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Political Prisoners Share How Jimmy Carter Saved Their Lives

Jimmy Carter tried like no president ever had to put human rights at the center of American foreign policy. It was a turnabout dictators and dissidents alike found hard to believe as he took office in 1977. The U.S. had such a long history of supporting crackdowns on popular movements — was his insistence on restoring moral principles for real?

After Carter, now 98, entered hospice care at his home in Georgia, The Associated Press reached out to several former political prisoners, asking what it was like to see his influence take hold in countries oppressed by military rule. They credit Carter with their survival.

Michèle Montas witnessed the impact from the control room of Radio Haiti-Inter, which carefully began challenging the dictatorship of Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier after Carter said U.S. aid would depend on the growth of a civil society.

“So much was done in Haiti because of him. He managed to force the regime to open up,” Montas said.

But when they broadcast Carter’s reelection loss to Ronald Reagan in November 1980, Duvalier’s dreaded enforcers, the TonTon Macoutes, fired weapons and shouted, “Human rights are over, the cowboys are back in the White House!”

“Everyone who could move in Haiti was suddenly arrested, and the country fell into complete silence,” Montas said.

But Carter wasn’t out of office yet. Montas was put on a plane to Miami, one of a list of prominent Haitian prisoners U.S. diplomats presented to the dictator’s staff.

“We were expelled because there was a strong protest on the part of the Carter administration,” said Montas, who later became the U.N. secretary-general’s spokesperson.

Carter had been briefed by outgoing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose “realpolitik” approach meant covertly cozying up to autocrats as they terrorized their citizens. But Carter sought a new approach to winning the Cold War.

“We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear,” he announced four months into his presidency. “For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs.”

Carter also expanded the State Department’s report on human rights in each country, an annual document authoritarians loathed and feared. His Foreign Corrupt Practices Act aimed to abolish bribery by multinational corporations. And his embassies welcomed victims of state terror, documenting 15,000 disappearances in Argentina alone.

Declassified documents eventually confirmed Kissinger’s secret encouragement of Operation Condor, an effort by South America’s dictators to eliminate each other’s political opponents. Carter’s presidential daily memos, by contrast, included names and numbers of people kidnapped, imprisoned or killed.

Fernando Reati was a 22-year-old Argentine college activist when his whole family was arrested. Although his parents were released and fled into exile, he and his brother were tortured — waterboarding, beatings and stress positions — and narrowly escaped being shot by prison guards.

The U.S. government’s sudden insistence on respecting human rights came as a complete surprise to political prisoners and must have been “very mind-boggling” for Argentina’s military, said Reati.

“They didn’t believe that he was serious, because it was so hard to believe it after decades of U.S. support for all kinds of military dictatorships in Latin America,” said Reati, whose testimony helped convict his torturers of crimes against humanity.

Carter hadn’t focused on human rights until it proved to be a potent campaign issue. As president, he framed it in terms of civil and political rights, avoiding the more difficult rights to food, education and health care, and applied its principles selectively, reflecting pragmatic calculations about U.S. interests, according to historian Barbara Keys, who wrote Reclaiming American Virtue – the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s.

So while Carter was personally committed to Latin America, he maintained a hands-off approach in Southeast Asia after the U.S. pullout from Vietnam — and his record there suffered for it.

Despite emerging evidence of brutality, Carter waited until 1978 to declare that Cambodia’s bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge was “the worst violator of human rights in the world.” Their nearly four-year reign of terror, from 1975-79, ultimately killed more than 1.7 million people.

In Africa, however, his post-presidential Carter Center helped transform societies by fostering grassroots activism and social justice through public health initiatives, said Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, a former director of Africa Watch who taught human rights law at Emory University in Atlanta.

An-Naim was a University of Khartoum professor advocating for a Sharia that guarantees women’s equality when the dictator of Sudan, Jaafar al-Nimeiri, decreed a draconian version of Quranic principles. To stifle dissent in the religiously diverse country, al-Nimeiri detained An-Naim and 50 colleagues for 18 months without charges.

At another scholar’s request, Carter wrote a personal appeal. Al-Nimeiri became extremely angry and screamed about traitors and enemies, but “we were released without charge, without trial, without a word,” An-Naim said. “It is Carter the human being who did this.”
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AP Interview: Ukraine, Democracy ‘Must Win,’ Says Pelosi

“We thought we could die.”

