‘America has no functioning democracy at this moment’ – Jimmy Carter on NSA

http://rt.com/usa/carter-comment-nsa-snowden-261/

by sanbor • 13 years ago

262 125 13 years ago

rt.com

swombat• 13 years ago

Quick! Throw Jimmy Carter in jail! He's a terrorist sympathiser!

Alex3917• 13 years ago

I'm surprised Obama hasn't killed him with a drone yet.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Actually Carter will be done in by a rabbit.

madaxe• 13 years ago

I hear he's a godless traitor with a personality disorder!

By which I mean he's a good, well intentioned, honest man.

jivatmanx5• 13 years ago

I often see quotes by Peter T. King in these articles saying things like that, or like - "no American Muslim leaders are cooperating in the war on terror,", or "80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists .... This is an enemy living amongst us."

It's interesting to note that he was an actual terrorist financier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_I...

walshemj• 13 years ago

An hard left ones as well :-)

StefanKarpinski• 13 years ago

Jimmy Carter just gets more and more awesome.

gadders• 13 years ago

Is this satire?

ihsw3• 13 years ago

He's the reason we're in the Middle East.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine

Roboprog• 13 years ago

Carter told the truth (probably due to his background as an engineer and an actual family-business size businessman). Many people didn't like that.

Carter wanted to do something about the energy crisis and peak oil. Reagan tore down the solar panels (it's symbolic, OK?). Now we have massive debt and an attempt at empire to capture remaining fossil fuel resources, as well as a blossoming police state to wrap a bow around the package.

jliechti1• 13 years ago

I wonder if Jimmy Carter realized it would come to this when he signed the FISA into law back in 1978.

JonSkeptic• 13 years ago

I suspect that if he knew, he would not have signed it.

eliasmacpherson4• 13 years ago

Probably a good candidate for a debate on whether the slippery slope is real or imagined.

dragonwriter12• 13 years ago

If you think that FISA in 1978 started a slippery slope to the recent surveillance abuses, you don't understand what FISA did and what the state of affairs with regard to surveillance was before FISA.

dragonwriter12• 13 years ago

FISA was a law which criminalized much domestic surveillance, and placed explicit limits on notionally "foreign" surveillance, in response to abuses occurring in the 1970s (particularly, the Nixon administrations use of national security apparatus for domestic political surveillance.)

FISA wsa the law that was broken by much of the post-9/11 surveillance, and that it was the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 which weakened the restrictions put in place by FISA and immunized those who had illegally cooperated in the illegal surveillance that led up to it.

I don't think Carter was aware that FISA's restrictions would be casually cast aside within living memory of the abuses which spawned it, but I think he was quite aware of the kind of things that could happen if those restrictions were either not in place or not enforced.

sage_joch2• 13 years ago

Fun fact: if you start typing "Edward Sn..." into Google News, it will not auto-complete it. I don't know if there is an innocuous explanation, but it is consistent with a media that is trying to downplay stories like this.

roc• 13 years ago

I get "Edward Snowden" as the first suggestion after typing as little as "edw".

edit: I'm in the US; My browsers aren't configured to use google for address bar/search box searching. I may have explicitly searched for Snowden via Google at some point, but I don't really use Google for search anymore, so that feels unlikely.

Searching directly from www.google.com, I get the suggestion at "edw".

Though searching from news.google.com, I don't get an auto-suggestion, even if I type out "Edward Snowden" in its entirety.

Amusingly, at "ns" I get "NSA warrantless surveillance controversy" as the first suggestion.

dllthomas16• 13 years ago

Google News search box, or browser search bar? I am finding that the former is behaving like the parent comment said, the latter like you say.

bowmessage• 13 years ago

You must have previously searched it, or maybe aren't in the US? I get the same result as the parent comment though. Very odd.

drcube2• 13 years ago

I get instant suggestions for "Edward Snowden" on the main search site, but nothing from Google News. Suggests "Edward Sharpe" until I type the "n", then nothing.

