The last time President Carter fetched up, in his years out of office, on a high profile trip in the Caribbean, he had rushed down to Haiti on the eve of the military action that President Clinton had ordered there. At the time the Forward newspaper suggested the 39th president be brought up on charges under the Logan Act. This is a law, passed shortly after the American republic was founded, making it a crime for a private citizen to carry out diplomacy abroad. The law no doubt seems draconian, but to gain a glimpse of why the founders were tempted, read the dispatches about how Mr. Carter is cavorting in Cuba with the communist dictator Fidel Castro. He is, according to the AP, the first American head of state in or out of office to visit Cuba since the communist conquest. According to the AP, Mr. Carter wasted no time, once on communist soil, in asserting that American officials briefing him for his trip had said they had no evidence that Cuba was transferring abroad technology that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction. Those and other comments by the Georgian appear designed to undercut warnings by one of the American state undersecretaries, John Bolton, about Mr. Castro’s machinations. It’s the kind of error of judgment that no doubt impelled America’s voters to turn Mr. Carter out of office after but one term.