William Scott Ritter, Jr. (born July 15, 1961) was an important
United Nations weapons inspectorUnited Nations Special Commission was an inspection regime created by the United Nations to ensure Iraq's compliance with policies concerning Iraqi production and use of weapons of mass destruction after the Gulf War...
in
IraqIraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
from 1991 to 1998, and later a critic of United States foreign policy in the
Middle EastThe Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
. Prior to the
U.S. invasion of IraqThe 2003 invasion of Iraq , was the start of the conflict known as the Iraq War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days of major combat operations...
in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant
weapons of mass destructionA weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures , natural structures , or the biosphere in general...
(WMD) capabilities. He became a popular anti-war figure and talk show commentator as a result of his stance.
Since 2001, Ritter has been arrested on sex charges. He was acquitted on a single criminal attempt charge, and convicted on other charges.
Military background
Ritter was born into a
militaryA military is an organization authorized by its greater society to use lethal force, usually including use of weapons, in defending its country by combating actual or perceived threats. The military may have additional functions of use to its greater society, such as advancing a political agenda e.g...
family in 1961 in
Gainesville, FloridaGainesville is the largest city in, and the county seat of, Alachua County, Florida, United States as well as the principal city of the Gainesville, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area . The preliminary 2010 Census population count for Gainesville is 124,354. Gainesville is home to the sixth...
. He graduated from Kaiserslautern American High School in 1979, and later from Franklin and Marshall College in
LancasterLancaster is a city in the south-central part of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is the county seat of Lancaster County and one of the older inland cities in the United States, . With a population of 59,322, it ranks eighth in population among Pennsylvania's cities...
,
PennsylvaniaThe Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, with a
Bachelor of ArtsA Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in the
history of the Soviet UnionThe history of the Soviet Union has roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, emerged as the main political force in the capital of the former Russian Empire, though they had to fight a long and brutal civil war against the Mensheviks, or Whites...
and departmental honors. In 1980 he served in the U.S. Army as a Private. Then in May 1984 he was commissioned as an
intelligenceMilitary intelligence is a military discipline that exploits a number of information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to commanders in support of their decisions....
officer in the
United States Marine CorpsThe United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...
. He served in this capacity for about 12 years. He served as the lead analyst for the Marine Corps
Rapid Deployment ForceA rapid deployment force is a military formation capable of quick deployment of its forces. Such forces typically consist of elite military units and may receive priority in equipment and training to prepare them for their mission....
concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran–Iraq War. Ritter's academic work focused on the Basmachi resistance movement in
Soviet Central AsiaSoviet Central Asia refers to the section of Central Asia formerly controlled by the Soviet Union, as well as the time period of Soviet administration . In terms of area, it is nearly synonymous with Russian Turkestan, the name for the region during the Russian Empire...
during the 1920s and 1930s, and on the Basmachi commanders Fazail Maksum and
Ibrahim BekIbrahim Bek was the leader of an anti-Soviet group known as the Basmachi. Ibrahimbek was a member of the Uzbek Lakai tribe in Eastern Bukhara and led an organized resistance against the Soviet military in the 1920s. A religious conservative and loyal to the ousted Emir of Bukhara he had little...
. During Desert Storm, he served as a
ballistic missileA ballistic missile is a missile that follows a sub-orbital ballistic flightpath with the objective of delivering one or more warheads to a predetermined target. The missile is only guided during the relatively brief initial powered phase of flight and its course is subsequently governed by the...
advisor to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Ritter later worked as a security and military consultant for the Fox News network.
Weapons inspector
Ritter served from 1991 to 1998 as a
United NationsThe United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
weapons inspector in
IraqIraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
in the
United Nations Special CommissionUnited Nations Special Commission was an inspection regime created by the United Nations to ensure Iraq's compliance with policies concerning Iraqi production and use of weapons of mass destruction after the Gulf War...
