Did Colin Powell close the deal today in your mind for anyone who has yet objectively to make up their mind?
I think for anybody who analyzes the situation, he has closed the deal.
This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today, Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today.
Colin Powell is outstanding today.
I mean, it was lockstep.
It was so compelling.
I don't see how anybody at this point cannot support this effort.
He made a wonderful presentation.
I thought he made a great case for the purpose of disarmament.
It was devastating.
I mean, and overwhelming.
Overwhelming abundance of the evidence.
Point after point after point, he just flooded the terrain with data.
It's the end of the argument phase.
America has made its case.
The Powell speech has moved the ball.
I think case is closed.
Trust me.
Trust me.
Saddam Hussein's intentions have never changed.
He is not developing the missiles for self-defense.
These are missiles that Iraq wants in order to project power, to threaten, and to deliver chemical, biological, and, if we let him, nuclear warheads.
For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And our next guest on the show today is Scott Ritter.
He's a former UN weapons inspector.
Of course, author of Endgame, Iraq Confidential, Target Iran.
And I forget the Art of War for the Peace Movement.
I forget the first part of the title.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
Well, thanks for having me.
I'm sorry.
What's that last book there?
Waging Peace.
Ah, yes.
Waging Peace.
The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement.
Sorry about that.
I don't have it in front of me.
What I want to ask you about today is the Iraq War and how we got into it.
I'm really interested, actually, in my own memory, the way I interpreted in, I think, 1998, your statements on CNN.
I still remember you with your blue UN hat on.
And you said that you guys would go to do a weapons inspection in Iraq, and then at the last second, you would get a phone call from Madeleine Albright's office.
Saying, don't go.
And from reading your recent article in The Guardian about the government of England and their role in lying us into war, it seems like you make pretty clear that your belief is that the American government didn't want you guys to finish your inspections back in that era, 96, 97, 98.
Because they were afraid you would prove the negative.
They were afraid that you would be finished and there would be, you know, it would basically be proven fact that there are no weapons of mass destruction there.
And yet, if I remember right, my own memory of you on TV at the time, it seemed like you were very concerned, really, that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
And you couldn't understand why Albright was keeping you from doing your job.
Do I remember that right?
Can you explain exactly what's going on there?
Well, let's be absolutely clear about, you know, what we're talking about here.
The Iraqis had an obligation, not just to declare the totality of their weapons of mass destruction, but also all of the supporting infrastructure related to weapons of mass destruction.
We, as inspectors, had done a very good job from 1991 to 1996, 1997, of accounting for the weaponry, the hard weapons, the bombs, the shells, the missiles.
And we had done a good job.
We could account for, you know, 90 to 95% of these weapons.
We had done a good job in terms of monitoring Iraq's industrial infrastructure to ensure that Iraq was neither reconstituting or retaining weapons of mass destruction manufacturing capacity.
But our mandate was 100% disarmament, not 90%, not 95%, 100%.
This is the standard that we, as inspectors, were held to.
So I, as a chief inspector, you know, I didn't have the ability to sit there and go, you know, 90, 95% is good enough.
That's a political decision made by the Security Council.
My job was to achieve 100% certainty.
That was the task I was given.
There was no flexibility on that.
And I accurately stated that we did not have 100% certainty that there were viable concerns, that the Iraqis were hiding aspects of their weapons of mass destruction program.
Not necessarily complete weapons, but documents pertaining to these weapons, documents pertaining to ongoing procurement activity, which was being conducted in violation of United Nations sanctions.
And we needed to get clarity on this.
I served the role of a detective in an ongoing investigation who had a desk full of leads that needed to be followed up before the case could be closed.
And we were being told that we can't follow up on these leads.
Now, that doesn't mean that I'm going to sit there and play judge and say Iraq is guilty or Iraq is innocent.
As an inspector, my job is to carry out the mandate of inspections.
And I was not being allowed to do that.
And my mandate of inspections was based upon not only Iraq's past record of behavior in terms of lying to us and retaining weaponry in violation of their obligation to disarm, but also Iraq's behavior since then where they were obstructive to the work of inspectors.
So it led us to be suspicious, that Iraq led us as inspectors to be suspicious as to what Iraq's true intent was, what was going on here.
We needed to clarify it.
If we sat down and laid out all the facts on the table, we wrote report after report after report that said we can account for almost every missile there is.
There is no viable chemical weapons production capability in Iraq today.
Iraq cannot produce a biological weapon.
We wrote these reports, but our job was 100% verification of Iraqi compliance, and we could not give that.
And so we carried out inspections that were designed to get that, and so long as the United States would not allow a qualitative assessment to be made.
See, if the United States said, well just, you know, bottom line, can Iraq produce weapons of mass destruction?
The answer was no.
But that's not the benchmark that the United States and Great Britain and others put out there.
They said 100% compliance.
And as long as that was the benchmark, we couldn't state that Iraq had achieved that benchmark.
And so we as inspectors were going forward.
Now, when I resigned, I was allowed to apply qualitative assessments.
