Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.
While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.
The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
via America’s Shameful Human Rights Record – NYTimes.com, written by President Jimmy Carter.
Truth and Traditions 
Better late than never from the NY Times.
The research I’ve been doing recently suggests that a lot of assassinations (“extrajudicial executing” in current lingo) has been done by previous Presidents from Eisenhower on down. But they always tried to hide it. And then Pres. Carter and Sen. Frank Church’s committee tried to stop it in the 1970s. But then Murder, Inc. took over the White House again.
This century it is OUT IN THE OPEN. What’s different now is that 8 years of Bush/Cheynie conditioned us, brainwashed us, rendered us quiet, put us deeper into this profound Collective Denial about Americans doing wrong in the world. Now, as the Times editorial notes, many millions of Americans feel no guilt or shame or remorse when women and children die in drone strikes, many are still proud of our “heroes” in the CIA, and almost no one is packing their bags to ask for citizenship elsewhere. Now we know why there were so few “good Germans” in Nazi Germany. No one wants to be on the “kill list”, no matter how far down near the bottom you might be.
Yeah, the NYTimes gets no points for daring of prescience on this one, but the editorial was signed by Jimmy Carter. That’s why I posted it.