Former US president slams drone attacks

WASHINGTON: Former US President Jimmy Carter has slammed American assassination drone strikes in other countries, saying that killing civilians in such attacks would in fact nurture terrorism.

"I personally think we do more harm than good by having our drones attack some potential terrorists who have not been tried or proven that they are guilty," Carter said in an interview with Russia Today.

"But in the meantime, the drone attacks also kill women and children, sometimes in weddings... so this is the kind of thing we should correct," he added.

Carter, who served as US president from 1976 to 1980, also criticized incumbent American policy makers for violating the country's "long-standing policy" of "preserving the privacy of US citizens."

"We now pass laws that permit eavesdropping on private phone calls and private communication," he noted, explaining that in the past, in order to do that, the government had to obtain a court ruling that proved the nation's national security was at risk, "which was very rare, but now it's done all over America."

"We need to back off [and] restore basic human rights as spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)," the former US president underlined.

He concluded by saying that there are 30 paragraphs in the UDHR, "and at present time, my country, the US, is violating 10 out of the 30."