Free Republic

Retired Navy Adm. Stansfield Turner, the iconoclastic director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1970s who significantly reorganized its clandestine ranks and helped usher in a new technological age at the agency, died Jan. 18 at his home in Seattle. He was 94. His secretary, Pat Moynihan, confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause. An Oxford-educated Rhodes scholar, Adm. Turner was long considered to be one of the Navy’s sharpest analytical minds and brashly confident leaders. He was a four-star admiral and commander of NATO forces in Southern Europe when he was tapped in 1977 by...

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel August 18, 2002 Pg. 5 Despite Son's Pleas, Scientist's Death Remains A Cold War Mystery Given LSD, he died in a fall from hotel room; government later promised to tell all, but didn't By Frederic N. Tulsky, Knight Ridder News Service San Jose, Calif. -- The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history. Only in 1975 did Olson's family learn that the CIA had slipped LSD into his drink, days before his death. President Ford apologized...

Clarice Feldman at American Thinker points to an ultra-left affilliated group calling itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, frequently abbreviated as VIPS, as the behind-the-scenes allies of the MSM in fanning the flames of the Plamegate scandal.

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- The Navy will commission its newest nuclear-powered attack submarine Jimmy Carter on Saturday, Feb. 19, during an 11 a.m. EST ceremony at Naval Submarine Base New London, Groton, Conn. The attack submarine Jimmy Carter honors the 39th president of the United States. President Carter is the only U.S. president to have qualified in submarines. He has distinguished himself by a lifetime of public service, and has long ties to the Navy and the submarine force. Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, served as a commissioned officer aboard submarines, and served as commander-in-chief from 1977...

News Advisory: Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, a group of retired ambassadors and senior military officers, will hold a Morning Newsmaker news conference Wednesday, June 16, at 8 a.m. EDT at the National Press Club (Zenger Room), 13th floor, 529 14th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. The topic will be "The Need for Change in U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy." The group includes former ambassadors Jeffrey Davidow, William DePree, Charles Freeman Jr., William Harrop, Arthur Hartman, H. Allen Holmes, Samuel Lewis, Princeton Lyman, Jack Matlock Jr., Donald McHenry, Richard Murphy, David Newsom, Phyllis Oakley, John Reinhardt, Ronald Spiers, Nicholas Veliotes...

NEW YORK (AP) A former CIA director said Wednesday that he would resign if he were in current Director George Tenet's place because of political pressure on the intelligence agency. ''I think the biggest problem of intelligence today is political direction from the White House, and I don't know what I would do if I were George Tenet other than resign,'' said Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA from 1977 to 1981 in the Carter administration. Turner spoke on a panel about the CIA at the Council on Foreign Relations, along with former directors William Webster, who headed the agency...

OLLEGE PARK, Md. — In the debate over America's prewar intelligence failures in Iraq, there are two important questions. First, is there someone the president could fairly blame? And second, does the president have the power to repair whatever problems exist? In both cases the answer is no. No single government official had the authority to prevent the misjudgments about Iraq's weapons programs. And under the present rules no single official has the authority to set things right. These problems grow out of a flaw in the National Security Act of 1947, which created the office of director of central...

WASHINGTON -- Former CIA director Stansfield Turner accused the Bush administration Tuesday of ''overstretching the facts'' about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in making its case for invading that country.