In fact, I wrote, I think, the definitive article on this issue, which is the case for the qualitative disarmament of Iraq, published in Arms Control today in June of 2000.
And it clearly states the case.
And that case was borne out after the invasion in 2003 when the CIA's reports exactly matched that which I wrote in June of 2000, which says Iraq was fundamentally disarmed.
That there was no weapon of mass destruction program still there.
That the thing that held us back was the requirement for quantitative disarmament to account for 100% of everything.
That was our job as inspectors.
We weren't allowed to do that job.
But it was pretty much a moot job to begin with.
But as an inspector, I'm not allowed to say that.
I have to do the job that I'm mandated to do by a Security Council resolution.
Well, and so this is actually the origin of what, from a very vague right-wing pro-Iraq war point of view, was what they saw as your flip-flop.
From this is the guy who used to be on TV saying it's not 100% and Iraq is a danger, and now he's saying it might as well be 100%, it's close enough, and no, they're not.
Let's just be clear.
What I said is, you defined Iraq as a danger.
So long as Iraq is not in compliance.
So, in order for us to reach your level of compliance, you have to let us do these inspections.
And if you block us from doing these inspections, by your own definition, Iraq continues to be a danger.
So I was basically throwing their words back in their face.
But the bottom line is, when you step back and go, well, is Iraq really a danger?
And this is what the United States didn't want, was a debate to be held in the Security Council about why Scott Ritter and the other inspectors are going into Iraq, kicking down doors, and causing trouble.
Why is it every two months we have an international crisis in Iraq over aggressive weapons inspections?
What are the inspectors looking for?
I can guarantee you that in November of 1997, that was a question the Security Council was asking.
What exactly is it you're looking for?
And we had to craft some very detailed presentations to present to the Security Council to explain what exactly we were looking for.
But in the end, many in the Security Council, including the Russians, the French, the Chinese, said, you know, but that's really nothing.
I mean, compared to what Iraq had, what you're looking for is nothing.
You don't even have hard evidence this stuff exists.
This is the last debate that the United States wanted to occur in the Security Council.
They wanted to make it a clean debate, which is Iraq is non-compliant, as opposed to a murky debate that said, yeah, you might not be able to get 100% compliance.
But gosh, haven't we fundamentally disarmed them?
Iraq no longer poses a threat.
Isn't this right?
And that was not the debate the United States wanted.
Well, now, Andrew Coburn reported that in 1997, in fact, I think I went back and found some sort of cooperation in official statements back at the time.
But he told a story where Madeleine Albright in 1997 was actually prepared to somehow, I'm not sure the exact terminology, but somehow certify Iraq as weapons of mass destruction free.
But that then a decision was made.
And I guess it was the President, Bill Clinton himself, preempted her by saying that as long as Saddam Hussein is in power, the sanctions will not be lifted.
And so then that put all the pressure on him, or put him in the position, I guess, where the most rational thing for him to do is say, well, then why should I allow any inspections at all?
Why should I cooperate with any of this?
Well, I mean, it gets more complicated than that.
In 1995, Clinton, well, let's even go back further.
When Bill Clinton came into office, during his transition period, the Clinton administration had reached out.
Officials from the future Clinton administration, from the transition team, had reached out to the Iraqi government through intermediaries in Jordan, where they carried out extensive discussions about what would happen when Clinton came into office.
And basically the deal was that Iraq would fully cooperate with the weapons inspectors and that Bill Clinton would use his cooperation as the trigger for the eventual lifting of economic sanctions and the return to normalcy, bringing Iraq back into the family of nations.
I remember sitting down with the oil minister and the chief weapons official, Amir Rashid, and he gloated that the age of the inspectors was virtually over, that with this new president, things were going to change dramatically.
The problem was that when Bill Clinton got sworn in in 1993, the last act of President George Herbert Walker Bush was to order military strikes against Iraq, so that as Bill Clinton was being sworn in, we were technically at war with Iraq.
A lot of Americans don't realize that, that we had active bombing campaign going on as Bill Clinton was being sworn in.
Then Bill Clinton managed to navigate through that crisis, and then we have the alleged assassination attempt against George Herbert Walker Bush when he was visiting Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government producing the culprits, producing weaponry, etc.
Turns out that was all false, 100%.
There was never an assassination attempt, but in the rush to judgment based upon the political pressure put on Bill Clinton and his administration, the Clinton administration attacked Iraq, attacked the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in June of 1993, certifying the assassination attempt as legitimate.
Once you do that, you cannot negotiate with Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein becomes a pariah that has to be dealt with.
Bill Clinton didn't have a plan to do that.
He endorsed the Bush administration's regime change policy without funding it, but in 1995, Saddam Hussein's continuing intransigence compelled Bill Clinton to order the CIA to up the ante.
So in 1996, you had active ongoing assassination attempts, some of which used the UN weapons inspections as a front to gain access to Saddam Hussein, and these failed.
They failed egregiously.
This embarrassed the United States.
