Tom Mooney
Scott Ritter in LA Times!!
Mon Sep 16 18:07:02 2002
208.152.73.139


Ex-Inspector's Stance on Iraq Sparks Storm
Weapons: Scott Ritter says U.N. teams rid 95% of
Saddam Hussein's arsenal. Critics and colleagues
question the depth of his knowledge.
By JOHANNA NEUMAN and BOB DROGIN
TIMES STAFF WRITERS

September 16 2002

WASHINGTON -- When former United Nations arms
inspector Scott Ritter got home from Baghdad Tuesday
night, he was greeted by a flood of e-mail messages.

Some applauded his courage in standing up to the Bush
administration's war rhetoric by telling Iraq's
National Assembly that the U.S. had no "hard facts"
that Baghdad possesses weapons of mass destruction.
Others, saying he'd been brainwashed by President
Saddam Hussein, suggested that he turn in his U.S.
passport and move to Iraq.

"People who call me a traitor are disrespecting
American democracy," Ritter said in an interview, one
of dozens he juggled in the days after his return.
"It's mind-boggling."

Mind-boggling is a word often applied to Scott Ritter
these days. As a weapons inspector, he pioneered new
techniques to ferret out Hussein's most virulent
weapons. When Ritter resigned in 1998, he was hailed
by conservatives in Congress for standing up to what
he saw as lack of spine in the Clinton administration
and the U.N. Security Council.

"Iraq today is not disarmed and remains an ugly threat
to its neighbors and to world peace," Ritter told a
Senate committee in September 1998. "Americans who
think that ... something should be done about it have
to be deeply disappointed in our leadership."

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), called him "a true
American hero." Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of
Delaware was less kind, faulting Ritter for reaching
"above his pay grade" in presuming to tell White House
officials how to conduct foreign policy. "That's why
they get paid the big bucks," Biden said. "That's why
they get the limos, and you don't."

These days, Ritter is sounding a different warning.
Concerned about the White House's drumbeat for "regime
change," he argues that 95% of Hussein's arsenal was
disarmed by the U.N. inspection teams between 1991 and
1998. The only way to determine whether Iraq has
rearmed in the last four years, he says, is to let
inspectors back in.

"There is no hard evidence, no hard evidence
whatsoever," Ritter told CNN on Friday. "I'm not
saying Iraq doesn't pose a threat. I am saying that it
has not been demonstrated to pose a threat worthy of
war."

So this former Marine, a tough-guy Republican with a
taste for intelligence work and a knack for media
splash, has been embraced by the anti-war movement. He
says he has little in common with his latest
allies--"they're tree-huggers and I'm for chopping
down the forests," he explains--except for an
understanding that war without provocation is wrong.

His passion for inspections is born of
adrenalin-pumping days in Iraq. There were the "dog
ate my homework" excuses Iraqi officials used to deter
detection: Books were missing; documents had been
destroyed during the war; the key to the office was
lost. There were confrontations in parking lots when
inspectors refused to leave after being denied entry
to a building. Shots were fired over their heads.

'Underdogs' in the Game

"It was a great game, and we were the underdogs,"
recalled another weapons inspector, who asked that his
name not be used to avoid a personality clash with
Ritter. "We were like hotel thieves, cooking up all
kinds of creative methods to get in." Being on the
inspection team, he said, "was the highlight of all of
our lives."

If some see Ritter's obsession with inspections as
nostalgic, others ridicule him for taking a 180-degree
turn and for demonstrating--as former Marine Lt. Col.
Oliver L. North did in embroiling the Reagan White
House in an arms-for-hostages swap with Iran--that
Marines are sometimes better at "taking the hill" than
understanding it.

"This is the classic Marine problem," said Patrick
Clawson, deputy director at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy. "It's building a bridge over the
River Kwai, when it's not apparent that a bridge is
what is needed."

Since 1998, Ritter has earned his living as a
lecturer. He wrote "Endgame," which Simon & Schuster
is reissuing in paperback. With $400,000 from an Iraqi
American businessman, Shakir Alkhafaji, he produced a
documentary about Iraq, "In Shifting Sands," which
will also be the title of his next book. Ritter
bristles at the comparison to North, who invoked his
5th Amendment rights before Congress granted him
immunity. Ritter also insists that he has done no
180-degree turn, being a fan then and now of the power
and efficacy of inspections. And he is quite angry
about accusations that he has become Hussein's
lobbyist.