Torgo• 13 years ago

What country are you in?

highstep• 13 years ago

I found the same thing to be true. Rest assured, google news auto-suggest doesn't filter Glee actor Cory Monteith's name.

nostromo• 13 years ago

I always liked this quote from Carter on his legacy:

"We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our international goals. We brought peace to other people, including Egypt and Israel. We normalised relations with China, which had been non-existent for 30-something years. We brought peace between US and most of the countries in Latin America because of the Panama Canal Treaty. We formed a working relationship with the Soviet Union."

vph• 13 years ago

With all due respect to Jimmy Carter, and he is a good man at heart, but he appears naive as to what is the true core of the USA. The USA has always been a country of military power. Without military power, the USA would not be what it is today. Even during peace time with the Soviet and others, the underlying military power of the US serves as an important factor to maintain that peace.

drcube2• 13 years ago

"Since WWII" is not the same thing as "always".

dragonwriter12• 13 years ago

Even during peace time with the Soviet and others, the underlying military power of the US serves as an important factor to maintain that peace.

What makes you think that Carter, who was President during that time and initiated the large military buildup that Reagan is often credited with to maintain that peace, is too naive to recognize that?

jivatmanx5• 13 years ago

The military-industrial complex was basically created from scratch in WWII (The U.S's industrial contribution to WWI was a joke). This was never de-mobilized because the Cold War began immediately after, and Europe was in no position to defend itself.

hga2• 13 years ago

His surprise at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was telling as was his overreaction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Afganistan#I...), including a grain embargo and canceling our participation in the Moscow Olympics. Followed by a big military buildup in the next term of whoever was in office; quite a shift from this first year in office quote (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Foreign_policy):

"Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed."

adventured3• 13 years ago

America in fact had a very modest military before the WW2 build-up, as others have noted.

Before it could afford that military might, it required a substantial economy to pay for it all.

Land, natural resources, enterprising & hard working immigrants, low regulation, the protections enshrined in the Constitution, ease of starting a business, labor mobility, strong judicial system, checks & balances restraining and slowing down government abuses - just a few of the actual reasons America became what it did.

dualboot• 13 years ago

I still haven't forgiven him for bringing back Selective Service.

tome• 13 years ago

Carter's being generous to himself. It was Nixon who opened up relations with China (and it probably could only have been a Republican who took that first step), and Carter presided over the mess subsequent to the incredibly disatrous Iranian revolution.

dragonwriter12• 13 years ago

Carter's being generous to himself. It was Nixon who opened up relations with China

Carter didn't claim to have opened up relations with China, he claimed to have normalized relations with China.

and it probably could only have been a Republican who took that first step

While there was a popular saying relating to that about Nixon, it doesn't really stand up too much; its hardly as if Kennedy and Johnson were perceived, at home or abroad, in ways which would have made that difficult in any way that it wouldn't be for Nixon. What really set the stage in the 1970s for the opening in relations that began under Nixon and culminated under Carter wasn't the political party of the US participants but the growing rivalry between the USSR and PRC.

znowi• 13 years ago

This relative peace was forced upon by the Cold War. It largely restrained the militant zeal from both sides.

As soon as the Soviet threat was gone, the US devised the new concept of evil - terrorism - and, with no viable checks and balances, went on fighting it around the world.

Except that, in time, the notion of terrorism became very vague and murky. Anyone is a potential target now.

btilly• 13 years ago

Forced? Forced?

His predecessor presided over the end of Vietnam, and there were plenty of casualties.

His successor was involved in lots of hot conflicts, from illegal covert operations to the invasion of Grenada to the bombing of Libya.

Why did the Cold War not keep that from happening?

ihsw3• 13 years ago

What are your thoughts on the Carter Doctrine? He effectively annexed the Middle East without all the benefits of being US territory.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine

euroclydon• 13 years ago

I think that his doctrine was influenced by what happened to Germany in WW2: they had a tremendous war machine, but were hobbled by a lack of oil. The U.S. had enough domestic oil to wage any war they needed to, but diverting that oil to war would have wrecked havoc on the global and domestic economy. That's was the state of the Cold War and the state of things today: a strategy of maintaining economic levels while simultaneously waging war.

300bps2• 13 years ago

That speech reeks of spin.

The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil.

The Soviet Union was in Afghanistan which has no oil. President Carter seems to making a very tenuous connection between Afghanistan and the Middle East.

The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow.