Now in 1997, the United States was at a crossroads.
What do we do with Iraq?
Do we move forward in terms of a disarmament mandate, or do we pursue regime change?
I don't think that Madeleine Albright was on the verge of saying, I know she was under pressure from outgoing Chairman Ralph Acaius, who was saying that we think that we've accounted for everything we're going to account for.
We can mitigate against concerns about what might remain by noting that we have the most intrusive, effective on-site inspection regime in the world, monitoring the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure.
These were reports that were being given to Madeleine Albright, but in the end, Bill Clinton was under pressure from the neoconservatives and the right wing of his own party to hold Saddam Hussein to account, so they embraced a policy of regime change.
A cornerstone of regime change was the continuation of economic sanctions that were imposed on Iraq in August of 1990, sustained by Security Council resolutions linking the lifting of economic sanctions with Iraq's disarmament obligation.
Therefore, it became incumbent upon the United States to maintain the perception of Iraqi non-compliance as a vehicle of maintaining economic sanctions that serve to destabilize and isolate and contain Saddam, until which time an effective means of removing him from power could be achieved.
This is why, in 1997, every time the weapons inspectors started moving forward aggressively on an inspection issue, Madeleine Albright would pull the plug, because she did not want to have a debate in the Security Council about why we were doing these inspections.
She didn't want inspections that cleared up the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.
She wanted an inspection program that sustained the notion of Iraqi non-compliance, and aggressive inspections became an enemy, not a friend, of American foreign policy.
Now, did you understand that at the time, you and your team there?
Absolutely, we understood it.
We understood even more in the spring of 1998, when Madeleine Albright finally approved a series of aggressive inspections.
In March of 1998, an inspection that I led into Iraq, where the United States inserted the Iraqi Ministry of Defense as the dominant target, even though we didn't want to go to the Ministry of Defense.
We said, there's no compelling arms control reason to go to the Ministry of Defense.
In a White House meeting, where I was in the Situation Room with the national security leaders of the United States, the United States said, you will do this inspection.
Thinking that, because Tariq Aziz said, if you try to inspect the Ministry of Defense, this is an act of war.
So, the United States was hoping that Iraq would reject the inspectors, and they had their military force all lined up.
They had cruise missiles targeted with the coordinates loaded in, ready to strike.
We were supposed to go to Iraq, attempt an inspection, get turned away, and as we left Iraq, the cruise missiles were coming in.
That was the plan.
The problem is, as a weapons inspector, my job isn't to facilitate American military action.
My job is to carry out my mandate of inspections.
I was able to work out a compromise agreement with the Iraqi government that gave me full access to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, me and my inspectors.
We inspected that facility thoroughly and effectively.
We got rid of the threat of war.
Madeleine Albright was so incensed.
She was sitting in Paris, France at the time, bragging to the French government how, in a few hours, Saddam would be committing suicide.
Suddenly, she got the phone call that, no, the inspectors are underway, everything's going fine, and she just turned beet red in the face.
She couldn't even talk to her French counterparts.
Clinton was accused of undermining the inspection.
He gave a speech in April of 1998 in which he promised to give the inspectors every support, all the support they needed.
Meanwhile, Albright and Berger and the rest of the national security establishment is meeting and drafting and passed new policy guidelines that said the United States will not support any aggressive inspections at all.
Then they sold this to the British, and the British bought into it.
The bottom line is the two major powers in the Security Council, who were proponents of weapons inspections in Iraq, or allegedly proponents, basically turned their back on the weapons inspection regime because weapons inspections were no longer conducive to their policy objectives, which were not disarming Iraq, but getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
This is 1998.
Okay, so just to sum up.
Basically, they did not want you guys to be able to prove the negative.
As you say, clear up the issue that, no, they really don't have anything.
And then even they tried to send you on a mission to the Defense Ministry where they assumed that it was, I guess, just they thought it was a safe bet that you would not be allowed access there, and then they would use that as the excuse.
You were being turned away from a place where you had no business whatsoever as an excuse to bomb it, and, I guess, hopefully kill Saddam or what?
But you screwed that up by going ahead and making a deal and getting the inspection done at the Defense Ministry.
Correct.
I mean, it gets even more nefarious in that the British, the culpability of the British goes further because the British, I traveled to London and met with them at the highest levels, and said, are you going along with this American policy?
And they said, no, we will support inspections if they're based upon absolutely accurate intelligence information.
And that means it has to be timely information.
We can't be acting on information that's a month old, two months old.
It has to be fresh information.
It has to be verified, confirmed.
And if that's it, then we will back an inspection.
In July, I got summoned from my office in New York to the British mission in New York, where I met with the SIS, the British Secret Intelligence Service representative, and he passed some very sensitive intelligence information, and he said this information has been vetted, that the British government supports it, and if the United Nations would want to do an inspection based on this information, it would be supported by the British government.
So I put together an inspection team.
We were ready to act in early August.
Again, the United States pulled the plug, wouldn't allow the inspection to take place.
