Jimmy Carter, exemplar of ethical rectitude, played Nathan to George Bush's David as he castigated the president last week for conducting warrantless surveillance of suspected terrorists. Mr. Carter stood strong and tall in his condemnations and denunciations of the encroachments upon our civil liberties perpetrated by the Bush administration, who, in their perfidy, he inadvertantly likened to the Kennedy administration.
So, it comes as a minor surprise that St. Jimmy, when he was president, engaged in exactly the same nefarious behaviour for which he flogs President Bush. Here's the lead of this interesting story:
Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies. "Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign.
"And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act," he said.
The next day at Mrs. King's high-profile funeral, Mr. Carter evoked a comparison to the Bush policy when referring to the "secret government wiretapping" of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam. The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men's rights.
In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons."
That description, some Republicans say, perfectly fits the Bush administration's program to monitor calls from terror-linked people to the U.S.
I don't know what they call this sort of behavior in Georgia, Mr. Carter, but around here, it's called H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y. You can read about it in the Bible under P-H-A-R-I-S-E-E-S.