Looking at the Straits of Hormuz on Google Maps, it appears to be not even close to Afghanistan which isn't surprising considering Afghanistan is totally landlocked. Again, President Carter appears to be trying to link Afghanistan to the hot-button topic of the day. i.e. Stop the Soviet Union or they'll be able to stop the flow of oil!

dllthomas16• 13 years ago

He should run for President or something.

adventured3• 13 years ago

He has another term left.

melchebo• 13 years ago

He'll be 91 years old in 2016..

dllthomas16• 13 years ago

Yeah, I might've been serious if I thought he could survive the campaign...

shank8• 13 years ago

I love Jimmy Carter

sehugg• 13 years ago

The former POTUS's quote "America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time" was covered in few U.S. outlets, and initially reported in the German paper Der Spiegel in the German language.

Perhaps the most visible outlet to include the quote was The Huffington Post, but they can't be bothered to do their own translation. So they cover it via a link to The Inquisitr, which can't bring itself to validate the source, questioning the accuracy of the German newspaper Der Spiegel (which it calls "Die Spiegel").

Note: Carter made this statement in Atlanta, Georgia, not Germany.

Maybe Carter should have also said "America does not have a functioning news media at this point in time."

eeky• 13 years ago

THIS. I mostly go to RT for actual news these days. The American media is propaganda and it's killing our country with DELIBERATE misinformation.

griffordson• 13 years ago

Deliberate misinformation has a pretty long history. Here's a good report about the CIA manipulating the US media from Carl Bernstein (yes, that Bernstein) circa 1977:

http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

I agree this is causing a great deal of damage to democracy around the world, I'm just pointing out that it has been going on for a very long time.

Thanks to the Google News archive, you can see lots of examples of those CIA "journalists" advancing the interests of the CIA throughout the '50s and '60s. It is fascinating to compare that known manipulated media content to what is now contained in the historical record about those same events. You'll also see many striking similarities to the way every modern story is reported and commented on in the modern media.

foobarqux• 13 years ago

"Few" is and understatement. Searching on Google News for "no functioning democracy" yields only two recognizable US outlets: Huffington Post and The Atlantic Wire.

fnordfnordfnord2• 13 years ago

https://news.google.com/news?ned=us&q=America%20has%20no%20f...

Sad.

hga2• 13 years ago

Carter was the first Democratic President after the Church Commission, and his CIA director (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_Central_Intelligenc...) was infamous for his scorn of HUMIT and e.g. firing of 800 in operational positions in a "Halloween Massacre". I've read that today the CIA has 90% of its personal stationed in the US, and their loss of fieldcraft skills is infamous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack).

So you might say that his actions in the long term pushed us towards a dependence on what the NSA does, especially in a "War on Terror" where image reconnaissance is of limited utility.

ihsw3• 13 years ago

Financial necessity pushed us towards what the NSA does -- it's an operational imperative to cut costs, and processing the world's communications definitely cuts costs quite a bit.

Maintaining listening posts and other intelligence infrastructure is a massive economic and political undertaking, and the vacuuming of everything reduces dependence of third-parties.

diminoten11• 13 years ago

This is the stance you must take if you believe Snowden was in the right.

You must believe there is no recourse from within the system for which to correct it if you believe that acting outside of the system is a valid strategy.

I applaud Jimmy Carter for being consistent, at least.

dllthomas16• 13 years ago

I think, as a general principle, this is dead wrong. One could think an injustice so egregious that righting it needs to be pursued both within and outside the system, for instance.

diminoten11• 13 years ago

You can't believe in a system of government and also act outside of it.

The system is utterly worthless if you don't believe it can correct egregious errors. It's the mundane errors (parking tickets, etc.) which aren't so important, not the other way around.

rangibaby• 13 years ago

"Carter ran on a platform of "honesty" and was apparently the only president in American history to actually mean it. See where it got him..."

http://www.rotten.com/library/history/political-scandal/wate...

tptacek5• 13 years ago

But it totally had a functioning democracy when the President had a team of henchmen breaking into the offices of his political opponents, during an era where the Joint Chiefs had a plan to depose the President if he was unwilling to abide by impeachment.

Certainly, democracy must have flourished during the time where the administration waged an undeclared war in Central America that sponsored death squads and brokered arms deals with the Iranians, in part as an effort to undermine the campaign of the preceding incumbent President.

