Former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday that current U.S. human rights practices are an “embarrassment” and are far from policies he put in place as president to make human rights a priority for U.S. foreign policy.

Carter said U.S. detention centers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in Iraq may one day have infamy as historic places where human rights were abused such as in Argentina, Chile, Poland, South Africa and the former Soviet Union.
“This is an embarrassment to the people in my country to know that my own nation’s government now disavows the principles that were in the forefront of the world’s consciousness in the late 1970s,” said Carter, who was speaking Wednesday evening at The Carter Center during a discussion of civil rights in the former Soviet Union and the U.S.
“We have a very serious problem here,” the former president said.
Carter said that during his presidency, the objective of the U.S. government was to reduce torture, arbitrary arrest and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners. But he said that has changed in the U.S. because of the country’s war on terror.
“We know that prisoners are incarcerated now under the control of the United States without any charges made against them -- for years and years. The administration and Congress have become immune to the tragedy of human rights violations under the aegis of security,” Carter said. “We say in order for us rich folks to be secure, we can deprive others of their civil rights.”
Carter said the history of past human rights abuses must be remembered, and the American public must change its attitude to prevent the reoccurrence of other abuses.
But it’s difficult to convince people around the world that something can be done to protect human rights, said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
“How do we dig down deeper and find again the moral outrage that was the source and power of the (1970s) human rights movement?” Cox said.
Sergei Kovalev, who spent seven years at a Soviet forced labor camp and founded the first human rights foundation in the Soviet Union, said Carter’s efforts to promote human rights as part of U.S. foreign policy offered Soviet dissidents hope in the 1970s.
“It was a first and the most valiant and honorable attempt by a leader of a powerful country to announce human rights as the main priority of his foreign policy,” he said.
(Source: Associated Press).