(UNSCOM), which was charged with finding and destroying all
weapons of mass destructionA weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures , natural structures , or the biosphere in general...
and WMD-related manufacturing capabilities in Iraq. He was chief inspector in fourteen of the more than thirty inspection missions in which he participated.
In January 1998, his inspection team in Iraq was blocked from some weapons sites by Iraqi officials stating that information obtained from these sites would be used for future planning of attacks. UN Inspectors were ordered out of Iraq by the United States Government, shortly before
Operation Desert FoxThe December 1998 bombing of Iraq was a major four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets from December 16–19, 1998 by the United States and United Kingdom...
attacks began in December 1998, using information which had been gathered for the purpose of disarmament to identify targets which would reduce Iraq's ability to wage both conventional and possibly unconventional warfare. UN Weapons Inspectors were thereafter denied access to Iraq. He spoke on the
Public Broadcasting ServiceThe Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
show,
The NewsHour with Jim LehrerPBS NewsHour is an evening television news program broadcast weeknights on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. The show is produced by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, a company co-owned by former anchors Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, and Liberty Media, which owns a 65% stake in the...
:
I think the danger right now is that without effective inspections, without effective monitoring, Iraq can in a very short period of time measured in months, reconstitute chemical and biological weapons, long-range ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and even certain aspects of their developing of nuclear weapons. program.
When the United States and the UN Security Council failed to take action against Iraq for their ongoing failure to cooperate fully with inspectors (a breach of
United Nations Security CouncilThe United Nations Security Council is one of the principal organs of the United Nations and is charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Its powers, outlined in the United Nations Charter, include the establishment of peacekeeping operations, the establishment of...
Resolution 1154), Ritter resigned from the United Nations Special Commission on August 26, 1998.
In his letter of resignation, Ritter said the Security Council's reaction to Iraq's decision earlier that month to suspend co-operation with the inspection team made a mockery of the disarmament work. Ritter later said, in an interview, that he resigned from his role as a United Nations weapons inspector over inconsistencies between United Nations Security Council Resolution 1154 and how it was implemented.
The investigations had come to a standstill, were making no effective progress, and in order to make effective progress, we really needed the Security Council to step in a meaningful fashion and seek to enforce its resolutions that we're not complying with.
On September 3, 1998, several days after his resignation, Ritter testified before the
United States Senate Committee on Armed ServicesThe Committee on Armed Services is a committee of the United States Senate empowered with legislative oversight of the nation's military, including the Department of Defense, military research and development, nuclear energy , benefits for members of the military, the Selective Service System and...
and the
United States Senate Committee on Foreign RelationsThe United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is a standing committee of the United States Senate. It is charged with leading foreign-policy legislation and debate in the Senate. The Foreign Relations Committee is generally responsible for overseeing and funding foreign aid programs as...
and said that he resigned his position "out of frustration that the United Nations Security Council, and the United States as its most significant supporter, was failing to enforce the post-Gulf War resolutions designed to disarm Iraq."
Opinions on U.S. policy toward Iraq
Following his resignation from UNSCOM, Ritter continued to be an outspoken commentator on U.S. policy toward Iraq, particularly with respect to the WMD issue. He became a popular anti-war figure and talk show commentator.
Commentary in the post-inspection period
In 1999, Ritter wrote
Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem — Once and For All in which he reiterated his claim that Iraq had obstructed the work of inspectors and attempted to hide and preserve essential elements for restarting WMD programs at a later date. However, he also expressed frustration at alleged attempts by the CIA to infiltrate UNSCOM and use the inspectors as a means of gathering intelligence with which to pursue regime change in Iraq – a violation of the terms under which UNSCOM operated, and the very rationale the Iraqi government had given in restricting the inspector's activities in 1998.
In the book's conclusion, Ritter criticized the current U.S. policy of
containmentContainment was a United States policy using military, economic, and diplomatic strategies to stall the spread of communism, enhance America’s security and influence abroad, and prevent a "domino effect". A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet...
in the absence of inspections as inadequate to prevent Iraq's re-acquisition of WMD's in the long term. He also rejected the notion of removing
Saddam HusseinSaddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003...
