Carter at his word

Jimmy Carter on Secretary Rice (via memeorandum):

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of not telling the truth about warnings she said her department gave Carter not to speak to Hamas before a Middle East trip. . . .”President Carter has the greatest respect for … Rice and believes her to be a truthful person. However, perhaps inadvertently, she is continuing to make a statement that is not true,” a statement issued by the Carter center in Atlanta said on Wednesday.

“No one in the State Department or any other department of the U.S. government ever asked him (Carter) to refrain from his recent visit to the Middle East or even suggested that he not meet with Syrian President (Bashar) Assad or leaders of Hamas,” it said.

Meryl on Carter’s truthfulness:

But then, Carter is an expert at finessing the language when he wants to get around taking responsibility for his actions. Like justifying suicide bombing in his anti-Israel screed. Of course, he apologized for making people think that he justifies suicide bombings. But then you have to wonder, since he’s constantly using the language of the terrorists (”40 dead Palestinians for every Israeli” is straight out of the Hamas playbook). It’s getting hard to tell the difference these days.

Unsurprisingly, Firedoglake disagrees.

But take the NYT report Carter Says Hamas and Syria Are Open to Peace:

Jimmy Carter said here on Monday that in talks in Damascus, Syria, over the last several days, he obtained a significant concession from the militant group Hamas regarding Israeli-Palestinian peace and found Syrian leaders eager for a full peace treaty with Israel.Mr. Carter said he extracted a promise from Hamas to respect the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip negotiated by Hamas’s rivals in the Palestinian Authority if it were ratified by a referendum of the Palestinian people.

Then he seems to backtrack:

In a subsequent interview, Mr. Carter struck a more cautious note, saying, “I’m not claiming it’s a breakthrough.” He added, “I don’t have any control over whether or not Hamas does what they tell me.”

Hardly a display of confidence. But then the reporter gets Carter:

But Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader with whom Mr. Carter met in Damascus, gave a televised news conference late Monday in which he seemed to contradict Mr. Carter’s statements. “Hamas accepts the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital and with full and real sovereignty and full application of the right of the Palestinian refugees to return, but Hamas will not recognize the state of Israel,” Mr. Meshal said.

The Washington Post finds another hole in Carter’s assurances:

The talks resulted in a written agreement. An English version that Carter released reads in part: “If President Abbas succeeds in negotiating a final status agreement with Israel, Hamas will accept the decision made by the Palestinian people and their will in a referendum monitored by international observers . . . even if Hamas is opposed to the agreement.”The terms, however, give the group substantial room to later back out. Hamas officials, for instance, have said that any referendum must include Palestinians living in exile worldwide — something that could make the vote logistically impossible.

These contradictions show that Carter is capable of hearing only what he wants to hear. I suspect that was the operating principle in the case of the State Department warning.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.