From The Times Online:

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line. Carter, who has immersed himself since his presidency in Israeli-Palestinian relations, was highly critical of Israeli settlers on the West Bank, and of Israel’s refusal to talk to elected officials of the Islamic party Hamas, although he said that Israel’s security was his prime concern.

Carter, whose presidency was dominated by the 444-day siege in which Iran held 52 American diplomats hostage, said “my advice to the US would be to start talking to Iran now” to persuade it to drop its nuclear work. But he cited Israel’s nuclear arsenal - and those of the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - in arguing that Iran would find it almost impossible to develop, in secret, many weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

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Warned him? Or what? They’ll put him in Gitmo? Yah, don’t talk to them, because as you can clearly see, OUR foreign policy is working so wonderfully……we don’t need to talk to anybody we don’t like. And when we do talk, it’s in a threatening, bully manner. Get with the program Jimmah!! Seven more months of this shit.

From USA Today:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday the Bush administration explicitly warned former President Jimmy Carter against meeting with members of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that controls the Gaza Strip and which is regarded by the U.S. as a terror group.
Rice, attending a regional meeting on Iraq’s security and future, contradicted Carter’s assertions that he never got a clear signal from the State Department. Rice told reporters that the U.S. thought the visit could confuse the message that the U.S. will not deal with Hamas.

“I just don’t want there to be any confusion,” Rice said. “The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help” further a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Carter said top Hamas leaders told him during seven hours of talks in Damascus over the weekend that they are willing to live next to Israel, but a top Hamas official said the group would never outright recognize the Jewish state.

Separately Tuesday, a Hamas official said the militant group has softened its demands for a cease-fire with Israel.

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Tell it, Jimmy!

But this is kinda old news. I think most Americans were onto Dick from the beginning. Still nice though to hammer Cheney’s ass in the public arena whenever the chance presents itself.

Jimmy Carter calls Dick Cheney a ‘disaster’

Former president also says U.S. tortures prisoners

WASHINGTON - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday denounced Vice President Dick Cheney as a “disaster” for the country and a “militant” who has had an excessive influence in setting foreign policy.

Cheney has been on the wrong side of the debate on many issues, including an internal White House discussion over Syria in which the vice president is thought to be pushing a tough approach, Carter said.

“He’s a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world,” Carter told the BBC World News America in an interview to air later on Wednesday.

MSNBC News Services

And what does the Dick camp have to say about all of this?

Oh please! Anyone not toeing the republican line gets taken to the woodshed. In this case, they simply can’t argue with Carter’s statements.

MSNBC.com

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Jimmy Carter talks to Wolf AIPAC Blitzer about an attack on Iran and Bush redefining torture.

“I don’t think it, I know it, certainly,” Carter told CNN television when asked if he believed the US administration allowed the use of torture.

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A man with a brain……and compassion.

DUBLIN, Ireland - Former President Jimmy Carter accused the U.S., Israel and the European Union on Tuesday of seeking to divide the Palestinian people by reopening aid to President Mahmoud Abbas‘ new government in the West Bank while denying the same to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was addressing a human rights conference in Ireland, also said the Bush administration’s refusal to accept Hamas’ 2006 election victory was “criminal.”

Carter said Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns with Abbas’ moderate Fatah movement.

Hamas fighters routed Fatah in their violent takeover of the Gaza Strip last week. The split prompted Abbas to dissolve the power’sharing government with his rivals in Hamas and set up a Fatah-led administration to govern the West Bank.

Carter said the consensus of the U.S., Israel and the EU to start funneling aid to Abbas’ new government in the West Bank but continue blocking Hamas in the Gaza Strip represented an “effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples.”

“All efforts of the international community should be to reconcile the two, but there’s no effort from the outside to bring the two together,” he said.

More at the Houston Chronicle

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from “The Nation”
by John Nichols

How touchy is the Bush administration about criticism?

Very touchy, indeed, especially if the source of that criticism is a certain former president.

When Jimmy Carter, whose approval ratings dwarf those of George Bush these days, gets to talking about what’s wrong with the current president the White House spin machine goes into overdrive.

And Carter has been talking.

He told the conservative Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper Saturday that, “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”

Suggesting that the president has presided over an “overt reversal of America’s basic values,” Carter drew a clear line of distinction between the current Bush policies and those of another Bush who has occupied the Oval Office, former President George Herbert Walker Bush.

With his misguided approach to the war in Iraq, Carter said, Bush made a “radical departure from all previous administration policies,” including those of the president’s father.

“We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered,” explained Carter, who has long been a critic of the Bush administration but whose comments in recent days have been particularly pointed.

read more at THE NATION

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I don’t think those “28-percenters” are able to grasp honesty and truth even if they were slapped upside the head with it but, thank you, President Carter, for trying…

MSNBC.com:

Carter: Bush’s foreign policy is A-worst in history-

39th president says 43rd has done severe damage to U.S. reputation abroad

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Former President Carter says President Bush’s administration is “the worst in history” in international relations, taking aim at the White House’s policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy.

The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush’s environmental policies and the administration’s “quite disturbing” faith-based initiative funding.

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper’s Saturday editions. “The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.”

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