Jimmy Carter: Amnesty and Draft Registration
Photograph Source: White House Staff Photographers – CC BY-SA 4.0
Jimmy Carter may have liked the endless accolades that came his way following his death. Carter was immensely unpopular by the end of his first and only term as president from 1977 to early 1981. His foreign policy success between Israel and Egypt was overshadowed by inflation, an inability to communicate with the people, and the Iran hostage crisis.
Carter also set in motion the support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan that led in a direct line to September 11, 2001.
“Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain’s M16, who conducted their own separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties…”
It wasn’t the long gas lines, and they were long, because of the US role in the Middle East, but two other actions of the late president that were at opposite ends of the policy divide that made the most lasting impression and impact on me. Although the number of draft and military resisters were erroneously stated in this article about Carter’s 1977 amnesty, readers get the idea that lots of people benefited from his program. Hundreds of thousands of people were given the opportunity to go on with their lives after the murderous debacle of the Vietnam War and the larger wars in Southeast Asia. That’s what amnesty is about: forgetting. Amnesty had been turned into a political football.
I was one of those people who benefited from Carter’s amnesty and was able to live a life unmolested by the horrors of the Vietnam War, although millions of the dead and wounded in Southeast Asia were never able to benefit from any form of relief or reparations from the US. People are still killed in Southeast Asia from what’s called unexploded ordnance. In Southeast Asia those bombs that did not detonate and sometimes do now were cluster bombs and unexploded bombs dropped from aircraft that dug into the earth. It is almost like documenting ancient history to list the free-fire zones the US created where anything or anyone who moved, communist and noncommunist alike, could be shot without question. The strategic hamlet program was a euphemism for concentration camps. Scores of massacres took place of which My Lai in March 1968 was the most famous and infamous that Seymour Hersh documented (New Yorker, January 14, 1972). US commanders demanded high body counts of dead Vietnamese people, whether real or made up to show false progress against North Vietnamese forces and other military forces that supported the North operating in the South. Often civilian noncombatants were killed and listed as enemy dead. Bombing campaigns from the air such as Operation Rolling Thunder pummeled Vietnam, while the defoliant Agent Orange destroyed forests and left a poisoned legacy on the ground.
This is the mother of Paul Meadlo, whose son took part in the massacre at My Lai: “I sent them a good boy and they returned him a murderer” (Vietnam Veterans Against the War).
Almost as if from the script of a science fiction novel, or movie, the Iran hostage crisis put me in direct opposition to the situation that the US found itself in after a CIA operation snuffed out Iranian democracy in 1953 and led in another straight policy line culminating with the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran (PBS) in 1979 and hostages taken from that embassy.
It was less than the span of one US presidency, Carter’s, that I was trained by a representative of the American Friends Service Committee and set up a draft registration counseling center in the Catholic Center at the University of Rhode Island. I had few draft-age individuals who used the counseling service. I did not want to publicize the counseling program because I had learned an important lesson from the Vietnam era about speaking out in the face of US power. I also did not want my family harmed in any way by those in an increasingly rightward moving society. I ended up advising people to sign up for draft registration and note their stand of conscientious objector status when they registered. My work was more of an educational effort rather than counseling resistance and refusal to comply with the program. Counseling resistance could have brought prosecution to both the people counseled and myself, a lesson well learned from the Vietnam era.
In a laughable and largely boycotted so-called earlier amnesty by Gerald Ford (New York Times, September 17, 1974), draft and military resisters had to perform two years of public work, and in the case of those seeking amnesty from military infractions, the discharge would be vindictive and clearly identify the individual as a culpable person. Ford had previously issued a complete pardon for Richard Nixon. Nixon’s coverup of the Watergate break-in and its aftermath is what caused Nixon’s impeachment. More than 20,000 US soldiers died during Nixon’s first term. A significant but largely unknown number among the 3-5 million in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were killed during both Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s presidencies. Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the wars in Southeast Asia was a prescription for an ongoing bloodbath. Nixon did not face impeachment because of the Vietnam War.
US policy is almost like a revolving door. Jimmy Carter became a staunch opponent to the US and its allies’ support for Israel’s apartheid regime in Gaza and the West Bank. Principled policy positions, especially in regard to foreign policy, are very rarely seen among US presidents.
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