The former president Jimmy Carter has declared that US drone strikes and targeted assassinations abroad have seen the country violating human rights in a way that “abets our enemies and alienates our friends”.
In a stinging attack on US foreign policy in the New York Times, Carter says America is “abandoning its role as a champion of human rights” and calls on Washington to “reverse course and regain moral leadership”.
Revelations that top US officials are targeting people, including their own citizens, abroad are “only the most recent disturbing proof” of how far such violations have extended, he says in a furious critique of the administrations of George Bush and Barack Obama.
At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the US should be strengthening, not weakening “basic rules of law and principles of justice”, Carter says in the paper on Monday. His criticisms, just months before Obama hopes to regain the White House in November’s presidential election, lambast the use of drones and detention.
Attacks on human rights after the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, have been “sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public”, says the Nobel peace prizewinner. “As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.”
For the country to get moral leadership, some leaders have to speak with moral authority. So far, there’s just Carter.
One of the saddest pubic episodes of the last decade was when Richard Durbin of Illinois made a floor statement in the Senate deploring the treatment of prisoners in the so-called War on Terror. Part of the statement is here:
The right wing kicked up a shitstorm, every other public figure ran away from Durbin, and he ended up apologizing. What sick cowards our elite are!