What strikes me as interesting is that in December of 1998, this same site, the Ba'ath Party headquarters in Adhamia, a neighborhood in Baghdad, was cited, was attempted to be inspected by UN inspectors using the same British information.
But by this time, the information is almost five months old, violating the British criteria.
The information itself said that the material that was allegedly hidden there was going to be rotated out every few weeks, so there wasn't going to be anything in there anyways if this information was accurate.
But it was a political site, the Iraqis balked.
They eventually agreed to allow the inspectors in, but the United States used the initial rejection as an excuse to withdraw the inspectors from Iraq, setting up a bombing, Operation Desert Fox, a 72-hour bombing campaign that killed weapons inspections because it became clear to the Iraqis that the weapons inspectors were doing two things.
One, they were gathering intelligence information that was being passed back to the United States that was being used to target Iraq.
And two, they were acting on intelligence information from the United States and Great Britain that wasn't designed to further disarm it, but rather provoke confrontations.
Just as a side note, when I went to Iraq back in 2000 to film my documentary, In Shifting Sands, I gained access to the Ba'ath Party headquarters in Adamiyah.
I was intimately familiar with this site from overhead photography and the diagrams provided by the British.
There was no basement where they said it would be.
The place where they said the stuff was going to be hidden didn't exist.
It was flawed information to begin with.
But my point is, we went to war in December 1998 using bad intelligence, outdated intelligence, and it wasn't done for legitimate disarmament reasons.
It was done as a deliberate provocation.
Let me make sure I understand here because I think I might be confused.
You're saying that you were sent there to the Defense Ministry and you made a deal and were allowed access.
You inspected the place and said, no problem.
But then, I guess after you were out or a different team was sent over and over again until they would finally say no to the same site?
No, the Defense Ministry is one site.
The next site is the Ba'ath Party headquarters in Adamiyah.
I'm sorry.
A different site altogether, but still a very politically sensitive site.
Sure.
And the point was to do this in order to be refused, in order to justify airstrikes.
That's right.
When you told me before years ago, Scott, that Operation Desert Fox was an assassination attempt against Saddam Hussein, basically that was the first shot at real regime change right there.
Correct.
One of the programs that we ran as inspectors in an effort to try and find out what was going on with the potential Iraq hiding weaponry was to do covert intercepts of Iraq's most senior sensitive communications, the communications involving the president and presidential security because presidential security was linked to the hiding of weapons back in 1991.
And the Iraqis were denying this altogether.
So we were suspicious that if weapons were being hidden today, they would be hidden by the same organizational structures.
So we penetrated their communications.
We were doing it for disarmament purposes, but the data was making its way to the United States, which was using it to target Saddam Hussein.
Based upon the weapons inspectors' work in radio communications interception, the United States was able to derive two targets where they thought that Saddam Hussein was going to be that night by listening to communications on where presidential convoys were headed.
One was in downtown Baghdad.
The other one was in Algiers just outside of Tikrit.
And the first cruise missiles to hit Iraq hit the villas associated with these sites where they thought Saddam Hussein was going to be.
Saddam wasn't in either one.
The other thing is they struck a number of security installations, primarily Special Republican Guard, in an effort to suppress Saddam's regime protection mechanisms.
And the CIA had recruited some generals from divisions down south in the Kut region.
And the idea was to get those divisions to move on Baghdad with Saddam's personal bodyguards suppressed to make a move and seize Baghdad, get rid of Saddam Hussein.
So Operation Desert Fox, far from being an effort to suppress Iraq's weapons of mass destruction potential, was purely an airstrike designed to terminate Saddam Hussein's regime.
So did those generals attempt to take Baghdad at all?
No.
Like everything the CIA does and did in Iraq, that effort was penetrated.
Those generals were arrested and executed by Saddam Hussein's security forces.
Well, so let's talk about the Bush administration, right?
Because the Desert Fox failed to kill Saddam Hussein, and then you had the whole Lewinsky thing going on at the same time.
Basically, I guess it was just finishing up.
But you basically had a lame-duck presidency right through 1999-2000.
What was Clinton doing then?
Was there anything that we need to stop and get to before we get to Bush-Cheney years here?
Well, I mean, Bill Clinton...
The Desert Fox had basically two sides to it.
One is, if by a miracle we could get rid of Saddam, it would be problem solved.
But part two of it was, if the strikes did not work, they would be conducted in a way and linked to inspections in a manner which would compel the Iraqis to say, weapons inspectors aren't allowed back in.
And with no weapons inspections on ground, in Iraq, then you basically keep the sanctions at status quo ante.
Meaning, we can't show that Iraq is fully compliant, therefore economic sanctions are maintained.
And this time without the inconvenience of those pesky inspectors trying to disarm Iraq, and those pesky French, Chinese, and Russians trying to find out just what the heck is going on in Iraq.
Now basically, there's no inspectors, so you go with the last conclusion, which is Iraq is non-compliant, and now you keep economic sanctions in place, until which time you can come up with an adequate way of getting rid of Saddam.