The Russian invasion had just begun when Nancy Pelosi made a surprise visit to Ukraine, the House speaker then the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to lead a congressional delegation to Kyiv.

Pelosi and the lawmakers were ushered under the cloak of secrecy into the capital city, an undisclosed passage that even to this day she will not divulge.

“It was very, it was dangerous,” Pelosi told The Associated Press before Sunday’s one-year anniversary of that trip.

“We never feared about it, but we thought we could die because we’re visiting a serious, serious war zone,” Pelosi said. “We had great protection, but nonetheless, a war — theater of war.”

Pelosi’s visit was as unusual as it was historic, opening a fresh diplomatic channel between the U.S. and Ukraine that has only deepened with the prolonged war. In the year since, a long list of congressional leaders, senators and chairs of powerful committees, both Democrats and Republicans, followed her lead, punctuated by President Joe Biden’s own visit this year.

The steady stream of arrivals in Kyiv has served to amplify a political and military partnership between the U.S. and Ukraine for the world to see, one that will be tested anew when Congress is again expected this year to help fund the war to defeat Russia.

“We must win. We must bring this to a positive conclusion — for the people of Ukraine and for our country,” Pelosi said.

“There is a fight in the world now between democracy and autocracy, its manifestation at the time is in Ukraine.”

Looked beyond US borders

With a new Republican majority in the House whose Trump-aligned members have balked at overseas investments, Pelosi, a Democrat, remains confident the Congress will continue backing Ukraine as part of a broader U.S. commitment to democracy abroad in the face of authoritarian aggression.

“Support for Ukraine has been bipartisan and bicameral, in both houses of Congress by both parties, and the American people support democracy in Ukraine,” Pelosi told AP. “I believe that we will continue to support as long as we need to support democracy… as long as it takes to win.”

Now the speaker emerita, an honorary title bestowed by Democrats, Pelosi is circumspect about her role as a U.S. emissary abroad. Having visited 87 countries during her time in office, many as the trailblazing first woman to be the House speaker, she set a new standard for pointing the gavel outward as she focused attention on the world beyond U.S. shores.

In her office tucked away at the Capitol, Pelosi shared many of the honors and mementos she has received from abroad, including the honorary passport she was given on her trip to Ukraine, among her final stops as speaker.

It’s a signature political style, building on Pelosi’s decades of work on the House Intelligence committee, but one that a new generation of House leaders may — or may not — chose to emulate.

The new Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library this month, the Republican leader’s first foray as leader into foreign affairs.

Democrat Hakeem Jeffries took his own first trip abroad to as House minority leader, leading congressional delegations last week to Ghana and Israel.

Pelosi said it’s up to the new leaders what they will do on the global stage.

“Other speakers have understood our national security — we take an oath to protect and defend — and so we have to reach out with our values and our strength to make sure that happens,” she said.

‘A fight for everyone’

When Pelosi arrived in Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stood outside to meet the U.S. officials, the photo that ricocheted around the world a show of support for the young democracy fighting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

“The courage of the president in greeting us on the street rather than us just meeting him in his office was yet again another symbol of the courage of the people of Ukraine,” she said.

Pelosi told Zelenskyy in a video released at the time “your fight is a fight for everyone.”

Last year, in one of her final trips as speaker, Pelosi touched down with a delegation in Taipei, Taiwan, crowds lining the streets to cheer her arrival, a visit with the Taiwanese president that drew a sharp rebuke from Beijing, which counts the island as its own.

“Cowardly,” she said about the military exercises China launched in the aftermath of her trip.

Pelosi offered rare praise for McCarthy’s own meeting with Tsai, particularly its bipartisan nature and the choice of venue the historic Reagan library.

“That was really quite a message and quite an optic to be there. And so, I salute what he did,” she said.

In one of her closing acts as House speaker in December, Pelosi hosted Zelenskyy for a joint address to Congress. The visit evoked the one made by Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, at Christmastime in 1941 to speak to Congress in the Senate chamber of a “long and hard war” at the start of World War II.

Zelenskyy presented to Congress a Ukrainian flag signed by frontline troops that Pelosi said will eventually be displayed at the U.S. Capitol.

The world has changed much since Pelosi joined Congress — one of her first trips abroad was in 1991, when she dared to unfurl a pro-democracy banner in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square shortly after the student demonstrations that ended in massacre.

After the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s Russia and China that remain front of her mind.