And democracy was no doubt stronger during the era of the Vietnam Draft.

And it absolutely had a functioning democracy during a time when the House had a committee on "Un-American Activities" that subpoena'd citizens and had them testify under penalty of perjury --- a penalty that actually imprisoned Americans --- for merely sympathizing with the aims of Communism.

And surely we had a functioning democracy during the times where voting was controlled by literacy tests --- "Question 13: Spell Backwards, Forwards" and dogs and firehoses greeted people who dared challenge enforced, legal segregation.

The idea that it's never been worse in American, because some government agency might be reading your Facebook posts, is lunacy; an insult to people who actually stood up to real malignant government power. It's an easy mistake to make: it's the availability heuristic. You understand the implications of worldwide Internet surveillance, but barely remember (if you even knew about in the first place) HUAC.

I don't know what Carter's excuse is, though; he surely knows about Watergate, Iran-Contra, HUAC, Tuskegee, COINTELPRO, and the Hoover FBI. Carter is just being a coot.

forgotAgain• 13 years ago

That president was forced to resign after public, televised House hearings showed the country what was going on.

The public Iran contra hearings exposed what happened and sent Oliver North to jail.

And democracy was no doubt stronger during the era of the Vietnam Draft.

Nightly news programs showing the war and giving the count of US deaths led to protests that ended the war and the draft.

And those public hearings ultimately led to the downfall and disgrace of McCarthy.

Would those tests have ever ended if they were not publicly known?

You're purposefully trivializing what has been going on. All of the situations you described were ended by public knowledge of what was going on. In the current case not only is there no public knowledge, there is the threat of imprisonment for those who discuss what they know publicly.

I don't know what Carter's excuse is, though; he surely knows about Watergate, Iran-Contra, HUAC, Tuskegee, COINTELPRO, and the Hoover FBI. Carter is just being a coot.

Carter has always listened to a different drummer. He's also been willing to speak for others. In this case he happens to be speaking out for us.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

You're romanticizing. It's easy to talk about how public information solved these crises in hindsight, but in reality the US government did a far better job of concealing things from the public during the 20th century than it does now. As a concrete example: the entire Vietnam War was predicated on a lie that was only fully uncovered in 2005.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

The NSA issue is just beginning. I'm not prepared at this stage, less than 2 months in, to declare a defeat for democracy.

Watergate, Iran-Contra, Vietnam, and McCarthyism each took years to run their course to a good resolution. The U.S. federal government is not optimized for speed, it's optimized to achieve the best result...eventually.

samstave2• 13 years ago

You're right. We should all just sit down, shut the fark up and let the government do whatever it wants.

We should not raise a peep against the NSA, afterall, as you state - its lunacy to think we are not better off now than we were in the past. Further, who should complain about a government agency given supposed "legal" freedom to do absolutely anything it wants with any and all human communications across the globe!

All this in a time where the reach of the US military is literally global and can kill any stated enemy combatant at the push of a button. If you're innocent little snowflake is killed in that attack, gee, sorry about that, we must have had bad intel!

So, in the end, while your comment that things were also bad "back in the day" -- this in absolutely no way should preclude anyone from complaining about the excessive, tyrannical over-reach of the NSA and the USG. So to that end, I say fuck your argument, completely because its a cop-out to the fact that the world, and the NSA in particular, have gone to far.

I want my privacy, my freedom and my safety (even from the arm of the USG) and all at the same damn time!

tptacek5• 13 years ago

Because that's exactly the point I'm making? That we should be OK with anything the US does up to coups and HUAC?

sage_joch2• 13 years ago

Individual freedom might be a difficult thing to measure quantitatively (aside from incarceration rates, which have been getting significantly worse), but Daniel Ellsberg recently argued that the Nixon era was far less threatening for whistleblowers: "Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/daniel-ellsberg-nsa-l...

SBCodeMonkey• 13 years ago

I believe you miss the point, which is summed up with this quote from the article "the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far."

Bad things have happened in the past but we shouldn't discredit what is happening now.

Just like the past, Americans as citizens of the world need to take action against the wrongs that are being done.

mapgrep• 13 years ago

Democracy has been trammeled before. This does not excuse it being trammeled again.

