Many Lawmakers Irate over Carter's Meetings with Hamas

WASHINGTON — Jimmy Carter no longer flies aboard Air Force One. If an irate House member gets her way, the globe-trotting former president could be confined to domestic flights.

Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., has asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pull his passport.

Why? Because Carter, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, met this week in the Middle East with leaders of Hamas, which the State Department regards as a terrorist group and President Bush has tried to isolate.

"Members of the Congress who don't normally get involved in these issues are just infuriated," Myrick said of Carter's meetings with Hamas. "He's done some damage, if he even cares."

Myrick joined Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, and two other members of Congress a year ago to form the House Anti-Terror Caucus to help educate House members and the public about the terrorist threat to the United States. The caucus has about 120 members.

Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich., introduced legislation Wednesday that would block federal funding of the Carter Center, the former president's global humanitarian aid and democratization institution in Atlanta.

The Carter Center, which has an annual budget of $36 million, has received roughly $3 million a year in federal funding over the past seven years, according to Knollenberg's office. The Carter Center's press office did not respond to repeated calls on Friday.

Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and Terrorism, called Carter's personal diplomacy "troubling, unhelpful and outrageous."

Said Pence, "It's not in keeping with the dignity of the high office he has held."

House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, is a co-sponsor of the bill to cut off federal funding for the Carter Center.

"Boehner believes it is a serious mistake to give legitimacy to Hamas, an organization that regularly commits acts of terror and is committed to destroying Israel, but that's just what Jimmy Carter did," said Boehner spokeswoman Jessica Towhey.

It isn't only Republicans who are upset.

Thirteen Democrats - including Robert Wexler of Florida, Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Brad Sherman of California - were among 55 House members who signed a letter last Wednesday urging Carter not to meet with Hamas officials during his Middle East swing this week.

"Hamas terrorists are responsible for the murders of at least 26 American citizens - some of them teenagers, children and infants," read the letter. "President Carter, do not meet with the man who ordered their deaths."

Carter met Friday with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in the Syrian capital of Damascus. He met with Gaza-based Hamas officials earlier in the week in Cairo.

Carter, who led Israeli and Egyptian leaders to the historic Camp David peace accords three decades ago, contends that diplomacy with Hamas is essential to any effort to broker an end to half a century of bloodshed and enmity between Israelis and Palestinians.

"You can't have an agreement that must involve certain parties, unless you talk to those parties to conclude the agreement," Carter told reporters in Cairo. "They have to be involved in some way."

Author of the controversial book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Carter criticized Israel's virtual blockade of the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

"It's an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza. It's a crime," said Carter. "I think it is an abomination."

Carter's personal diplomacy with Hamas isn't likely to cost him his passport.

"Look, he is a private citizen," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters Friday. "I don't think people are going to confuse the efforts of a private citizen, former President Carter, with the very clear policies of the United States government."

McCormack said, though, "we find it very odd" that Carter would urge Israel to meet with Hamas. "It's our view that you should focus on those who want to bring about peace, who have turned away from violence, who have renounced terrorism."

Hamas, more formally known as The Islamic Resistance Movement, has a political wing and a 6,000-member militia. Its candidates won control of the Palestinian parliament in elections two years ago and its militia ran rival Fatah faction members out of Gaza last June at gunpoint.

The State Department lists Hamas as a terrorist organization, owing to its refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist and its support for suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israel.

In his Cairo meeting with Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar, Carter called the daily rocket attacks a "despicable crime" and publicly called on Hamas to end them. At the same time, Carter said Israel's military response to such attacks was excessive.

"If you live in Gaza, you know that for every Israeli killed in any kind of combat, between 30 to 40 Palestinians are killed because of the extreme military capability of Israel," Carter said.

This week alone, Israeli forces killed more than 20 Palestinians after a Hamas ambush that killed three Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have made Hamas an international pariah, calling on foreign leaders and businesses to shun the Hamas-led government in Gaza. Instead, Bush and Olmert have favored the West Bank government led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the rival Fatah faction.

Carter has a long history of using personal diplomacy to break an impasse between the U.S. government and foreign leaders. He brokered an agreement that led to a breakthrough U.S.-North Korea nuclear accord when the two countries were on a war footing in 1994.

That same year, he persuaded Haiti junta leader Raoul Cedras to voluntarily leave the country ahead of a U.S. invasion force, averting bloodshed in the capital of Port au Prince.

Months later, he weathered sub-freezing temperatures and braved sniper fire in shuttling among leaders from Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia to broker a four-month cease-fire in Balkans fighting that took more than 200,000 lives.

More recently, Carter has joined forces with former South African President Nelson Mandela, former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and other prominent figures in what is known as The Elders, to try to bring their collective moral authority to bear on global ills ranging from AIDS to poverty.

In 1992, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for what the Nobel Foundation called "his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."