*effective* just sayin

LOL... -1 me :)

@ AtomicOrangutan

Da li govoris srpski?

Jimmy Carter had no moral impediment against propping up a brutal dictator, the Shah of Iran. What's the big deal about the murder of many thousands of Iranians anyway?

Don't the desperate americans make you all laugh?

They resort to Jimmy Carter right away.......

If you're going that track, alright.......

But you'll have to hang every modern leader who's ever supported or recognized any brutal dictator for the sake of diplomatic peace...

In other words--all of them.

Two examples of "what is Jimmy Carter guilty of?"

1. Guatemala:

During Carter's administration the US, via the CIA, continued to interfere in Guatemala's internal affairs, funding the activities of an elite Guatemalan army unit known as "Unit G2" which carried out politically motivated murders and assassinations. Officers of this unit were secretly paid by the CIA and worked out of the US Embassy and various safe houses belonging to the CIA. This had been going on since the 1950s but Carter did not put a stop to it.

According to Amnesty International, between 1978 and the mid 1980s, Unit G2 and another unit known as "Archivo" were responsible for the deaths of more than 110,000 Guatemalan civilians.

2. Turkey:

The US directly supported the 1980 coup in Turkey through which the military siezed power. During the coup and in the months after, at least 250,000 people were arrested. At least 50 were executed, thousands were brutally tortured, and thousands of the prisoners went missing, never to be heard from again. This violent repression of the Turkish people was supported by Carter's administration, and the military regime in Turkey went on to torture and kill thousands more people during the 1980s.

@patizcool - I was actually refering to the current stormont assembly which represents all of the North of Ireland. My point remains, the Scots and Welsh didn't use terrorist tactics and acheived devolution and the IRA did use terrorism and 'acheived' the same result. One can not therefore say that the only way to gain equality is to become terrorist.

@Maniac, in fairness, the devolved assemblies in Wales and Scotland are in part modelled after the same institution in Northern Ireland.

It could be argued that they would not exist if not for the terrorism of the IRA.

Look instead to India's independence if you want to cite a better example.

These are not war crimes. CIA activities don't go through the President for plausible deniability purposes. As far as the action in Turkey, that was military action against a government. Also not a war crime. US Troops didn't slaughter civilians nor did we sanction any action of that nature.

To say a president is a War Criminal, you must show he not only had knowledge of war crimes in action but was complicit in their commission. That means, he either ordered them or implied the US troops should commit them through back channels. Carter did neither of these. The man was an oaf, but not a war criminal.

Remember, the CIA is and was infamous for operating black ops without any oversight from Congress or the President. So throwing the war criminal label around when the man (no matter which President) has no knowledge of what happened until after the fact is an undefendable aspersion.

@Orathaic - the Welsh and Scottish Assemblies are not modelled on the North of Ireland assembly as they came into being around the same time. I take your point about India being another example of how independence can be acheived without terrorism.

My point remains that one does not have to engage in terrorism to acheive their aims and it is false to say that because a group engaged in terrorism and their aims were acheived that one always follows the other.

@maniac, my mistake on which assembly you were referring to. And I'll accept your points that independence can be achieved without terrorism and the aims of a terrorist group are not always met. However, I find it difficult to believe the same results would have occurred in Northern Ireland had it not been for the provisional IRA. Stormont and the Belfast Agreement were developed through the discussions of the British and Sinn Fein. Also, the British army was deployed to Northern Ireland during the 1969 Bogside riots. Had the IRA not renewed activities, it is likely the British army would have left much sooner and the RUC and unionists would have renewed their same old tactics,and I find the British much easier to deal with than the unionists.

"This had been going on since the 1950s but Carter did not put a stop to it."

Perhaps he couldn't, that is, perhaps he didn't have the political capital/influence/presence to pull off a stoppage of such a long-standing policy?

I'm just saying...

People far too often seem to think Presidents and PMs have King or God-like powers to do whatever an affect whatever change they like--this is NOT the case, as we're seeing with Obama's youthful enthusiasm running into a buzzsaw known as The Party of No and Status Quo (sure I'll get blasted for that, but whatever.)

And Carter certainly couldn't be called one of our stronger presidents of late...

So perhaps the project was in place and so entrenched in the system he, as Jimmy Carter, couldn't stop it?

Just an idea...

@ obiwanobiwan:

ME: "This had been going on since the 1950s but Carter did not put a stop to it."

YOU: "Perhaps he couldn't, that is, perhaps he didn't have the political capital/influence/presence to pull off a stoppage of such a long-standing policy?"

The Director of Central Intelligence (head of the CIA) during Jimmy Carter's administration was Stansfield Turner. Turner was a former Naval Academy classmate of Carter and a personal friend of his, and the decision to appoint him as head of the CIA was made by Carter not long after taking office.

So if Carter couldn't control Turner, why not? If Carter had ordered Turner to direct the CIA to stop fucking about in Guatemala, and Turner had refused, Carter could have sacked him. If Turner didn't have the power to tell his own subordinates to stop their operations in Guatemala, why not?

The President is the Commander in Chief of US forces and in terms of the CIA he directly appoints the CIA chief. He's responsible. End of.

The CIA is basically one of the most evil terror organisations the world has ever seen, and their crimes and abuses reflect on every US president since WWII.

The British and Canadian intelligence services would be just as evil if they were the hegemon. The problem is capitalism. The British overthrew Mossadegh. The Canadians overthrew Aristide.

@Jamie - The president can't order someone to stop doing something he doesn't know they are doing to begin with. The CIA Director, including Turner with Carter, has always kept the President in the dark. How do you say "Stop doing X" when you don't know X is happening to begin with and have no way of confirming it was stopped even if you did have a clue. No, you can't blame carter for the actions of the CIA anymore than you can blame a PResident for Congress overriding a veto.

CIA Directors don't keep Presidents in the dark. Anyway Jamie forgot to mention the Afghan mujihadeen and US support for the Khmer Rouge.

Is it possible for any of the INTELLIGENT Americans that we have as members to come up with anything better than "the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing" defense?

Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

They keep them in the dark when necessary. Sorry if my statement was ambiguous.

@paticool - I'm glad our opinions on terrorism seem to be converging. I'm interested by your last statement "I find the British much easier to deal with than the unionists" Are you speaking as a resident of the North of Ireland?

@ Putin33: "The British and Canadian intelligence services would be just as evil if they were the hegemon. The problem is capitalism."

Oh, absolutely. I agree with you. Despite being a British citizen I am not here to defend the UK's ill-advised foreign interventions either.