And that's what happened.
Bill Clinton had pretty much declared that his policy was regime change.
Well, it was November 1998 when he signed the Regime Change Act, right?
Correct.
But the debate is taking place all throughout the summer of 1998, the fall of 1998, and he was placed under tremendous pressure.
So in the late fall of 1998, he signs the Iraq Liberation Act, which makes public law the expenditure of almost $100 million of U.S. taxpayer money to fund opposition groups that will overthrow Saddam Hussein.
So the money was voted for, passed by Congress, but Bill Clinton was never very aggressive in spending this money.
And so it sets up the, you know, now we have formal policy.
In the past, it was covert policy of regime change.
Now we have a formal policy of regime change.
And Bill Clinton is not effectively implementing this.
So enter George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the other neoconservatives who say, hey, if you elect us, we're going to follow through on this.
Well, you know, and let me stop you right there because in the spring, I guess late spring, early summer of 2001, people can find the YouTube out there of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice both saying that, I think Powell says, well, we have Saddam Hussein in a box.
His military is completely degraded.
He's not a threat to anyone.
Containment's working just fine.
Rice basically parrots Powell.
Somehow that changed like everything else on September 11th, huh?
Well, but remember, those were two voices and those are two voices that are highlighted.
But you also had, you know, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and others saying the exact opposite, that Iraq is a major threat.
What people need to realize is that the Bush administration, you know, a lot of people voted for him because we, you know, I was one of them.
You know, because we're going to get the return to adult leadership, you know, after eight years of this, you know, teenage puberty infested leadership that we had with Bill Clinton, you know, especially in foreign policy.
Well, I remember, yeah, the story went, well, everybody knows that George Bush was kind of an idiot, hand-me-down power, but that Dick Cheney, he's a real bright guy.
That's right.
He's a bright guy and so is all the people that, it's not so much what Bush is.
I mean, I bought into this lock, stock and barrel.
It's the team that's going to surround him.
That team's going to be, you know, from Papa Bush, you know, the old guard.
So we're going to get a return to that kind of maturity.
The problem is we didn't.
We pretty much, with the exception of Dick Cheney, we had a purging of the ranks.
Very few of the old guard came back.
You had a whole bunch of the new generation of neocons that came in with this hard agenda of changing the world, of carrying on, you know, the vision of the Defense Policy Review that took place in 1992 in the aftermath of the Cold War, which talked about global domination.
But the other thing people don't realize is that the Bush administration was probably one of the most fundamentally incompetent administrations in 500 days.
From the time of his being sworn in until September 10, 2001, we weren't talking about, you know, the epitome of competence.
Fact is, if you go back and read the op-eds in August and September of 2001, there was a cry for Rumsfeld to be fired, that this man was just grossly incompetent.
The Bush administration was floundering without direction.
The Onion ran a headline in, I think, July or August that said, country just realizing that George Bush is actually the president.
Oh no, they cry.
Yeah, I mean, you know, he was a joke, a national joke.
And then September 11th comes along and, of course, there's the dramatic realignment and suddenly we have an administration that's operating with razor-sharp clarity.
Not necessarily the clarity that I wanted to see, but, you know, they were focused and they had a mandate.
And Iraq conveniently fit into this mandate.
I mean, it was a mandate that was basically scripted for Iraq.
Afghanistan was purely a, you know, a bridging mechanism.
You know, yes, politically, we had to do something about Al-Qaeda, but you saw that we weren't serious about the full-scale commitment of American troops to Afghanistan.
We used Afghanistan as a policy initiator, but even by January of 2002, with Osama bin Laden still on the loose, Al-Qaeda not defeated, we were withdrawing the tip of the spear of the Special Operations Forces into, you know, the Iraqi theater of operations, getting ready for a war that was originally projected to take place in October of 2002, extended to March 2003 because of McCollum Powell's intervention to get us engaged with the United Nations.
But the bottom line is, you know, the Bush administration had promised to do something about Saddam Hussein in Iraq in their platform during the 2000 election, and come 2001 with 9-11, they now were, you know, hell-bent to deliver on that promise.
Well, you know, from my point of view, which was basically trying to watch the news and read the newspaper as best I could, it was amazing.
I've got to figure that from your point of view, where you actually were the expert on what kind of weapons they had and which ones they didn't, it was like watching the slowest motion, worst train wreck imaginable.
Because as you say, at least, if not in December of 2001, at least in January of 2002, they were saying, oh yeah, we're going to war against Iraq and we're going to make up whatever lie we have to between now and then in order to get you to go along with it.
And, I mean, they just announced it was regime change was the policy at the very beginning of 2002, and everything that came after that was bogus, putting things together, as they're saying now in England, scrambling to find a smoking gun, scrambling to find an excuse for what they'd already decided to do.
Absolutely.
And it took them more than a year.
I mean, geez, that really was unprecedented, right?
Announcing we're going to lie you into war.
It's going to take about a year.
And then getting started.
