Another Ex-CIA Director: Iraq's WMD was "overstretching the facts"

Ex-CIA director says administration stretched facts on Iraq

USA Today

6/17/2003

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.

Turner's broadside adds the retired admiral's name to a list of former intelligence professionals concerned that the CIA and its intelligence reports were manipulated to justify the war. Since Baghdad fell April 9, U.S. forces have been unable to find chemical and biological weapons the White House said were in Iraq.

Stansfield Turner

Professor Turner is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland. He served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1977-1981. As such, he headed both the Intelligence Community (composed of all of the foreign intelligence agencies of the United States) and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was responsible for developing new procedures for closer oversight of the Intelligence Community by Congress and the White House, led the Intelligence Community in adapting to a new era of real-time photographic satellites and instituted major management reform at the CIA. Previously as an Admiral in the U.S. Navy he served as commander of the U.S. Second Fleet and NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic, and as the commander-in-chief of NATO's Southern Flank. Turner has published four books, Secrecy and Democracy (1985), Terrorism and Democracy (1991), Caging the Nuclear Genies (1997), and Caging the Genies: A Workable Plan for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons (1998).

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