russian sanctifying relationships between two persons of the same sex. Stored for centuries in archives as diverse as the Vatican Library and the National Library of Belgrade, the manuscripts reveal a liturgical tradition over many centuries and many churches from the 10Th to as late as the 17Th centuries.

The ceremony was the marriage of two men that shared some of the characteristics found in heterosexual marriage. For example, they are likely to include a couple at the Altar with their hands joined  while being blessed by the priest.They share Communion  and promise fidelity. It even included a feast for friends and family after wards.

Jeff Jacoby's rationale for opposing gay marriage in his May 22 op ed in the Boston Globe, he writes, ''The core of marriage has always and everywhere been the pairing of a man and a woman because no other arrangement can do what marriage does: produce the next generation." Like Pope Benedict XVI , it is unlikely he as done much research into same-sex unions in premodern Europe.

Should women fight wars is the wrong question

Should women fight wars is the question Cathy Young asks us in her oped piece, May 30. It's the wrong question. How civilized can we be if we use our teens, male and female to fight wars created by adults. How many times do you have to  see the ages of the dead soldiers. Children fight wars. What parent doesn't know how much growing up is necessary for a 19 year old to know what it means to be accountable. . Even when Young addresses the tragic loss of life for men or women in the line of duty in Iraq she overlooks the most disturbing point. Even worse, now they ask our children to die for lies! In Frank Rich's May 29 NYT piece, Ground Zero Is So Over, he answers Young's question. " The myth fostered by the administration that Saddam Hussein conspired in the 9/11 attacks is finally dead and so, apparently, is the parallel myth that Iraqis were among that day's hijackers. Our initial, post-9/11 war against Al QED - the swift and decisive victory over the Taliban - is now seen as both a discrete event and ancient history (as is the hope of nailing Asama bin Laden dead or alive); Afghanistan itself has fallen off the American radar screen except as a site for burgeoning poppy production and the deaths of detainees in American custody. In its place stands only the war in Iraq, which is increasingly seen as an add-on to the war provoked by 9/11 and whose unpopularity grows by the day."

It's time to question the idea that young people should be asked to fight in wars created by adults who have failed to even provide a genuine explanation of their flawed decision making, never mind be held accountable in any public way for sending our young people to die for their mistakes. Let's have the Congress and Senate sign up first for all wars!! How fast would the war option disappear?

Let's get negotiation on the "A" list for a change!!

You imagine things When you don't know the truth

Mary Tillman' s words regarding the added pain of losing her son in Afghanistan  because the family wasn't told the truth about how he died, was like deja vu.  It made the loss more horrible and we had heard it before from another victim of the Afghan war.This victim was the first Afghan refugee to come to the US after the Marxist coup in 1978 that inaugurated the Afghan crisis. It seemed a great irony that these two women, one and Afghan and the other an American, should discover the same truth through there quite different Afghan experience.

"It makes you feel like you're losing your mind in a way," she said. "You imagine things. When you don't know the truth, certain details can be blown out of proportion. The truth may be painful, but it's the truth. You start to contrive"                    .msnbc.msn.com/id/7946201/

It was in 1983 when we took Roger Fisher, head of the Harvard's Project on Negotiation to Kabul and discovered a negotiated settlement to the Afghan war was possible. Even after all this time, few know the circumstances of the events surrounding the Soviet involvement and even fewer that a negotiated settlement was possible. It's been hard to live with the knowledge that this terrible tragedy could have ended for the Afghan people as far back as 1983.

A new course opened for us in 1998 as we started collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali. When Sima fled Afghanistan her homeland. Since then she has tried to make sense of what happened to her country. The most difficult has been for Sima to accept that negotiation was an unused option so early on in the conflict that destroyed her county. Sima, just like Mrs. Tillman, told us that knowing the truth has helped her come to terms with the immense loss.

Sima's Afghanistan is of course gone. Moderate Afghans today need more than charity to reclaim their homeland . If for nothing else, these facts must be part of or the historical record..