And then it working.
And then they did it.
I basically wrote my hand numb writing op-ed pieces that got placed in major mainstream newspapers.
I spent a lot of time, I mean, I put my own personal welfare at risk by going to Iraq in September to speak before the parliament to gain access to the senior Iraqi leadership to compel Saddam Hussein to allow the return of weapons inspectors without precondition.
I was successful in that.
I did everything I could do to undermine this blatant march to war.
I spoke myself, I was hoarse in the voice.
The bottom line, though, is nobody wanted to hear the truth.
I mean, individuals did.
But I mean, as a nation, we had already drank the Kool-Aid.
We'd already taken the bait.
And it's pretty funny when you compare and contrast that reality.
That is, we have a foregone conclusion-based policy.
They know what they're going to do.
They know how they're going to do it.
We have a public that's already accepted it.
We have a Congress that's already accepted it.
People focus on words that were said in October and November of 2002.
Well, what about the summer of 2002 when Congress held these kangaroo courts that tried and convicted Saddam Hussein of capital murder?
Yes, Senator Biden.
That's right, Biden.
Biden and Lugar did the same.
The House did the same.
They brought in fixed witnesses who basically misrepresented data and lied to create this case that Iraq has these weapons of mass destruction.
Nobody debated whether or not Iraq had WMD.
The only debate was what's going to happen once we go in and get rid of Saddam.
It was our foregone conclusion that we were going to war.
So it's absurd to say that Congress was hesitant.
Congress bought into the whole darn thing.
So did the American media.
So did the American people.
And so to sit here now and read about people saying to find the smoking gun, that implies that there was some sort of good faith going on.
There was no good faith going on.
This was a joke, a sham from the very beginning that predates the alleged scrambling that took place in the fall of 2002, in the spring of 2003, or the winter of 2003.
Yeah, well, let's get into some of that sham.
You know, I saw Dick Cheney give his VFW speech.
I believe it was in August of 2002.
Yep, August of 2002.
It's Hussein Kamel.
And, you know, I think it's worth emphasizing again here that I'm nobody.
I certainly was absolutely nobody at all.
No relationship with Antiwar.com other than I read it from time to time back then, whatever.
And I knew that I'd seen Hussein Kamel interviewed on CNN back in the 1990s where he swore that he destroyed all of it.
And I saw Dick Cheney say, well, he admitted that they kept some of it.
Yeah, until what?
The end of 1991.
And that's when they got rid of the rest of it.
And there Dick Cheney was lying to the veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam assembled in front of him.
I need your son, he said to them.
Based on this transparent, bogus lie?
I mean, it was on CNN.
I remembered it at the time.
Well, it's...
You know, after he gave that speech, I was the lead investigator for the UN in the Hussein Kamel defection.
Both in terms of, you know, managing the data that he brought out, but also doing the follow-up investigations in Iraq to determine, you know, the veracity of what he was saying and also to investigate the Iraqi government response.
So I know this guy pretty, in this case, extraordinarily well.
The fascinating thing is that after Cheney gave that speech, I had with me the debriefing document of the UN's debrief of Hussein Kamel.
And I was also very familiar and had notes of the CIA's debriefing documents and the British government's debriefing documents, all of which match.
It's not like there's a difference between what he told the CIA and what he told the British and what he told the UN.
He told them the same thing.
And so I went to CNN at the United Nations and did a lengthy interview based on these documents.
CNN killed that interview.
Didn't want to deal with it.
So I then wrote an op-ed piece that got published in the Chicago Tribune.
Again, not an insignificant newspaper in which I, you know, basically exposed the Cheney speech as a lie.
Nobody picked up on it.
It was only after I turned the documents over to, I think it was Newsweek.
That got some legs, but not enough.
The bottom line is Cheney got away with one of the biggest lies ever told.
You know, Hussein Kamel told the world that Saddam is hiding weapons lie.
In fact, Hussein Kamel told the world that they got rid of their weapons.
They blew them up.
There's nothing left.
It's going to be a frustrating experience.
The only thing he said remained was documents, documentation.
Following his defection, the Iraqis turned us over to what we called the chicken farm where we had over a million pages of documents.
Right.
I think you told me this before.
After he defected, Saddam Hussein feared that he had given everything.
There was no way for them to know exactly what he'd given.
So he ordered the Muqbaraat or whoever to turn over everything you got so that we don't get caught hiding something that Kamel was all given up.
I mean, that's what people need to understand.
What happened in August, September of 1995 is critical because that's when the Iraqi government formally divorced itself from any pretense or any intention of reacquiring weapons of mass destruction.
All this stuff you hear today about people talking about Joseph Pirro, the FBI agent who personally debriefed Saddam and all this crap.
Charles Dolfer in his report for the Iraqi Survey Group.
The intent of Saddam Hussein was made clear and well documented in August, September 1995.
He made it clear that Iraq will have nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction.
That they're giving up the documents.
They're giving up everything.
And over and over and over again we have the tape recordings of.
