US foreign policy, drones alienating friends: Jimmy Carter

In a poignant critique of Washington’s foreign and security policies, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter has said by tolerating human rights violations and continuing drone attacks in Pakistan and several other parts of the world, America is alienating its friends.
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, Carter wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times. “But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends,” he noted.
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, Carter, the winner of 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, noted.
“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,” he questioned.
“This would have been unthinkable in previous times,” he observed.
“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.”
The United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights, he regretted in a blunt examination of the American recent and current policies.
While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past.
“With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.”
The declaration, he said, has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies, and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs.
“It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Criticizing the recent legislation that has made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or “associated forces,” he says the broad, vague power can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress (the law is currently being blocked by a federal judge).
“This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.”
In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications.
Carter is also piqued by other developments. “Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.”