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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said on Monday the Bush administration had eroded America's global influence with its conduct in Iraq and by condoning the torture of terrorism suspects. "They have redefined torture to make it convenient for them," Carter said of the Bush administration in an interview with Reuters. "Things that are unanimously almost or globally assumed to be torture, they claim that this is not torture. I don't think there is any doubt that is what they are doing," said Carter, a Democrat who was president from 1977 to 1981. He has since been a...

Former President Jimmy Carter campaigns on behalf of his son, Jack Carter, at a public library in Henderson, Nev., Monday, Sept. 11, 2006. The former president came to town after his son, who is the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, was hospitalized. (AP Photo/Laura Rauch)

LONDON Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter criticized the British government on Thursday for quickly adopting controversial policies of the Bush administration regarding the Iraq war and the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. "I've been really disappointed in the apparent subservience of the British government's policies related to many of the serious mistakes that have been originated in Washington," Carter said in an interview BBC-TV's news show "Nightline." In the past, Carter said, British governments had used a "strong voice" to help shape joint U.S.-British policies as part of the long-standing special relationship between two of the world's greatest democracies. But under Prime Minister...

New Haven, CT (AHN)-Millionaire businessman and Democratic Ned Lamont said Wednesday the U.S. is weaker because of the war in Iraq backed by rival Sen. Joe Lieberman, and he called for shifting forces to Afghanistan and elsewhere. During a speech at Yale Law School, Lamont said, "We have sacrificed our daughters and sons and our treasure in a war we didn't have to fight. We have ignored the real threats and security needs in the war we should be fighting, the one against the terrorists. ... Senator Lieberman believes that President Bush has it right in Iraq. I believe that...

New Haven, Conn. -- Democrat Ned Lamont said Wednesday the U.S. is weaker because of the war in Iraq backed by rival Sen. Joe Lieberman, and he called for shifting forces to Afghanistan and elsewhere. "We have sacrificed our daughters and sons and our treasure in a war we didn't have to fight," Lamont said. "We have ignored the real threats and security needs in the war we should be fighting, the one against the terrorists. ... Senator Lieberman believes that President Bush has it right in Iraq. I believe that he's dangerously wrong." The Democrat, who upset the three-term...

Jack Kelly: Meet the worst ex-presidentAn odious Iranian will see Jimmy Carter on his U.S. visitSunday, September 03, 2006 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The State Department has granted a visa to Mohammad Khatami, the former president of Iran, to visit the United States.           Mr. Khatami is coming this week chiefly to attend meetings at the United Nations. He also will speak at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; at a function sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Arlington, Va., and at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. And he will meet with former president...

A few weeks ago, Jimmy Carter gave an interview to the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, mostly on the recent Lebanon conflict. It was classic Jimmy Carter -- at once moralizing and morally confused, ill-informed and preachy -- illustrating why the American people voted him out of office after just one term and the politically partisan Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize. Take first the former president’s historical illiteracy. "Under all of its [the Bush administration's] predecessors there was a commitment to peace instead of preemptive war," Carter claimed. But is that really so? What about the Spanish-American War...

LONDON, Aug 27 (Xinhua) -- Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said the Iraq invasion had subverted the fight against terrorism and instead strengthened al-Qaeda and the recruitment of terrorists, according to a British paper report on Sunday. In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, Carter said that if he had still been president, he would never have considered invading Iraq in 2003. "However, I wouldn't have excluded going into Afghanistan, because I think we had to strike at Al-Qaeda and its leadership," he said. "But then, to a major degree, we abandoned the anti-terrorist effort and went almost...

For an event that would turn a page in American history, former president Jimmy Carter has agreed in principle to host former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami for talks during his visit to the United States starting this week. Carter's term as president was dominated by the rupture in relations after the 1979 Iranian revolution and the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, where 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days until the day he left office. Iranians made the overture for the meeting, and the Carter Center in Atlanta is working on the possible timing, said Phil Wise,...

When I wrote about Jimmy Carter's antics recently, some suggested I should quit wasting my time discussing someone so irrelevant. Well, I'd be happy to comply, except that their assumption is incorrect. What this misguided and increasingly bitter man says, especially on foreign soil, does matter. Don't forget that the Democratic Party leadership embraces Carter, as witnessed by his prominent role in the party's national convention, where he called President Bush -- in no uncertain terms -- a liar. Remember that when you're tempted to think of Carter as just a benign senior statesman. I'll concede Carter has done some...