He says, why are the inspectors still asking these questions?
Why can't you answer these questions?
What's going on?
I've ordered you to get rid of everything.
I've ordered you to be cooperative in every way.
Why are they still here?
Why can't we resolve this?
He was very frustrated.
This isn't a case of Saddam trying to hoodwink people into believing that he held a secret cache of weapons.
He was saying just that, which he said over and over again.
So this concept of the intent of Saddam, which people talk about.
Yes, we didn't find any weapons, but Saddam intended to.
That's why we had to get rid of Saddam.
That in itself is an absolute lie.
I mentioned that I was reading antiwar.com from time to time then.
One of the benefits of reading antiwar.com is it doesn't matter how obscure the source might be.
If it's an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune or if it's a headline in what was the Chicago Tribune.
They've been bought out by McClatchy, but you have Strobel and Landay and I forget the other really great reporter there.
There's a couple.
Nancy Yousef is one, but there's three of those guys who did wonderful work on the weapons of mass destruction lies in 2002 and in the early part of 2003 there.
Those made the top headline on antiwar.com.
For example, the aluminum tube story that were being shipped to Iraq and they were being spun to be used for centrifuges to enrich highly enriched weapons grade uranium to make nuclear bombs to kill us all in our jammies in the middle of the night.
That the DOE, the Department of Energy and I think even lower level guys of dissenting people at the CIA were the sources for the Knight Ritter reports that completely laid it to waste.
It was part of the CIA, NIE or the National Intelligence Council's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in 2002 and it was even in the Washington Post in September of 2002 that the actual nuclear experts in the government say that these aluminum tubes are for rockets not for centrifuges and so that thing was debunked early fall and I kept hearing it for months and months and it was half funny and half the most frustrating thing ever debunked in the Post and in Knight Ritter.
How can they keep going after lies been debunked for so long like that?
Because they didn't want it.
Look, I was in Iraq and Paula Zahn who was a presenter for CNN at the time the story had just broken and I stood there live on national TV and said that these aluminum tubes this is ridiculous and she said it seems to me like you've drank the Kool-Aid and that's the whole thing anybody at that time this is post 9-11 anybody who dared speak out and question the veracity of the US government when it came to a diabolical dictator named Saddam Hussein something had to be fundamentally wrong with you.
Saddam Hussein is some charismatic leader like Charles Manson drinking his Kool-Aid as opposed to the one doing the talking Paula Zahn and the rest of them.
I'm sorry again it's only my long setup to a good question and credit to you but I was painting a house that was my job I was a cab driver and I was also painting houses with a friend of mine and I was painting a house and the doors of the truck opened and we were listening to speech and I was as I was painting the house debunking lie by lie by lie about when it came to Zarqawi and all of that stuff the wooden leg and all the different accusations about the weapons and whatever I was debunking it all to my buddy painting this house and that was how easy it was for someone who was interested for someone who didn't drink the Kool-Aid to go better than all of this that was the end of February 2003 and then of course the next day you were in Tokyo and gave your giant presentation and really debunked it step by step by step What's amazing is that when I debunked it I had the totality of the foreign press there every representative from every major media company in America and around the world was wrong there was not one aspect of it that was accurate Do you think any of that found its way into the press?
The answer is no No, I mean really if I go back to do the footnote now and I search Ritter in Tokyo all I can find is the great article at Counterpunch I think that's the only one Right, and that was written after the fact Yeah, it's stunning The people that were there they gave me a heck of a launch I was the featured speaker I mean it wasn't as though I accidentally walked in there and spoke, they invited me to the foreign press club of Tokyo They were there to listen and whether they chose not to write anything or whether their editors chose not to run with what they wrote, I don't know the answer to that is accountability How were we to know that what he was saying was BS?
Well, the answer is you had a weapons inspector who did that job for 7 plus years telling you right up front that his case did not hold water but they didn't want to go because nobody wanted the truth I mean that's the inconvenient reality is that not a single person in a position of authority was really searching for the truth It was a smokescreen for an action that was already a done deal We weren't debating Iraq in February 23 Colin Powell's presentation really wasn't needed The decision was already made We were going to go to war It didn't matter really what he said, it was just an act It was a game, it was a sham We need to call it what it is This was a lie and the interesting thing is that it wasn't this lie had intent behind it which now, because we're talking about government officials lying in the conduct of their official duty that makes it a felony We're not talking about a felony was committed a felony that has as its ramification the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and others It's not a felony it makes you an accessory to murder We can take this to an extreme but the bottom line is a crime was committed and I think that's what's coming out of the Chilcot hearings in London is that a crime was committed This was an illegal war and maybe America is going to wake up and recognize that and maybe we need to do something about this if we are to ever regain our stature in the world but it doesn't look like it We've got the President today talking about sending 34,000 more troops into Afghanistan expanding the scope of that war We've got an Iraqi Parliament that's unable to pass and upon which the Obama Administration constructed its troop withdrawal scheme from Iraq will not be in place The troops that we're going to withdraw from Iraq and shift to Afghanistan may not be able to leave Iraq so where are we going to get them?
