JIMMY CARTER: “Well, as you may know, I had a policy when I was president of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world, and some of our allies were very irate about this policy. And I have to say that I was not, you know, as thoroughly briefed about what was going on in East Timor as I should have been. I was more concerned about other parts of the world then.”
That sounds like a completely believable explanation to me. I can completely believe that that the military advisors didn’t give him the full picture of what was happening there.
Of course, the classic “don’t ask, don’t tell” of the national security state. The careerists don’t want oversight and the president wants plausible deniability so they’re left to just do whatever tf they want with no democratic accountability whatsoever.
I know you want to imagine something darker, but once you get your first job you’ll realize how very very very very easy it is for simple things to slip through the cracks, let alone complex things like a conflict on the other side of the planet from you in a region your country hasn’t traditionally cared about.
That it’s trivially easy for them to just casually decide to do a genocide with no input or oversight from any democratic process that could hold them accountable or allow the people to actually control what our foreign policy is.
What does that mean? The name Carter doesn’t show up on the Wikipedia page for timor from what I can find.
https://etan.org/timor/uspolicy.htm
JIMMY CARTER: “Well, as you may know, I had a policy when I was president of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world, and some of our allies were very irate about this policy. And I have to say that I was not, you know, as thoroughly briefed about what was going on in East Timor as I should have been. I was more concerned about other parts of the world then.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/1/10/jimmy_carter_indonesia_east_timor_genocide
That sounds like a completely believable explanation to me. I can completely believe that that the military advisors didn’t give him the full picture of what was happening there.
Of course, the classic “don’t ask, don’t tell” of the national security state. The careerists don’t want oversight and the president wants plausible deniability so they’re left to just do whatever tf they want with no democratic accountability whatsoever.
I know you want to imagine something darker, but once you get your first job you’ll realize how very very very very easy it is for simple things to slip through the cracks, let alone complex things like a conflict on the other side of the planet from you in a region your country hasn’t traditionally cared about.
And that in itself is a reason why the intelligence community cannot be allowed to exist in its current form.
What is? That humans are fallible?
That it’s trivially easy for them to just casually decide to do a genocide with no input or oversight from any democratic process that could hold them accountable or allow the people to actually control what our foreign policy is.