“The role of Putin in terms of Russia that is a bigger threat than it was when I came to Congress,” she said. A decade after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, she said, Putin went up.

“That’s where the fight for democracy is taking place,” she said.

And, she said, despite the work she and others in Congress have done to point out the concerns over China’s military and economic rise, and its human rights record, “that has only gotten worse.”
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Former US Security Adviser Calls for Closer Ties With Taiwan

A former U.S. national security adviser called for deeper interaction between the United States and Taiwan during a visit Saturday to the self-ruled island, which has seen increasing military threats from China.

John Bolton, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024, said at a pro-Taiwan independence event in Taipei that national security teams from both sides must develop contingency plans on how to respond to actions Beijing might take, warning it would be too late once an attack occurs.

“We have to tell China and Russia what the consequences are if they take actions against Taiwan,” said Bolton. “Not just in the immediate response, but over the longer term, to basically excommunicate China from the international economic system if it did take military actions against Taiwan or attempt to throw a blockade around it.”

Bolton, former President Donald Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, started his weeklong trip to Taiwan on Wednesday. The visit reflects the importance of the island’s democracy as an issue in the U.S. presidential election next year amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing.

China flies near Taiwan

Taiwan and China split in 1949 following a civil war that ended with the Communist Party in control of the mainland. The island has never been part of the People’s Republic of China, but Beijing says it must unite with the mainland, by force if necessary.

The U.S. remains Taiwan’s closest military and political ally, despite the lack of formal diplomatic ties between them. U.S. law requires Washington to treat all threats to the island as matters of “grave concern,” though it remains ambiguous over whether American forces would be dispatched to help defend the island.

Bolton said the backlog of U.S. military sales to Taiwan is estimated to be $19 billion and it needs to be resolved.

“Part of that is a U.S. problem. Our defense industrial base is not as strong as it used to be. We need to improve that for global reasons, but particularly for Taiwan,” he said.

On Friday, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said China’s military flew 38 fighter jets and other warplanes near Taiwan. That was the biggest flight display since the large military exercise in which it simulated sealing off the island after the sensitive April 5 meeting between Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. China opposes any exchanges at the official level between Taiwan and other governments.

China protests U.S. flight

Later Friday, China’s People’s Liberation Army also issued a protest over the flight of a United States Navy P-8A Poseidon anti-submarine patrol aircraft through the Taiwan Strait, calling it a provocation that the U.S. “openly hyped up.” But the U.S. 7th Fleet said Thursday’s flight was in accordance with international law and “demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Bolton is scheduled to join a banquet on Monday organized by the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, a pro-independence organization headquartered in Washington. Tsai also will attend the event.
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Disney Sues DeSantis, Claiming Unlawful Retaliation 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ very public feud with the Walt Disney Co. entered a new phase this week, when the entertainment conglomerate filed a lawsuit claiming that the governor and his administration violated the company’s First Amendment rights.

Disney, which employs 75,000 people in a cluster of theme parks and hotels in central Florida, said that a series of new restrictions placed on the company were meant to retaliate against it for public criticism of one of DeSantis’ key legislative initiatives. The legislation, commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, restricts the ability of teachers in Florida schools to discuss issues of sexuality and gender identity.

In a series of moves beginning last year, the Florida legislature — at DeSantis’ bidding — stripped the company of the ability to self-govern the land on which its parks and hotels sit, changed the rules governing ride-safety inspections, and took other actions targeting the company. The changes appear to have applied only to Disney, and not to other self-governing districts and theme parks in the state.

The fight with Disney has helped keep DeSantis in the news ahead of what is expected to be an announcement of his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination later this spring. DeSantis is currently second in polls of likely GOP primary voters, trailing former President Donald Trump by a significant margin.

Final straw

This week, a new board appointed to oversee the district where Disney is located moved to void development agreements its predecessor had struck with the company. Those deals, agreed to shortly before the old board was replaced, would have significantly limited the new board’s power over the company.

Within minutes of the vote, Disney announced that it had filed a lawsuit claiming unlawful retaliation.

“A targeted campaign of government retaliation — orchestrated at every step by Governor DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech — now threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights,” the suit charges.

For his part, DeSantis on Thursday claimed that the lawsuit lacks merit.

“Do you want one company to have their own fiefdom, or do you want everyone to live under the same laws?” he said to reporters in Israel while participating in an overseas trade mission. “The days of putting one company on a pedestal with no accountability are over in the state of Florida.”

