Jimmy Carter Defends Snowden, Says U.S. Has No "Functioning Democracy"

[struggle4progress]

19. There's no published agenda or list of attendees for the event in last years report

The organization's events are invitation-only, so the Spiegel reporter must have been invited, and his article, together with the headline for it, appears to deliberately garble a CNN interview with an alleged one sentence quote from Mr Carter

I happen to admire Mr Carter quite a lot, though he is rather conservative and traditional from my PoV: a former naval officer, and once governor of a Southern state, he spent time doing evangelical missionary work before become President. He's a talented man, with genuine political skills, and given his conservative Southern religious and military background, as well as his political experience, the chances are vanishingly small that he made a sweeping statement about US democracy being dysfunctional, so soon after the re-election of only the second Democratic President since Carter himself left office more than three decades ago -- though he might have made some remarks about current issues with the Congress

Of course, my suspicions about this sort of reporting may be entirely unfounded, and the Atlantic Bridge scandal in the UK could merely involve a group that attempted to hijack the good name of this German organization -- but, like many others at DU, I try to maintain a certain healthy level of paranoia, which will seem normal when people agree and will seem demented when people disagree