Jimmy Carter

As a guess, I believe the term 'war criminal' or 'war crime' was coined/defined during the Nuremberg trials.

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The Nuremberg principles were a set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime.
Nuremberg principles - Wikipedia

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You've asked me this before. I'll repeat that my answer still coincides with Chomsky's . . .

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If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm

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Here's one of Chomsky's truncated lists:

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Well, what about Eisenhower? You could argue over whether his overthrow of the government of Guatemala was a crime. There was a CIA-backed army, which went in under U.S. threats and bombing and so on to undermine that capitalist democracy. I think that's a crime. The invasion of Lebanon in 1958, I don't know, you could argue. A lot of people were killed. The overthrow of the government of Iran is another one -- through a CIA-backed coup. But Guatemala suffices for Eisenhower and there's plenty more.

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Kennedy is easy. The invasion of Cuba was outright aggression. Eisenhower planned it, incidentally, so he was involved in a conspiracy to invade another country, which we can add to his score. After the invasion of Cuba, Kennedy launched a huge terrorist campaign against Cuba, which was very serious. No joke. Bombardment of industrial installations with killing of plenty of people, bombing hotels, sinking fishing boats, sabotage. Later, under Nixon, it even went as far as poisoning livestock and so on. Big affair. And then came Vietnam; he invaded Vietnam. He invaded South Vietnam in 1962. He sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing. Okay. We took care of Kennedy.

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Johnson is trivial. The Indochina war alone, forget the invasion of the Dominican Republic, was a major war crime.

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Nixon the same. Nixon invaded Cambodia. The Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia in the early '70's was not all that different from the Khmer Rouge atrocities, in scale somewhat less, but not much less. Same was true in Laos. I could go on case after case with them, that's easy.

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Ford was only there for a very short time so he didn't have time for a lot of crimes, but he managed one major one. He supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which was near genocidal. I mean, it makes Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait look like a tea party. That was supported decisively by the United States, both the diplmatic and the necessary military support came primarily from the United States. This was picked up under Carter.

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Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions. As the Indonesian atrocities increased to a level of really near-genocide, the U.S. aid under Carter increased. It reached a peak in 1978 as the atrocities peaked. So we took care of Carter, even forgetting other things.

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Reagan. It's not a question. I mean, the stuff in Central America alone suffices. Support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon also makes Saddam Hussein look pretty mild in terms of casualties and destruction. That suffices.

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Bush. Well, need we talk on? In fact, in the Reagan period there's even an International Court of Justice decision on what they call the "unlawful use of force" for which Reagan and Bush were condemned. I mean, you could argue about some of these people, but I think you could make a pretty strong case if you look at the Nuremberg decisions, Nuremberg and Tokyo, and you ask what people were condemned for. I think American presidents are well within the range.

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Unfortunately for humanity, as the examples above show, the US is highly hypocritical in its application of the Nuremberg laws:

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When Chief Justice Jackson, chief counsel for the prosecution, spoke to the tribunal and explained to them the importance of what they were doing, he said, to paraphrase, that: 'We are handing these defendants a poisoned chalice, and if we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same punishments, otherwise this whole trial is a farce.' Well, you can look at the history from then on, and we've sipped from the poisoned chalice many times, but it's never been considered a crime. So, that means we are saying that trial was a farce.
NOAM CHOMSKY - The Responsibility of Intellectuals@Arts & Opinion

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"[At Nuremberg] the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime. The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so onthose aren’t crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it’s not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defence a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we did.’ And, therefore, they weren’t sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved."
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm

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I am dismayed that many of you on this forum, whom I often found liberal/humanitarian/ethical, do not SEEM to share my low opinion of Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama regarding the war crimes they committed.

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Look at the record, says Chomsky: Obama is in many cases worse than George Bush and Tony Blair -- on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Egypt -- and would be indicted for war crimes if the Nuremburg principles were applied.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mA4HYTO790

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I cheered Omni's post above. He's right on the mark. Besides just being a thoughtful/moral person, or showing the benefits of living by the golden rule, I wish he went on to highlight the consequences of leaders who swear absolute fealty to his nation, and not being morally/ethically considerate of other peoples:BLOWBACK.Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Timothy McVeigh (every military vet with PTSD who goes on a gun rampage), ISIS, etc. Anybody remember Osama bin Laden and 9/11? Americans have such short attention spans. It SHOULD be surprising that so many americans are so desperate to expand the middle east's conflicts to Iran. The Iraq fiasco has taught us nothing.So far, and speaking for Chomsky, I think Chomsky and I can both applaud ONE action of Obama's: the diplomatic resolution of Iran's nuclear policy. Let's hope senator Schumer and the rest of the war-mongering congress doesn't derail it.

I was only trying to question the claim that Carter helped to reform the National Guard as a counter-revolutionary militia after the fall of the Somoza regime - I'm not trying to justify support for Somoza.Regarding the Red Cross planes - I can find many assertions of Carter arranging this, but no sources. I can, however, find contemporary press accounts of National Guardsmen fleeing the country in Red Cross planes - planes they seized at gunpoint. There doesn't seem to be any mention of US involvement in the case at the ICJ.

Okay, sorry caffeine, I misread your post.

Pretty much a bare link, but I thought this belonged in this topic as related reading (OSLT).Jimmy Carter: Prophetic President - TPM – Talking Points MemoA paragraph from near the beginning of a rather extended essay:

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Jimmy Carter had been an engineer. He had also been a Baptist missionary. Both identities, in their different ways, converged on the same habit of thought: that there was a Correct Way to do thingsonly one. The engineer believed that a solitary individual, working assiduously with the right tools and information, with enough ingenuity and perseverance and a clear and clever mindall of which Jimmy Carter possessedcould arrive at the right solution to any problem. And for the devout Baptist, no less than for the engineer, a conviction, once arrived at, was something to communicate, not to compromise.

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Much more at the cite.Moose