Yearlong drama

The battle between the company and the state began last year, while the state legislature was debating the Parental Rights in Education Act which restricts the ability of teachers to discuss sexuality or gender identity with young children. The law has since been expanded to cover all children through high school.

The language in the bill made it unclear whether, for example, a gay teacher with a same-sex spouse could mention his or her marital status to students, earning it the “Don’t Say Gay” nickname from critics.

After taking an unclear stance on the legislation at the start, Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek responded to criticism from the company’s employee base by issuing a strong denunciation of the legislation, saying that it should never have been signed into law, and pledging that the company would work toward its repeal.

The move angered DeSantis and his allies in the legislature. The governor immediately began attacking the company in his public pronouncements as “woke” and pledged to “fight back.” In a fundraising email to supporters he wrote, “If Disney wants to pick a fight, they chose the wrong guy.”

Targeted legislation

Within days, Republican state legislator Stephen Roach made it clear that lawmakers were considering action that would eliminate an agreement struck in 1967 to allow Disney broad authority to govern the land on which its parks and hotels are located, known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID).

Roach seemed to concede that the change was to punish the company for its complaints about the Parental Rights in Education law.

“If Disney wants to embrace woke ideology, it seems fitting that they should be regulated by Orange County,” he said. (The RCID was carved out of land partly in Orange County and partly in Osceola County.)

Over the past few weeks, DeSantis has made other public comments suggesting that he is looking for additional ways to punish Disney.

In recent public comments, he suggested that he and his staff are considering new taxes on the company’s hotels, tolls on the roads that visitors use to travel to the park, and building other projects on nearby state-owned property.

At one news conference, DeSantis floated the idea of locating a new state prison on nearby land. “Who knows? I just think the possibilities are endless,” he said.

Strong claim

First Amendment experts contacted by VOA said that Disney appears to have powerful arguments behind its assertion that DeSantis and the legislature have engaged in unlawful retaliation against protected speech.

“Disney has a quite strong claim here,” RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah, said in an email. “First Amendment doctrine makes clear that it offends the Constitution when [the] government takes actions to retaliate for speech or expressive positions.”

Gregory Magarian, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, agreed.

“It is clear — axiomatic, obvious — that if the government retaliates against a speaker for what they say, that is a violation of the First Amendment,” he told VOA.

Magarian said that in order to overcome Disney’s argument, the state would have to argue that the actions it took against Disney were the result of public policy preferences, and were not meant to punish the company.

“My sense is that the public record, and what DeSantis has said and what legislators have said, will make that a fairly uphill climb,” he said.

Republican doubts

DeSantis, broadly seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, has come under fire from some of his erstwhile political allies in recent days over his unrelenting assault on Disney.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the most powerful Republican politician in Washington, on Thursday criticized the governor’s approach.

“This is a big employer inside Florida,” he said. “I think the governor should sit down with them. I don’t think the idea of building a prison next to a place that you bring your family is the best idea. I think it’d be much better if you sat down and solved the problems.”

Former President Trump, writing on Truth Social, a social network owned by his company, also piled on.

“Disney’s next move will be the announcement that no more money will be invested in Florida because of the Governor — In fact, they could even announce a slow withdrawal or sale of certain properties, or the whole thing. Watch!” he wrote. “That would be a killer.”
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Why Do Democrats Believe Biden Will Win Again?

Various polls show that American voters, including Democrats, do not want President Joe Biden to run again in 2024, citing his age as one of the primary reasons. Yet he is almost certain to be the Democratic nominee, and the party appears to have little doubt he will win again. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara explains the reason behind their confidence.
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Biden Notecard Raises Question of Collusion Between White House, Media

The White House and a newspaper are denying there was collusion this week when a reporter asked U.S. President Joe Biden a question very similar to what was written on a card Biden held while facing journalists in the White House Rose Garden.

“We do not have specific questions in advance. That’s not something that we do,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded when asked at Thursday’s briefing about the president’s pocket card, titled “Question # 1,” which contained the name and photograph of Los Angeles Times correspondent Courtney Subramanian, along with a question: “How are YOU squaring YOUR domestic priorities — like reshoring semiconductors manufacturing — with alliance-based foreign policy?”

Close-up images of the notecard were captured by multiple news photographers in the Rose Garden.