's regime by force. Instead, he advocated a policy of diplomatic
engagementAn engagement or betrothal is a promise to marry, and also the period of time between proposal and marriage which may be lengthy or trivial. During this period, a couple is said to be betrothed, affianced, engaged to be married, or simply engaged...
, leading to gradual normalization of international relations with Iraq in return for inspection-verified abandonment of their WMD programs and other objectionable policies.
Ritter again promoted a conciliatory approach toward Iraq in the 2000 documentary
In Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq, which he wrote and directed. The film tells the history of the UNSCOM investigations through interviews and video footage of inspection missions. In the film, Ritter argues that Iraq is a "defanged tiger" and that the inspections were successful in eliminating significant Iraqi WMD capabilities. (For more see below under "Documentary".)
Iraq War predictions
Just after the coalition invasion of Iraq had been launched, but prior to troops arriving in
BaghdadBaghdad is the capital of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Governorate. The population of Baghdad in 2011 is approximately 7,216,040...
,
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
Prime MinisterThe Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...
Tony BlairAnthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
told parliament that the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and the
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
believed they had "sufficient forces" in Iraq. At that very time Ritter offered an opposing view on Portuguese radio station TSF: "The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we can not win ... We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable ... Every time we confront Iraqi troops we may win some tactical battles, as we did for ten years in Vietnam, but we will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost," Ritter added.
U.S. forces swiftly took Baghdad, but characterizing the result as "winning the war" remains controversial. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, Ritter appeared on the
Sean HannitySean Hannity is an American radio and television host, author, and conservative political commentator. He is the host of The Sean Hannity Show, a nationally syndicated talk radio show that airs throughout the United States on Premiere Radio Networks. Hannity also hosts a cable news show, Hannity,...
show debating the validity of the invasion and his involvement in the Weapons Inspection program.
Commentary on Iraq's lack of WMDs
Despite identifying himself as a
RepublicanThe Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
and having voted for
George W. BushGeorge Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
in 2000, by 2002 Ritter had become an outspoken critic of the
Bush administrationThe presidency of George W. Bush began on January 20, 2001, when he was inaugurated as the 43rd President of the United States of America. The oldest son of former president George H. W. Bush, George W...
's claims that Iraq possessed significant WMD stocks or manufacturing capabilities, the primary rationale given for the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. His views at that time are well summarized in
War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know a 2002 publication which consists largely of an interview between Ritter and anti-war activist
William Rivers PittWilliam Rivers Pitt is an author, editor, and political activist.-Background:Pitt was born in Washington, D.C., and lived several years in Alabama before eventually moving to Boston...
. In the interview, Ritter responds to the question of whether he believes Iraq has weapons of mass destruction:
There's no doubt Iraq hasn't fully complied with its disarmament obligations as set forth by the Security Council in its resolution. But on the other hand, since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity has been verifiably eliminated ... We have to remember that this missing 5-10% doesn't necessarily constitute a threat ... It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons program which in its totality doesn't amount to much, but which is still prohibited ... We can't give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can't close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously, we can't reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capacity worthy of war. (page 28)
We eliminated the nuclear program, and for Iraq to have reconstituted it would require undertaking activities that would have been eminently detectable by intelligence services. (page 32)
If Iraq were producing [chemical] weapons today, we'd have proof, pure and simple. (page 37)
[A]s of December 1998 we had no evidence Iraq had retained biological weapons, nor that they were working on any. In fact, we had a lot of evidence to suggest Iraq was in compliance. (page 46)
In 2002, he heavily criticized the Bush administration and Media outlets for using the testimony of alleged nuclear scientist
Khidir HamzaKhidir Hamza is an Iraqi scientist who worked for Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme in the 1980s and early 1990s. Following the Gulf War, he left Iraq in 1994 and went into exile in the United States. He provided testimony to Western intelligence agencies suggesting that Hussein's weapons of mass...
