Since his retirement by Ronald Reagan, President Carter has given active service to the causes of human rights and peace. He has written a number of books, and now he has delivered a humdinger: Our Endangered Values (Simon & Schuster, 2005) in which he takes the Bush administration to task.
Jimmy Carter is an uncommonly decent and sincere person to have gone so far in American politics. His presidency failed because it coincided in time with three crises: economic malaise resulting from the exhaustion and failure of postwar Keynesian demand management, the outburst of long-simmering hatred in Iran of US interference in Iran's internal affairs, and a run-up in the oil price (small compared to what Bush and Cheney have achieved).
President Carter finds it unpleasant to write his assessment of the Bush administration, but he steadfastly makes it clear that the Bush/Cheney/neocon "war on terror" is in fact a war on America's reputation and civil liberties. He points out that the Bush administration has used the "war on terror" to justify actions "similar to those of abusive regimes that we have historically condemned." Consequently, "the United States now has become one of the foremost targets of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life."
Carter reports that the deception, naked aggression, and torture that define the Bush administration have caused a tremendous setback for human rights throughout the world. At an international human rights conference in June 2005, "Participants explained that oppressive leaders had been emboldened to persecute and silence outspoken citizens under the guise of fighting terrorism . . . The consequence is that many lawyers, professors, doctors,and journalists had been labeled terrorists, often for merely criticizing a particular policy or for carrying out their daily work. We heard about many cases involving human rights attorneys being charged with abetting terrorists simply for defending accused persons." Carter is especially disturbed that the Bush administration is encouraging these abusive policies in the name of "fighting terrorism."
Who among us ever expected to hear an American president, vice president, and attorney general justify torture as essential to the protection of the American way of life? Carter quotes attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who sounds more like a third world tyrant than an American when he dismisses the Geneva Convention's provisions as "quaint." Bush threatened to veto any congressional limitation on his right to torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon declared that "the president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as Commander in Chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture."
It is not only Carter who is disturbed, but also members of the previous Bush administration, including the current president's own father and former National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. Carter quotes Dr. Burton J. Lee III, President George H.W. Bush's White House physician as follows:
"Reports of torture by US forces have been accompanied by evidence that military medical personnel have played a role in this abuse and by new military ethical guidelines that in effect authorize complicity by health professionals in ill-treatment of detainees. . . . Systematic torture, sanctioned by the government and aided and abetted by our own profession, is not acceptable. . . . America cannot continue down this road. Torture demonstrates weakness, not strength. . . . It is not leadership. It is a reaction of government officials overwhelmed by fear who succumb to conduct unworthy of them and of the citizens of the United States."Carter notes that the illegal detentions following 9/11 were hurriedly legalized by dubious methods which violate a number of constitutional protections of civil liberties. Carter is distressed that children as young as 8 years old are being held in indefinite detention and tortured. Confronted by Seymour Hersh, a Pentagon spokesman replied that "age is not a determining factor in detention."
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To put it a bit hyperbolically (though not by much), Carter is a Bush with a different terminology. Where Bush talks about “freedom,” Carter talks about “human rights.” Both terms in fact mean unimpeded hegemony of capital. Carter is getting worried because Bush’s overt criminality has helped raised the world’s consciousness of what “freedom” and “human rights” in the vocabulary of US governments are really about, hence undermining projects such as free trade (one of the things that Carter’s life revolves around). Recall Carter’s massive military support for Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza in the latter’s unsuccessful attempt to reverse the Sandinista Revolution by bombarding the population of his own country. Of course, any opposition to Bush's crimes is welcome. Still, I think we should be cautious about the source and reasons for the opposition.
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