"I despise what Saddam has done to his people, I wish
... he'd drop dead," he said.

The trip to Baghdad--funded in part, he says, by peace
groups--was not meant as propaganda for Hussein but as
a counter to the White House media blitz against Iraq.
"I used the address to the Iraqi National Assembly to
put my message before the American public," he said.
"I knew Bush was meeting with [British Prime Minister]
Tony Blair. I knew the administration would have its
voice on the Sunday talk shows. I decided to launch a
preemptive strike."

A Born Military Man

Ritter is the youngest of four children--and the only
son--born into a military family. His father was in
the Air Force. His mother was a military nurse. The
formative high school years, he says, were spent in
Hawaii, Germany and Turkey.

As a kid, he had a special fondness for history,
painting Napoleonic toy soldiers in uniforms
researched for accuracy. Ritter remembers enjoying the
combat simulation games in "Strategy & Tactics," a
military history magazine.

He became a Marine, then a weapons inspector sent to
the Soviet Union to enforce the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Force Treaty. There he met his future wife,
Marina Khatiashvili, a translator from the Soviet
republic of Georgia. His marriage raised eyebrows in
intelligence circles, where Soviet translators were
assumed to be working for the KGB.

Ritter later applied to the CIA but was derailed by a
lie detector test in which he admitted sharing
intelligence with Israel while an inspector in
Iraq--one of his tactical maneuvers to outsmart
Hussein, he says. In two interviews before he left for
Iraq, Ritter argued that the U.N. teams destroyed all
the weapons and fundamentally disarmed Iraq before
Hussein barred further inspections in late 1998.

"There was nothing left that we were aware of that we
hadn't destroyed," he said. "We had suspicions. We had
concerns. But we had no hard evidence."

One reason, he asserts, was his own success as an
inspector. "You wouldn't believe how thorough we
were," he said. "In 1992, I went through Iraq like
Attila the Hun."

He dismisses concerns that Baghdad retains several
highly sophisticated devices, called lenses, used to
help trigger nuclear explosions. Iraqi troops tossed
the lenses into a truck and then onto the ground, he
said. "Whatever they had was smashed."

He challenges assertions that Iraq has reserves of VX,
a deadly nerve agent, and the means to make more. "The
R&D is destroyed. The major production equipment is
destroyed. The warheads are destroyed. So they don't
have the capability to produce VX."

And he ridicules fears that Iraq could deliver
anthrax, smallpox or other deadly biological agents
via a long-range missile. "The only way an Iraqi
biological bomb would kill you is if it hit you on the
head," he said.

As for Iraq's nuclear program, "absolutely nothing is
going on in nuclear," he said. "Everything was
destroyed. They'd have to be buying new stuff [from
abroad], importing it, installing it, putting in
electricity feeds. We'd see it. We'd know it."

Ex-Inspectors Skeptical

Ritter's statements have stunned other former U.N.
weapons inspectors. Richard Spertzel, the chief
biological weapons inspector in Iraq from 1994 to
1998, ridiculed Ritter's assertions during a Senate
subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

"How does he know what 100% is?" Spertzel asked. "I
don't. And how many biological sites did he visit? The
answer is none. He has no knowledge of those sites."

David Kay, the chief nuclear inspector in Iraq from
1991 to 1993, agreed. He said Ritter sharply
criticized the ability of U.N. inspection teams to
disarm Iraq when he testified before Congress.

"Either he lied to you then or he's lying to you now,"
Kay said. "He's gone completely the other way. I
cannot explain it on the basis of known facts."

So Long, Baghdad

But Ritter says he has been more consistent than
critics allow, favoring inspections instead of either
war or a shrug of indifference. Sobered by the
intensely angry reaction over his trip to Iraq, Ritter
says he has no plans to visit Baghdad again.

But he does plan to keep speaking out. This fall he
will be in Britain for the Labor Party conference, and
in Berlin, Vienna and Copenhagen to talk to anti-war
groups.

"People who call me a traitor today cheered me wildly
when I resigned," he said. "But I can't let them
fabricate the facts for war. If we want to sell
American democracy, by God we have to live it."
If you want other stories on this topic, search the
Archives at latimes.com/archives . For information
about reprinting this article, go to
www.lats.com/rights .

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
=======================================================================

Ex-UN weapons inspector addresses Iraqi
parliament, urges inspectors' return
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• Re: Scott Ritter — Les, Tue Sep 17 02:00