Man, it's just one of the things that you have to first go for is you have to threaten the American people with a nuclear bomb that's how you really get them to be for a war like this and of course we've talked about this numerous times but it's basically an almost carbon copy of our four strikes on Iran because they believe that if not then the Iranians could nuke us and so we've got to do something about that and that narrative have you seen any progress whatsoever on people who know a thing or maybe even two about the IAEA and how most Americans are unable or unwilling to differentiate between that nuclear activity which is part of a legitimate nuclear energy program and nuclear activity which is unique to a military or weaponization program all they hear is nuclear activity and they immediately assume that it's probably misleading data about what's going on inside Iran most of which is speculative in nature but then you take certain things that do happen for instance Iran's declaration of the nuclear enrichment facility under construction outside of Qom Americans are saying it's a nuclear facility that's installed yeah the Iraqis dug a hole and they didn't declare it 18 months before they decided to dig a hole because there's some debate as to whether or not Iraq is required to do that but it's irrelevant it's a hole in the ground it's being tons sized tons being the larger centrifuge enrichment plant 10 of these but Iran made this declaration before any hole was dug so they're complying with the rules we say they have to comply with and we're condemning them nonetheless whether or not Iran will be able to make it up on that we're just basically in panic mode saying oh my god they had one and now they got 10 and now they're going to have a weapon they're going to have nothing we can get into a technical discussion about what Iran can and can't do but the bottom line is they have a nuclear energy program that's the extent of what they have it's documented, it's verified it's got inspectors on the ground there's nothing to fear from this and yet all we get is fear that fear is derived from ignorance this is willful ignorance or it's ignorance derived from a genuinely disengaged population I'm under the opinion more and more that this is willful ignorance most of the people want to be ignorant on this subject because they've already reached a foregone conclusion about Iran we haven't learned anything from the Iraq experience and that's the amazing thing about it when just about half of the people oppose the Iraq war despite all the lies and still even they haven't learned because if you look at the polls maybe a higher number of people want to bomb Iran than support of the Iraq war you have even people who oppose the Iraq war who say well Iran that was the real problem they actually have a nuclear program and you know I've got to admit because I'm no weapons inspector or nuclear scientist or anything and basically I have benefit of reading Gordon Prather every week well up until a couple of weeks ago you know it's difficult I mean when somebody says nuclear this and nuclear that I mean really who does want to take the time to learn about that unless you really have a beef with debunking the war party like I do who's really got motivation you know unless their thing is stopping the next war well that's it I mean you know I think once again we have to call a spade a spade we're functioning as citizens we're compliant sheep we're whatever but we're not citizens a citizen is engaged a citizen holds to account a citizen cares and we have people who much rather you know wrap themselves and we've had this conversation before in a cocoon of comfort you know we've got the recovery taking place people got the holiday season we fail to perform as citizens and it's no wonder therefore that the media gets away with what it gets away with and the government gets away with it too well now so tell me this and it's a discussion we've been having for years as well what do you think is the real danger that we could end up with you know massive air force strikes on Iran and all the consequences they haven't I mean they put it off for a while but one of the reasons is that the Bush administration you know was very sloppy in crafting a case for war here you know we almost have a repeat of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August her fantastic book about you know the inevitability of the beginning of world war one a war that didn't need to be fought in Iran which many people including the Pentagon say is a war that doesn't need to be fought but we're setting ourselves up for the inevitability of conflict because of the absurdities of you know this foregone conclusion that Iraq is or Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program and these policies that automatically come from enrichment facilities now that's going to prompt a response from the United States that's going to prompt some sort of you know showdown at the security council and what we have is we have process driving the ship and eventually that process is going to kick out a conclusion that there has to be a military strike when nobody wants to see what the difference I guess I'll go ahead and pick on Broad and Singer by name too they can't seem to tell the difference between the IAEA inspections taking place under the safeguards agreement and the separate inspections to prove a negative and perform magic and quantitatively get to 100% that there is nothing anywhere Iran's Mohamed ElBaradei the outgoing Director General of the IAEA has made it quite clear that there continues to be no evidence whatsoever that Iran is pursuing a military program he also makes it clear that the totality of Iran's nuclear material is accounted for and under the safeguard but they don't pick up on that instead they build a case that's itself fabricated from lies and undocumented fact about secret programs that as you said Iran is called upon to prove a negative how can Iran prove it doesn't have something it doesn't have they're mixing these together because it dilutes the message put out by Mohamed ElBaradei which is Iran poses no threat whatsoever we get trapped in basically this procedural based inspection activity which is not derived from safeguards concerns but rather derived from policy concerns of the United States which is again a situation that we faced when it came to Iraq alright thank you very much for your time on the show today Scott alright well thank you everybody that's Scott Ritter former UN weapons inspector and he is the author of Endgame Iraq Confidential Target Iran and Waging Peace you can find what he writes at truthdig.com