as a rationale for invading Iraq;
We seized the entire records of the Iraqi Nuclear program, especially the administrative records. We got a name of everybody, where they worked, what they did, and the top of the list, Saddam's "Bombmaker" was a man named Jafar Dhia Jafar, not Khidir Hamza, and if you go down the list of the senior administrative personnel you will not find Hamza's name in there. In fact, we didn't find his name at all. Because in 1990, he didn't work for the Iraqi Nuclear Program. He had no knowledge of it because he worked as a kickback specialist for Hussein KamelHussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid was the son-in-law and second cousin of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. He defected to Jordan and assisted United Nations Special Commission and International Atomic Energy Agency inspection teams assigned to look for weapons of mass destruction in...
in the Presidential Palace.
He goes into northern Iraq and meets up with Ahmad Chalabi. He walks in and says, I'm Saddam's "Bombmaker". So they call the CIA and they say, "we know who you are, you're not Saddam's "Bombmaker", go sell your story to someone else." And he was released, he was rejected by all intelligence services at the time, he's a fraud.
And here we are, someone who the CIA knows is a fraud, the U.S. Government knows is a fraud, is allowed to sit in front of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign RelationsThe United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is a standing committee of the United States Senate. It is charged with leading foreign-policy legislation and debate in the Senate. The Foreign Relations Committee is generally responsible for overseeing and funding foreign aid programs as...
and give testimony as a expert witness. I got a problem with that, I got a problem with the American media, and I've told them over and over and over again that this man is a document-able fraud, a fake, and yet they allow him to go on CNNCable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
, MSNBCMSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...
, CNBCCNBC is a satellite and cable television business news channel in the U.S., owned and operated by NBCUniversal. The network and its international spinoffs cover business headlines and provide live coverage of financial markets. The combined reach of CNBC and its siblings is 390 million viewers...
, and testify as if he actually knows what he is talking about.
In the Pitt interview, Ritter also remarked on several examples of members of the Bush or Clinton administration making statements he "knew to be misleading or false" with regard to Iraqi WMD's.
Later statements on Iraq
In February 2005, writing on
Al JazeeraAl Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...
's website, Ritter wrote that the "Iraqi resistance" is a "genuine grassroots national liberation movement," and "History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government."
In an October 19, 2005 interview with
Seymour HershSeymour Myron Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters...
, Ritter claimed that regime change, rather than disarmament, has been the primary objective of
PresidentA president is a leader of an organization, company, trade union, university, or country.Etymologically, a president is one who presides, who sits in leadership...
George H. W. BushGeorge Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
, and later of
President ClintonWilliam Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
and the second
President BushGeorge Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
, in imposing and maintaining economic sanctions on Iraq after the Gulf War. Said Ritter:
The United States needed to find a vehicle to continue to contain Saddam because the CIA said all we have to do is wait six months and Saddam is going to collapse on his own volition. That vehicle is sanctions. They needed a justification; the justification was disarmament. They drafted a Chapter 7 resolution of the United Nations Security Council calling for the disarmament of Iraq and saying in Paragraph 14 that if Iraq complies, sanctions will be lifted. Within months of this resolution being passed — and the United States drafted and voted in favor of this resolution — within months, the President, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his Secretary of State, James Baker, are saying publicly, not privately, publicly that even if Iraq complies with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power.
That is proof positive that disarmament was only useful insofar as it contained through the maintenance of sanctions and facilitated regime change. It was never about disarmament, it was never about getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. It started with George Herbert Walker Bush, and it was a policy continued through eight years of the Clinton presidency, and then brought us to this current disastrous course of action under the current Bush Administration.
