Thursday, Jul 18, 2013 02:03 PM -0700
Jimmy Carter: US “has no functioning democracy”
The former president weighs in on NSA and the future of Internet platforms like Google and Facebook
By Alberto Riva
 |
| Jimmy Carter (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta) |
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA spying
scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a suspension of
American democracy.
“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” he said at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored by the
Atlantik Bruecke,
a private nonprofit association working to further the German-U.S.
relationship. The association’s name is German for “Atlantic bridge.”
Carter’s remarks didn’t appear in the American mainstream press but were
reported from Atlanta by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, whose Washington correspondent
Gregor Peter Schmitz said
on Twitter he was present at the event. The story doesn’t appear in the
English-language section of the Spiegel website and is only available
in German.
The 39th U.S. president also said he was pessimistic
about the current state of global affairs, wrote Der Spiegel, because
there was “no reason for him to be optimistic at this time.” Among the
developments that make him uneasy, Carter cited the “falling of Egypt
under a military dictatorship.” As president, Carter managed to get
then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem
Begin to sign the Camp David peace agreements in 1979.
Carter
said a bright spot was “the triumph of modern technology,” which enabled
the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring; however, the NSA spying
scandal, Carter said, according to Der Spiegel, endangers precisely
those developments, “as major U.S. Internet platforms such as Google or
Facebook lose credibility worldwide.”
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