In an exclusive interview, President Carter made it plain that he sees Mr Blair's lack of leadership as being a key factor in the present crisis in Iraq, which followed the 2003 invasion - a pre-emptive move he said he would never have considered himself as president. "We now have a situation where America is so unpopular overseas that even in countries like Egypt and Jordan our approval ratings are less than five per cent. It's a shameful and pitiful state of affairs and I hold your British Prime Minister to be substantially responsible for being so compliant and subservient."...

August 21, 2006   The Honorable Jimmy Carter The Carter Center 453 Freedom Parkway Atlanta, Georgia 30307 Dear Mr. President: I just read the transcript of your interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel, in which you accuse Israel of launching an “unjustified attack on Lebanon.”   Even after the interviewer reminded you that Israel was the first to get attacked, you charged Israel with lacking “any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.” As someone who served in the White House as a spokesman for a President, I am reluctant to criticize...

In the history of any nation there are high and low points. There are events and people that make the nation proud or, frankly, cause it shame and embarrassment. I, for years, felt one of our proudest moments was Ronald Wilson Reagan telling Gorbachev, ''Tear down this wall.'' I always thought the shame of slavery would forever be our low point. That was right up until Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 and again last week when he spewed his hate-filled venom against his country and its president in Der Spiegel magazine. Jimmy, you are a disgrace to our nation....

JIMMY CARTER – A BRAIN IN NEUTRAL - REDUX © by Norman Liebmann [Note: Had it been anticipated that Georgia would one day produce a Jimmy Carter, Abe Lincoln would have the first one to endorse that state’s secession from the Union. Carter has made much of his barn building for rustics most of whom think a toilet is an indoor wishing well. Carter’s enterprise, such as it is, does not redeem his treachery, although one could hardly foretell such duplicity could be conjured up by that Tobacco Road mentality. In the light of Carter’s recent re-eruptions of treason and...

There are so many sad things to write about today but we all need the cathartic diversion of a true laughingstock, so let us talk about Jimmy Carter. Carter, by all biological indications, is still alive, so we may speak of him ill. Very, very, incurably ill. From Jan. 20, 1977, through Jan. 20, 1981, our nation endured an unpleasant, aberrant, tragicomic episode. In the somewhat confused political atmosphere subsequent to the resignation of Richard Nixon, the electorate succumbed to the blandishments of a folksy Georgia governor who espoused a form of bland centrism. The theory, presumably, was that boredom...

President Bush has pursued an "erroneous policy" that has fostered violence in the Middle East, said former President Jimmy Carter, who brokered the historic Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. "In my opinion, maybe the worst ally Israel has had in Washington has been the George W. Bush administration, which hasn't worked to bring a permanent peace to Israel," Carter said Friday during a stop in West Michigan. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, were here as part of a fundraiser for their son, Jack Carter, who is seeking a U.S. Senate seat in Nevada. The $500-a-person event, attended by...

CAIMITO, Cuba (Reuters) - They do not come to Cuba for the beaches and tropical mystique that draw more than 2 million other visitors each year. Instead they come to spend their vacations working in the countryside under a blazing sun, eating rice and beans and sharing a room without air-conditioning or toilet with seven others. They are so-called revolutionary tourists who arrive each year from about 50 countries for a "total immersion" in one of the world's few remaining socialist countries. "I call it a revolutionary vacation. I dedicate my free time to doing something concrete for the Cuban...

The longest day of my short life occurred a week and a half ago. At some point while I slept in Pullman, the sun rose Thursday morning. That evening, I watched the gray sky fade from the top of the Space Needle in Seattle. On the road back to Pullman, the early morning rays lit up the sky again on the hill down into Washtucna. It was a long road trip. What was the purpose of this borderline insane trip? Former President Jimmy Carter, of course. Eighteen members of the WSU Young Democrats had an important meeting with the man...

In his acceptance speech for the 1976 Democratic nomination, Jimmy Carter said a memorable phrase: The income tax system, he said, “is a disgrace to the human race.” It is certainly the best rhyme of Carter’s presidency, and it is still apt, because it describes Carter himself to a T. After flunking as president, Jimmy Carter has now become an unalloyed embarassment. As president Carter almost managed to drive the US economy off the road, with the highest combined inflation and unemployment rate in a half century. Even worse, it was Carter who brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, by refusing...

SEATTLE -- Former President Jimmy Carter criticized the war in Iraq on Wednesday, urging a troop drawdown as the United States enters its fourth year of conflict in Iraq. "It was a completely unnecessary war. It was an unjust war," said Carter, the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner. "It was initiated on the basis of false pretenses. All of those are true, but we can't just pre-emptively withdraw."