Media Finally caught in its own Vietnam

SO THE MEDIA IS FINALLY IN THE HOT SEAT. OF ITS OWN MAKING . LET'S LOOK BACK TO COMPROMISE THE MEDIA ENLISTED FOR IN THE 1980'S WHEN IT CAME TO INFORMING THE PUBLIC ABOUT THE GROWING INSURGENCY IN AFGHANISTAN SET UP TO TRAP THE SOVIETS IN THEIR OWN VIETNAM. IT WORKED THEN AND ITS WORKING NOW ONLY THE VICTIM THIS TIME IS THE MEDIA ITSELF!

"Bin Laden was, though, of  a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80's he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Soviet occupation. Al-Quieda, literally" the database," was originally the computer file of 1000's of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help of the CIA to defeat the Russians.Inexplicably and with disastrous consequences it never appeared to have occurred to Washington that once the Russian's were out of the way, Bin Laden's organization would turn its attention to the west."

Robin Cook
Friday July 8, 2005

Guardian

Spooky Bit of Afghan History Trivia

There has been a flurry of news reports regarding Afghan  President Hamid Karzai's request for a formal long term military relationship with the US. Since May 10  there have been anti-US and anti- Karzai demonstrations throughout Afghanistan. The cause of the protests is reported as a result of the desecration of the Holy Koran by US guards at the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba. But Karzai also claims that foreigners are behind the protests. Historically Afghanistan has been interfered with by it's neighbors, especially Pakistan. But It was Karsai's prediction that the spread of violence will be fought with the same force that greeted the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s that we realized Karsai may be repeating a very tragic history for Afghanistan

Spooky Bit of Afghan History Trivia

Shortly after Ambassador Adolph Dubs was assassinated  in early 1979 Afghan  Foreign Minister Hafizullah Amin asked the Soviets to send a division of troops to stop interference from Pakistan. Nine months later a squad of Soviet commandos parachuted onto the grounds of the Daruluman Palace on the outskirts of Kabul - shot their way through to the beleaguered Marxist President, Hafizullah Amin and set the stage for a Soviet invasion that would rock the world. We hope that President Karzai's  recent request  for close military ties with the US to prevent such interference will not result in another catastrophe for the Afghan people as it did in 1979. 

Freedom of the Press, Afghanistan and Propaganda

The press function is a sacred tradition, in a line of succession dating back to the bards of Celtic societies. Bards functioned as official historians and genealogists, vital to the prosperity and well being of society. The bards’s praise could confirm a King or his satire could ruin the King's ability to maintain authority. As the "mediators between gods and men" they were the interpreters of Lex et Gratia, universal law and the grace that came with observing it.  Words were never wasted through overuse or misuse. The language was literally alive with "truth" that nurtured society and spoke to the soul.

We have been conditioned to believe that journalists dig out the “truth,” and get us the stories we need to know. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan Dan Rather intentionally propagandized the "truth" and compromised the role of the journalist. Then the mass media continued its own undoing by creating the illusion that the war was over when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

The events of September 11 changed a naive America and brought the US directly into the crisis that had become Afghanistan. Here was a cauldron we had watched over 20 years come to a boil, explode and explode again with hardly any media attention paid.

Something happened to journalism when the Soviets crossed their southern border. The press accepted a cover-up of a growing American role in Afghanistan and they have kept that cover-up in place for over 20 years. In 1980 it was the American media that chose to ignore what was being done to Afghanistan in the name of defeating the Soviet Union. The radical standards of self-censorship that Rather helped establish now haunt the American media as it finds itself without credibility. The journalist, the bard’s opinion is no longer of any value unless it is in the service to the state. The idea of state propaganda isn’t new. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “The democratic, Western idea of journalism is that it acts as a mirror to the world, reflecting its nature and reporting on its events, however good or bad. But the communist idea of journalism, shared by dictatorships that restrict personal freedom, is that journalism should be a tool of the state and used to ‘educate’ people. This type of journalism is called propaganda.” 

Undoing the compromise that eroded the authority and vibrancy of journalism over decades of cold war secrecy, anti-communism, bureaucratic pressure and intellectual corruption - will require journalists to demand open access to information.  But unless our media is willing to return to the status of the bard and equalize the pressure on the forces of self-interest and abuse, our freedom to know the truth will disappear. Without it we will simply cease to be a democracy. Can we afford to accept events that drive our society away from democracy without knowing the intent of the people who caused them? These are the questions that journalism should be asking of our leaders.

