There are two US presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now one of those Nobel laureate leaders is accusing the other, though without naming him, of actions that qualify as war crimes and impeachable crimes against the US Constitution.
Former US President Jimmy Carter won his Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, long after his one term of office as President of the United States, which ran from 1977 to 1981. He won the honor primarily for his efforts to mediate conflicts and to advance democracy and human rights, the Nobel Committee said. It’s understandable that they didn’t say much — with the exception of his role in getting Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to sign the Camp David Accords — about his time as president, because Carter, a former US Navy officer, wasn’t such a peacenik back then. Think back to his botched effort to invade Iran and rescue the Americans being held by student activists inside the US Embassy in Tehran, or to his arming of the Afghan Mujahadeen to attack and try to bring down the USSR-backed government in Kabul.
President Barack Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize as president before he even had time to do anything significant in office. When the Nobel Committee gave him the award in 2009, during his first year in the White House, they couldn’t even offer a single concrete example of something he had done to actually earn it. Instead they only said that it was “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
If the members of the Nobel Committee thought, by awarding Obama the prize early, they might encourage him to be a peacemaker, they must wish there was a way they could revoke that prize now. Not long after receiving it, President Obama ordered a doubling of the number of US troops in Afghanistan, approved a brutal campaign of aggressive night-raid attacks on alleged Taliban leaders and their supporters, and later approved a secret raid by Navy SEAL commandos inside Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden.
Now Carter, the ex-president who earned his Peace Prize for actual peace activities, is castigating the current president who got his prize based on a “hope” that he would eventually earn it, saying that the Obama administration is “clearly violating” at least 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that under Obama and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, the US has been “abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights…”
Dueling Peace Laureates: Presidents Carter and Obama
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF, please to go to Press TV, where this article first appeared.