In March 2007, in "Calling Out Idiot America," Ritter posted a quiz on Iraq to be taken by citizens:
If the reader can fully answer the question raised, then he or she qualifies as one capable of pointing an accusatory finger at Congress as its members dither over what to do in Iraq. If the reader fails the quiz, then there should be an honest appraisal of the reality that we are in way over our heads regarding this war, and that it is irresponsible for anyone to make sweeping judgments about the ramifications of policy courses of action yet to be agreed upon. Claiming to be able to divine a solution to a problem improperly defined is not only ignorant but dangerously delusional.
Ritter has also been harshly critical of Bill Clinton for politicizing the inspection process during his presidency and of Hillary Clinton for obfuscating that record.
From January 1993 until my resignation from the United Nations in August 1998, I witnessed first hand the duplicitous Iraq policies of the administration of Bill Clinton, the implementation of which saw a President lie to the American people about a threat he knew was hyped, lie to Congress about his support of a disarmament process his administration wanted nothing to do with, and lie to the world about American intent, which turned its back on the very multilateral embrace of diplomacy as reflected in the resolutions of the Security Council Hillary Clinton so piously refers to in her speech, and instead pursued a policy defined by the unilateral interests of the Clinton administration to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Opinions on U.S. policy toward Iran
On February 18, 2005 Scott Ritter told an audience in
OlympiaOlympia is the capital city of the U.S. state of Washington and the county seat of Thurston County. It was incorporated on January 28, 1859. The population was 46,478 at the 2010 census...
, Washington that
George BushGeorge Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
had signed-off on preparations to bomb
IranIran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
ian nuclear facilities, and that these preparations would be completed by June 2005. On the same occasion, he also made reference to the Iraqi elections, saying that the United States had manipulated the 2005 parliamentary election, changing the percentage of
United Iraqi AllianceThe National Iraqi Alliance , also known as the Watani List, is an Iraqi electoral coalition that contested the Iraqi legislative election, 2010. The Alliance is mainly composed of Shi'a Islamist parties...
votes from 56% to 48%.
Ritter reiterated and clarified his statements about Iran in a March 30, article published by
Al JazeeraAl Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...
.
In a June 20, 2005, article published by
Al JazeeraAl Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...
, after noting that the Iraq war, which supposedly began in March 2003, in fact began with military operations authorized by the president in late August 2002 and executed in September 2002, Ritter wrote: "The reality is that the U.S. war with Iran has already begun."
On October 21, 2005, Ritter was interviewed by
Amy GoodmanAmy Goodman is an American progressive broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author. Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the internet.-Early life:Goodman was born in Bay Shore, New York...
of the radio and TV show "
Democracy Now!Democracy Now! and its staff have received several journalism awards, including the Gracie Award from American Women in Radio & Television; the George Polk Award for its 1998 radio documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, on the Chevron Corporation and the deaths of...
" and commented on his earlier statements about United States policy toward Iran, as they had been reported by some sources.
I was very clear, based upon the information given to me, and it's 100% accurate, that in October 2004, the President of the United States ordered the Pentagon to be prepared to launch military strikes against Iran as of June 2005. That means, have all the resources in place so that if the President orders it, the bombing can begin. It doesn't mean that the bombing is going [to] begin in June. And a lot of people went, "Ah, you said they were going to attack in June." Absolutely not.
Although there were no air strikes against Iran by the United States in June 2005, there were bomb blasts in the southern west Iranian city of Ahwaz on June 12, 2005. Some believe the attacks were carried out by the Mujahideen al-Khalq (MEK) organization. Scott Ritter as well as other sources have claimed that the United States, after the invasion of Iraq, have been working with Mojahedin-e-Khalq to continue covert operations in Iran.
Ritter has also made the following two statements regarding military intervention in Iran
The real purpose of the EU-3 intervention — to prevent the United States from using Iran's nuclear ambition as an excuse for military intervention — is never discussed in public.
The EU-3 would rather continue to participate in fraudulent diplomacy rather than confront the hard truth — that it is the United States, and not Iran, that is operating outside international law when it comes to the issue of Iran's nuclear programme.
