Jimmy Carter

Another blood-soaked emperor

With the passing of Jimmy Carter today, it is time to write about him a little. This post is not a eulogy, but it is not a black eulogy, either.

Brian O’Leary advised George McGovern for his 1968 run for the American presidency, soon after he quit NASA. Brian led a White House protest in 1970 over the war in Cambodia, and was invited into the White House to air his grievances. Brian tried to get into the Oval Office, but was stopped at the door by Haldeman. Brian became close allies of Mo Udall and was his speech writer for his run for the presidency in 1976. Udall was the early frontrunner, and then Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to win the presidency (I voted for him). The stress of the Udall campaign wrecked Brian’s marriage, and he saw that no matter how idealistic he and Udall were, they were surrounded by the power-hungry.

Just a few years earlier, David Rockefeller (whom we had run-ins with) founded the Trilateral Commission with Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski. After JFK’s murder, the American presidency was permanently demoted, and Rockefeller handpicked American presidents. The Bush family had been Rockefeller fixers for a century. Carter was a puppet from the beginning and knew it.

When he ran for president, Carter said that he saw a UFO and promised that when he became president, he would get to the bottom of it. JFK may well have been murdered over the ET issue. Steven Greer was mentored by David Rockefeller’s brother Laurance, so I can appreciate skepticism of Greer’s motivation, but Brian trusted him, and that goes a long way with me. According to Greer, and I believe him, almost as soon as he got into the Oval Office, Carter summoned the Director of Central Intelligence to the White House. Carter requested the CIA’s files on UFOs. The CIA head refused the request, telling Carter that the president did not have the authority to go on fishing expeditions like that. Carter fired him soon afterward. That fired CIA head was George H. W. Bush. Carter persisted, and Daniel Sheehan told a very interesting story of how he was recruited into Carter’s effort and how he got to see Air Force photos of crashed ET craft.

According to Greer, that persistence by Carter led to a visit from some men-in-black types who told Carter to drop the UFO issue or end up like JFK. Carter never uttered another peep on UFOs. When Bill Clinton was president, he read Greer’s briefing and one of the Friends of Bill told Greer that if Clinton had raised the UFO issue, he would have ended up like JFK, and Clinton also remained silent.

I can appreciate how strange that might seem, but in my circles, it is not strange at all. That Carter tried to get to the bottom of the UFO issue was commendable, so he got a point from me for those efforts. But his other official duties led to countless lives ended and immiserated. When Carter became president, human rights became the theme of his presidency, but he had a strange way of pursuing it. Part of it was what he inherited as president, but it can’t all be passed off like that.

Allen Dulles, a Rockefeller fixer for his entire career, who led the cover-up of JFK’s murder (JFK fired Dulles over the Bay of Pigs debacle and Dulles despised JFK), had a special role in New Guinea, as he hid its prodigious mineral wealth from JFK and the president of Indonesia, Sukarno, whom the CIA overthrew between 1965 and 1967. Sukarno’s successor, Suharto, slaughtered about a million people as he came to power, as he wiped out the Communist Party. Perhaps the only American politician who protested that bloodbath was Bobby Kennedy.

The HSCA was established before Carter was elected, as it came from the Watergate Scandal, Church Committee, and other ferment, so Carter did not initiate those investigations. Also, in December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, mere hours after Suharto was given the green light by Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger. What Indonesia did in East Timor was the greatest proportional genocide since the Nazis, and it was carried out with American weapons, diplomatic support, and it was completely ignored by the American media. Suharto also committed genocide in New Guinea.

Indonesia began running out of bullets in its completely unprovoked slaughter of the East Timorese, and the Carter administration increased its weapons and support for Indonesia. In Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s first uncensored joint book, they wrote at length on the human rights “accomplishments” of Carter, who praised Somoza as Somoza’s forces slaughtered the citizenry of Nicaragua and who called Iran in support of the Shah, immediately after the Shah’s forces slaughtered protestors. Carter could have readily ended the Iran hostage situation (and those hostages were mostly spooks), but he refused the offer.

But for all of the bloodshed in East Timor, Nicaragua, and Iran, it paled beside the greatest foreign-policy triumph of Carter’s reign: baiting the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. Brzezinski bragged about it in 1998. Millions of people died in that war, as Carter used Afghanistan as a disposable pawn to undermine the Soviet Union, and that strategy echoes today in Ukraine.

How does all of that square with being a “human rights” president who won a Nobel Peace Prize? Carter’s Nobel brethren included Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, and Barack Obama – who were all mass murderers. Should Carter and Obama be called “good emperors”?

In my view, nobody gets away with anything, and maybe Carter did enough good in the world to balance those scales, but what bloody scales.