Jimmy Carter Says US Tortures Prisoners

by Barbara Ferguson

WASHINGTON, 12 October 2007 — No matter your opinion of former US President Jimmy Carter, you have to admit he has guts. At 83, he decided to take on the Bush administration, and took an extra punch at Vice President Dick Cheney.

In an interview broadcast Wednesday by the BBC, Carter called Cheney “a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world.”

Carter went on to say that the hawkish Cheney has been “a disaster for our country. I think he’s been overly persuasive on President George Bush.”

In the interview, Carter also criticized the Republican presidential candidates. “They all seem to be outdoing each other in who wants to go to war first with Iran, who wants to keep Guantanamo open longer and expand its capacity — things of that kind,” he said.

Carter continued his attack of the Bush administration beyond the BBC. Wednesday night he told CNN the US tortured prisoners in violation of international law, following an assertion last week from Bush that the US “does not torture.”

Bush was responding to an Oct. 4 report by The New York Times on secret Justice Department memorandums supporting the use of “harsh interrogation techniques.”

Bush defended the techniques last Friday by proclaiming: “This government does not torture people.”

Carter, the 2002 winner of the Nobel peace prize, said the interrogation methods cited, including “head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures,” constitute torture “if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored — certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.

“But you can make your own definition of human rights and say we don’t violate them, and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don’t violate them,” Carter said. “Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights,” Carter told CNN. “We’ve said that the Geneva conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we’ve said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime.”

During the interview, Carter also blasted fellow Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for refusing to commit to a full withdrawal of troops from Iraq.