Biden, alongside visiting South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Wednesday, called first on Subramanian, who asked: “Your top economic priority has been to build up U.S. domestic manufacturing in competition with China, but your rules against expanding chip manufacturing in China is hurting South Korean companies that rely heavily on Beijing. Are you damaging a key ally in the competition with China to help your domestic politics ahead of the election?”

Biden responded with an extensive and nuanced comment on the topic.

‘It seems like there’s collusion’

Jean-Pierre explained the following day that Subramanian was one of two correspondents called on by Biden because California has the largest Korean American community of any U.S. state.

“We are mindful on who we pick and who we want to communicate out to,” added Jean-Pierre.

Her response did not satisfy the briefing room audience. Among those denied an opportunity to ask a follow-up question about the matter was Jon Decker, White House correspondent for Gray Television, whose career spans 16 White House press secretaries and five presidencies.

“I was just simply trying to ask her is it her contention that the question that everyone could read on that so-called cheat sheet was not similar to the question that was asked at the White House press conference? And it was similar,” he told VOA.

“I’ve never seen an instance where the president is being given a question from a reporter that covers the president at a pre-announced White House press conference,” Decker added. “It really reflects poorly on the White House press corps, and it reflects poorly on the White House for allowing that to happen. It seems like there’s collusion, and for the public that has distrust, skepticism and even disdain for the media, it doesn’t put us in a good light.”

The White House continued to rebuff inquiries following Thursday’s briefing.

“Karine addressed this very clearly and in-depth in the briefing room today,” responded principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton to VOA, which attempted to pursue the topic of presubmitted questions to the president.

Subramanian has not commented. Her newspaper issued a statement to inquiries from media organizations.

“Our reporter did not submit any questions in advance of the Q&A with President Biden,” said Hillary Manning, vice president of communications for the Los Angeles Times. Subramanian “is in regular contact with the White House press office seeking information for her reporting. You would have to ask the White House who prepared the document for the president and why they included that question.”

April Ryan, Washington bureau chief of The Grio, who refers to herself as the longest-serving black female journalist covering the White House, said while it is not unusual for presidents to have a card listing journalists who could potentially be called on, she had never seen one that contained a picture of the reporter and the “actual question itself.”

Ryan told VOA it is routine prior to news conferences for the president and his principals, who help him with messaging, to discuss potential questions but what occurred Wednesday seemed unprecedented.

Kayleigh McEnany, a press secretary in the previous administration of Donald Trump, on the set of Fox News on Thursday, said “it’s very unordinary to have the question as specific as semiconductors as they pertain to alliances written out and scripted for the president.”

A correspondent, who asked not to be named and covers the White House for a foreign broadcaster, told VOA: “It raises questions of not only President Biden needing a heads up to come up with answers but also transparency of how the White House chooses who gets to ask questions. It is frustrating for reporters who aren’t in their inner circle.”

Reagan, Bush, had a seating chart

The president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Tamara Keith of National Public Radio, declined to comment on the issue. The association noted it has no involvement on who gets called on by presidents at news conferences.

During the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the presidents had a seating chart to know where to find a sympathetic questioner, said Charles Bierbauer, who was CNN’s senior White House correspondent from 1983-93.

“The guessing game between the press and the White House has long been to figure out who might ask what of the president at news conferences,” he told VOA.

“I recall presidential aides gleefully telling us when they had anticipated every question. My pattern was to be prepared for the questions I knew I had to ask but always have kind of an offbeat question, too,” recalled Bierbauer, distinguished professor and dean emeritus at the College of Information and Communications at the University of South Carolina.

It is not uncommon for the White House to let a reporter know he or she will be called on during a news conference and to query the reporter about what they might ask, according to former CBS Radio White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who covered eight presidents from Gerald Ford to Trump.

“As a reporter, I always prepared questions on a number of subjects,” Knoller told VOA. “More often than not the White House knows what subjects a reporter is interested in based on questions at briefings and inquiries made previously to the press office. I can’t believe a reporter worth his or her salt would give a detailed question in advance.”
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Record Settlement by Fox News in Defamation Lawsuit

This month a widely watched lawsuit over how U.S. cable network Fox News covered former President Donald Trump’s false allegations of election rigging in 2020 resulted in the network paying a near-record $787.5 million settlement to avoid a trial. VOA’s Laurel Bowman reports.
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