(ABC News) -- A former U.S. president is accusing the current president of sanctioning the "widespread abuse of human rights" by authorizing drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists.
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| You know things are bad when your role model turns on you |
Jimmy Carter, America's 39 th president, denounced the Obama administration for "clearly violating" 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, writing in a New York Times op-ed on Monday that the "United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights."
"Instead of making the world safer, America's violation of international
human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends," Carter
wrote.
While the total number of attacks from unmanned aircraft, or drones, and the resulting casualties are murky, the New America Foundation
estimates that in Pakistan alone 265 drone strikes have been executed
since January 2009 . Those strikes have killed at least 1,488 people, at
least 1,343 of them considered militants, the foundation estimates based on news reports and other sources.
In addition to the drone strikes, Carter criticized the current
president for keeping the Guantanamo Bay detention center open, where
prisoners "have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or
intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to
sexually assault their mothers."
The former president blasted the government for allowing "unprecedented
violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and
government mining of our electronic communications."
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