The world didn’t change on 9/11. What changed was only our perception of it. The terrorism that gripped Afghanistan didn’t materialize from nowhere. It was nurtured one day at a time by well-known anti-democratic forces over 20 years and then delivered into the heart of America on 9/11. But now the individuals and issues that created Afghanistan as the cauldron for Soviet destruction and the incubator for a worldwide terrorist threat have barely been brought into the picture. Even when Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed to a French magazine in 1998, that the US had been undermining its own diplomatic efforts by secretly destabilizing Afghanistan for months prior to the Soviet invasion with the intention, in Brzezinski’s words, “of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” the American press ignored it.

Until we understand the Devil’s bargain that our media struck when the Soviets entered Afghanistan, we will not realize how our freedom to know the "truth" has been severely compromised.The need for a free press to maintain a democracy was so clearly understood by America’s founding fathers that it was enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But in order to fulfill the vision of the founding fathers and truly protect the rights of Americans to know from their media what is really going on in the world we must demand a new standard.

The Death of Network News and Dan Rather

Sam Donaldson announced that Network News is Dead at the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas on 4/19. http://www.broadcastingcable.com/CA526034.html    We have news for Sam.  When it came to covering the war in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation the "Free Press" was already dead! Case in point, as far back as 1980 Dan Rather already had compromised the press by propagandizing the Afghan crisis. Throughout the Soviet occupation, Rather as managing editor and anchor of CBS Evening News broadcast faked footage of the Mujahedeen Holy Warriors fearlessly battling the evil Soviet empire. In 1989 when the Soviets withdrew, Rather never looked back at the crisis  that left the Afghan people to face the effects of the largest covert CIA operation since Vietnam all alone! The BCBeat http://www.bcbeat.com/ The Blog Of Television has a story that reveals "The FCC is making it easier to file indecency complaints." Great news but where do we file complaints about Dan Rather's use of his position at CBS News to air a political viewpoint that not only compromised the constitutionally protected press function but left the people of Afghanistan without a voice? "Freedom of the Press" has been compromised long enough. Without  a real "free press' there can be no real "Democracy."

Room 117 Dan Rather and "freedom of the press"

In the US "freedom of the press" is protected by the Constitution far better than in any other country. It's our Constitutional Right to demand more of the Press. Once the "press" is turned over to corporations they act in accord with their own business and political interests. What constitutes strict objectivity in covering the news cannot be judged by the press itself. The removal of  Dan Rather's for his use of  phony documents might have seemed impressive to some. This is not the first time Dan Rather got caught using false material. 9 months after Amb Dubs was killed in Room 117 at the Kabul Hotel in 1979 Soviets invaded Afghanistan.  Early 1980 Dan Rather had taken over as anchor of CBS New and  adopted the Afghan Mujahedeena as his personal cause. The media watchdog organization FAIR criticized CBS's Afghan coverage through the 1980's. "CBS coverage often resembled partisan war propaganda more than reporting. Rather's role appeared to be more that of a cheerleader than a journalist. Issues behind the conflict (such as Islamic fundamentalism and the role of woman) were secondary to the 'shoot-em-up' war footage. Was CBS so hungry for footage of Mujahedeen battle successes that it failed to closely scrutinize it? Did CBS make itself a tool of the guerrillas' propaganda?"  In  1981 Columbia Journalism Review article questioned why the media’s coverage of the US role in financing the insurgency went missing. Dan Rather’s April 6, 1980, 60 minutes segment was pinpointed as "consolidating popular misconceptions about the war into one high-impact, coast-to-coast broadcast. Rather accepted at face value that ‘no country is providing arms and ammunition to the Mujahadeen freedom fighters."

Stay Tuned for more on the media and Room 117..

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90% of the casualties of WW I were military

90% of the casualties of wars now are civilian

WAR IS A RACKET Smedley Butler  Major General - United States Marine Corps