The scandals you list at the end of your comment had, largely if not entirely, investigations and consequences. The NSA scandals largely have not. (The chief counsel to the Director of National Intelligence got laughs when he testified that his office had tried and obviously failed to hide mass collection of phone records. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/07/nsa-admits-i... )

I would say Jimmy Carter has admirably high standards for our country, except that's not it. The rest of us, generally speaking, simply have very low ones.

baddox• 13 years ago

I didn't read Carter saying that it has never been worse in America, or even that it is worse now than at any previous moment in history, but that seems to be the sort of claim you're arguing against in this entire comment.

penguindev• 13 years ago

And we totally had a functioning democracy when nixon 'temporarily' turned the US dollar into fiat currency... so we can finance the perpetual wars, and vastly enrich the elite...

(Actually, I'm pretty sure democracy WAS functioning quite well in that instance. democracy is inherently unstable, per Aristotle)

I'm getting to really, really dislike even seeing or hearing the word 'democracy'. No coincidence, it's one of dubya's and bummer's favorite words.

ScottBurson• 13 years ago

Carter said nothing (at least, nothing quoted in this article) about this being the first such moment. You've read something into his comment that just isn't there. Unless you have an expanded quote from some other source?

I would agree that his comment is somewhat hyperbolic, but I think there's enough truth in it that I'm glad he said it. I'm also glad to see him publicly defending Snowden.

And although there certainly have been times that our government kept secrets from us that we would have wanted to know, I am inclined to think the danger is greater now. If Carter's statement wakes even one person from the complacent slumber that so many seem to be enjoying, I think it will have served its purpose.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

Carter is a nice guy. My dad really likes him. His political views are actually quite consistent with the prevailing attitudes among my liberal friends and a lot of what I read on HN. So it's extremely telling that America dislikes him. The right has an intense hatred for him, and the left is at best ashamed of him. It's also extremely telling that America, on both sides of the aisle, loves Reagan, quite the opposite of Carter, someone who espoused a militarily powerful America that wasn't afraid to get its hands dirty abroad.

Obama seems, to me, to be a democrat for "Reagan's America." Socially liberal, but as willing to blow up random people in the Middle East as anyone who has come before him. When Obama killed Bin Laden and ran with that during the 2008 campaign, I could distinctly perceive democrats thinking: "we found our Reagan." It's no surprise then, that Obama's approval ratings on his handling of the war on terror are still in the black, and are surprisingly good overall for someone whose entire presidency has been mired in a terrible economy.

That doesn't seem to me to be a democracy that isn't functioning. It seems to me to be giving people what they want.

ace_of_spades2• 13 years ago

I think you are missing the fact that's media and money telling most of the people what they should want. It's sad to say but too many don't people think for themselves... that's why public debates are necessary to help people build an opinion. I'm just glad that Snowden stepped forward and exposed this system of ruthless disinformation. I'm optimistic that now is the time where we have a chance to really make a noise about these problems that we see right now and get people to listen to more sides of the story and drive change.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

I think that's a phat cop-out. The media can steer the public narrative, but it cannot create predispositions out of whole cloth. I think Americans, especially those raised in the shadow of the cold war, have a predisposition towards wanting a militarily aggressive government. And Carter argued against that, and was reviled for it and seen as weak. I think the media steered that narrative and maybe made Carter less popular than he would otherwise be, but I don't think they created that visceral reaction in people: that his actions showed weakness on the part of America and the gut aversion to showing weakness. I think that was always there and the media just took advantage of it.

fnordfnordfnord2• 13 years ago

Makes the "USS Jimmy Carter" a rather ironic name for the submarine, given its mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_%28SSN-23%29

jingo• 13 years ago

Who cares? Life in America is great at the moment. It was great yesterday and it'll be great tomorrow. Carter is living a nice comfortable life. So can you.

How is life outside America? It's either the same or not as good. Count your blessings. Americans have it good. Land of milk and honey. Take a deep breath and breathe that glorious American air. Freedom! Love it, live it!

rogerthis2• 13 years ago

I don't trust this Castro brother's friend.

rogerthis2• 13 years ago

http://electoralmap.net/PastElections/past_elections.php?yea...

‘America has no functioning democracy at this moment’ – Jimmy Carter on NSA

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