Interview with President Jimmy Carter: Human Rights

In the fourth episode of a five-part series, former President Jimmy Carter examines human rights and the foreign policy goals of the United States. Learn more about the United States and human rights in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how Stuff Works dot com. In celebration of the reopening
at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and the
former president's eighty five birthday, we sat down with Nobel
Laureate Jimmy Carter to talk about the highlights of his

(00:21):
presidency and his hopes for the Carter Center. Do you
think the United States does a good job protecting human rights? Sometimes?
In general? We do. In the days before I became president,

(00:43):
there was a policy of America to go to bed
with all the dictators and to step out any sort
of ball demand. But will prushed people for freedom and
equality and democracy because our major American corporations would have

(01:05):
contracts with the owners off the Couple of Minds, and
they still iron Minds and the banana plantations and so forth,
so they can make more profits on those things in
pineapple and all. And they didn't want to see the
economic benefits endangered by the dictators offended to us being overthrown.

(01:28):
And a lot of those dictators military were educated at
West Point or Anapolis where our so they knew American
customs and they spoke English well, and so it was
just natural for our country to protect them and not
let them be overthrown by radical people who demanded human rights.
They were called communists and so forth. And if the

(01:53):
dictator was sometimes endangered because the people were became too strong,
the United States were sending marines into that country to
protect the dictators, and so I thought that was a mistake.
So we began to promote human rights, particularly the right
of people to demand MHM, the ability to choose their

(02:17):
own leaders, which leads to democracy. When I became president,
most of the country's in Latin American, South America, Central
America with dictators Oh now there's not a single dictatorship
in South America or Central America because human rights were

(02:41):
protected by America and we encourage the people to express
themselves through free elections to choose their own governments. All
of those democracies are not what we do with defines democracy.
They are not the measure up to our particular standard.
The fact is their all democratis now. So that's one

(03:01):
definition of human rights and that we have not in
the past protected. I hope we will continue to in
the future. And in the last administration, we had horrible
violations of human rights uh saying abou grabbed prison and
in Guantanamo where we had people arrested, taken to prison,

(03:24):
never given a chance to have a lawyer, never being
informed about what the charges were against them, never being
able to have their families visit them in prison, never
having any hope of ultimately going to trial, and that
to some degree is still going on. I hope that

(03:45):
person Obama will be able to do away with that,
and I believe he will. At the same time, we've
seen a great restraints placed inside the United States on
the freedom of American people to be not nature not
endangered by intrusion our own privacy, people listening in on

(04:06):
our telephone conversations, or American citizens being arrested and accused
of certain crimes under the under the patriotide, within which
they can be deprived of legal counsel or to confront
their accusers, or to even know what the crimes are

(04:29):
that are raised against them his accusations, and held in
isolation from their own families. We've have been done that
a few American fatilers. So the judicial system, the High courts,
Court of Appeals, and the Spin Court have been correcting
those mistakes perpetrated under the administration of President George W. Bush,

(04:54):
and I think that personal Obama is trying to undo
those mistakes. But America has a chance or temptation sometimes
to slip in its commitment to human rights when it's convenient.
All when security so called is is it threatened or
on the terrorists threats. But almost in very body, that's

(05:16):
proven to be a mistake. And one of the great
things about our democracy is that we have an ability
to correct our own mistakes with changes in leaders and
also with the stability provided by the judicial system of
our country have an ultimate voice when there is a
dispute between the executive branch that is a president and

(05:40):
the Congress. So that is now correcting very rapidly the
mistakes that we've made in the recent past. Be short
of Tune in every Wednesday in September for more of
our interview with President Carter. To learn more about the
Carter Center and its mission of waging peace, fighting disease,
and building help, visit www dot Carter Center dot org and,

(06:03):
as always, for moral miss and thousands of other topics,
visit how stafforks dot com.