On February 6, 2006, in the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, Ritter stated about a U.S. war with Iran:
"We just don't know when, but it's going to happen," and said that after the U.N. security Council will have found no evidence of WMD, Bolton
"will deliver a speech that has already been written. It says America cannot allow Iran to threaten the United States and we must unilaterally defend ourselves." and continued
"How do I know this? I've talked to Bolton's speechwriter,"
In an interview with Amy Goodman broadcast on Democracy Now! on October 16, 2006, Ritter again reaffirmed the U.S.'s state of undeclared war vis-à-vis Iran.
Ritter published "
Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change" in 2006. One editorial review stated: "This book offers Ritter's "national intelligence assessment" of the Iranian imbroglio. He examines the Bush administration's regime-change policy and the potential of Iran to threaten U.S. national security interests."
In his book Ritter claimed that Israel was pushing the Bush administration into war with Iran. He also accused the
U.S. pro-Israel lobbyThe Israel lobby is a term used to describe the diverse coalition of those who, as individuals and as groups, seek and have sought to influence the foreign policy of the United States in support of Zionism, Israel or the specific policies of its government...
of dual loyalty and outright espionage.
Documentary
According to the
Washington Times, Ritter's 2000 documentary
In Shifting Sands was partially financed by
Iraqi AmericanIraqi Americans are Americans of Iraqi descent, including those who are expatriates in exile or permanent immigrants. The number of Iraqi Americans is around 140,000 according to the Arab American Institute....
businessman
Shakir al KhafajiShakir al Khafaji is a Detroit-based Iraqi-American businessman. He immigrated to the United States in 1975. He graduated with a B.S. degree in architecture from Lawrence Tech Universityin 1980. He received an M.S. in Urban Planning in 1982 from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.Mr. al Khafaji...
. Al-Khafaji pled guilty to multiple felony charges in 2004 for his relationship with U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal. Ritter denied any
quid pro quoQuid pro quo most often means a more-or-less equal exchange or substitution of goods or services. English speakers often use the term to mean "a favour for a favour" and the phrases with almost identical meaning include: "give and take", "tit for tat", "this for that", and "you scratch my back,...
with Al-Khafaji, according to
Laurie MylroieLaurie Mylroie is a U.S. author who has written several controversial and heavily criticized books on the subject of Iraq and the War on Terror. Notably, Mylroie contends that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein sponsored the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and many subsequent terrorist...
, writing in the
Financial Times. When Ritter was asked "how he would characterize anyone suggesting that Mr. Khafaji was offering allocations in [his] name", Mr. Ritter replied: "I'd say that person's a fucking liar...and tell him to come over here so I can kick his ass."
Arrests and conviction
Ritter was detained in April 2001 and arrested in June 2001 in connection with
police stingsIn law enforcement, a sting operation is a deceptive operation designed to catch a person committing a crime. A typical sting will have a law-enforcement officer or cooperative member of the public play a role as criminal partner or potential victim and go along with a suspect's actions to gather...
in which officers posed as under-aged girls to arrange meetings of a sexual nature. The first incident did not lead to any charges. He was charged with a misdemeanor crime of "attempted endangerment of the welfare of a child" after the second, but charges were dropped after he completed six months of probation and the record was sealed on condition that he avoid further trouble for a period of time. Ritter said that the timing of the leak was politically motivated.
Ritter was arrested again in November 2009 over communications with a police decoy he met on an Internet chat site. Police said that he exposed himself via a web camera after the officer said she was a 15-year-old girl; Ritter said he was not made aware of the ostensible age of his correspondent before the act. The next month, Ritter waived his right to a preliminary hearing and was released on a $25,000 unsecured bail. Charges included "unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communications facility, corruption of minors, indecent exposure, possessing instruments of crime, criminal attempt and criminal solicitation". Ritter was found guilty of all but one count against him in a Monroe County, Pennsylvania courtroom on April 14, 2011.
External links