Former Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Jimmy Carter took to the op-ed page of the New York Times
to
blast violations of human rights caused by policies continued,
ramped up or introduced by fellow former Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Barack Obama.

The former president managed to do so without referring to
Barack Obama by name at all, and referring to the president’s roles
only tangentially (e.g. “Recent legislation has made legal the
president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of
affiliation with terrorist organizations or ‘associated forces,’ a
broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight
from the courts or Congress”)

The thrust of Jimmy Carter’s argument is that anti-terror
policies pursued by the U.S. over the last decade have eroded
America’s legitimacy as an advocate for human rights on the
international arena. From his Times
op-ed:

Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones
is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women
and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30
airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President
Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice
continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in
any war zone. We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians
have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest
authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in
previous times.

These policies clearly affect American foreign policy. Top
intelligence and military officials, as well as rights defenders in
targeted areas, affirm that the great escalation in drone attacks
has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations,
aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive
governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic
behavior.

Meanwhile, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, now
houses 169 prisoners. About half have been cleared for release, yet
have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom. American
authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions,
some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been
tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with
semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault
their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a
defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred
under the cover of “national security.” Most of the other prisoners
have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either.

At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the
United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules
of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. But instead of making the world safer,
America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies
and alienates our friends.

As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse
course and regain moral leadership according to international human
rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and
cherished throughout the years.

Carter managed not to mention George W. Bush by name or his role
in all this either, but replace the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights with the Constitution, ignore the “making the world safe”
clap-trap, and there’s a decent point there. 

Reason coverage of drones, the war on terror and

Jimmy Carter

H/T Lord Humungus via the
A.M. Links