November 17, 2005
In the tradition of his former boss Jimmy Carter, ex-CIA director Stansfield Turner has gone abroad to stab his country in the back. In an interview with British ITV, Turner attacked the Bush administration, and especially Vice-President Dick Cheney, in the most outrageous terms imaginable:
- A former CIA director has exclusively told ITV News that torture is condoned and even approved by the Bush government.
- The devastating accusations have been made by Admiral Stansfield Turner who labelled Dick Cheney "a vice president for torture".
- The former spymaster claims President Bush is not telling the truth when he says that torture is not a method used by the US.
- Speaking of Bush's claims that the US does not use torture, Admiral Turner, who ran the CIA from 1977 to 1981, said: "I do not believe him".
- On Dick Cheney he said "I'm embarrassed the United States has a vice president for torture.
- "He condones torture, what else is he?"
Stansfield Turner is one of the worst bureaucrats ever employed by the United States government. As we have noted before, Turner is one of the chief reasons for the decline of the CIA into virtual uselessness, as he enthusiastically slashed 25 percent of all intelligence operatives from the payrolls.
It's interesting, isn't it, that for the last six months, the newspapers have breathlessly repeated the claim that the identification of a single non-covert desk employee of the CIA, Valerie Plame, somehow did great damage to American security interests. Well, if the neutralizing of a single "agent" is so newsworthy as to dominate the papers and the evening news for months, how about firing one-quarter of all the CIA agents--the really covert ones, I mean--in the world? Wouldn't that compromise our security to an almost unimaginable extent? How much publicity should that act of folly generate, in comparison to the meaningless Plame farce? And how much did it receive? That comparison speaks volumes about the agenda that drives mainstream journalism.
As for Turner, he should be ashamed of himself for slandering a man far better than himself, who has the difficult task of dealing with a world whose dangers Turner never acknowledged or understood, with resources that have never fully recovered from Turner's misguided stewardship.