Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter (born July 15, 1961) was a United States Marine Corps and a former United Nations Special Commission weapons inspector in Iraq.

Ritter was born into a military family in 1961. After graduating from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with departmental honors, he joined the Marine Corps in 1984, where he served for twelve years as an military intelligence officer. He initially served as the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq War. During Desert Storm, he served as a ballistic missile advisor to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Ritter later worked as a security and military consultant for the Fox News network.

After seven years as a UN weapons inspector, Ritter resigned from the weapons inspection team on August 25, 1998. Some have touted him as "the most outspoken critic of US policy towards Baghdad" and he has "argued that the inspection team, UNSCOM, was a nest of US spies and that Iraq was disarmed long ago. But he first made the headlines in 1997, when as a senior UNSCOM member he was accused by Iraq of being an American spy himself." [1] Ritter was also investigated by the FBI in 1998 on allegations that he reportedly gave classified intelligence to Israel. [2]

By 2004 Ritter was being touted as a major voice of opposition to the U.S. policy in Iraq. This surprised some commentators because of Mr. Ritter's testimony about Iraq to the U.S. Senate on September 3, 1998, a week after his resignation from the UN weapons inspection team. In response to questioning from Senator John McCain, Ritter stated, "The Special Commission has intelligence information, which indicates that components necessary for three nuclear weapons exist, lacking the fissile material" and concluded, "I believe within a period of six months Iraq could reconstitute its biological-weapons and chemical-weapons capability."[3]

In numerous speeches across the U.S. in 2004 and 2005, Mr. Ritter made clear that he is "a Republican" and "I still believe in war". While denying that he is a spy, he also frequently refers to providing information to U.S. intelligence agencies. "What I saw - and passed on to US intelligence agencies - were what might be called the blueprints of the postwar insurgency that the US now faces in Iraq..." [4]

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Publications

• "War on Iraq; What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know", with William Rivers Pitt, ISBN 1893956385

Other Related SourceWatch Resources

• Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Operation Rockingham
• Weapons of mass destruction
• Weapons of mass destruction investigation

External Links

• Scott Ritter, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript, August 31, 1998.
• Asla Aydintasbas, "Scott Ritter", Salon, March 19, 2002.
• "Scott Ritter: Facts needed before Iraq attack", CNN.com, July 17, 2002.
• Scott Ritter, "Is Iraq a True Threat to the US?", Boston Globe, July 20, 2002.
• "Profile: Scott Ritter", BBCNews, September 9, 2002.
• Massimo Calabresi, "Exclusive: Scott Ritter in His Own Words. The former weapons inspector explains his switch from getting up Saddam's nose to picking fights with Bush", Time.com, September 14, 2002.
• Justin Raimondo, "Target: Scott Ritter. The War Party gets ugly", antiwar.com, January 22, 2003.
• Scott Ritter, "Not Everyone Got it Wrong on Iraq's Weapons", International Herald Tribune, February 6, 2004.
• Harley Sorensen, "The WMD Inspector No One Heeded", San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 2004: "Scott Ritter is a prophet of sorts, and if we had listened to him and respected his intellect, knowledge and honesty, we could have avoided the war in Iraq and its cost in lives and dollars."
• William Rivers Pitt, "Bearing Bloddy Witness", 12 October 2004
• Scott Ritter, "The source Duelfer didn't quote", The Guardian, October 9, 2004
• Scott Ritter, "The Salvador option", Al Jazeera, January 20, 2005.
• Scott Ritter, "Criminals the lot of us", The Guardian, January 27, 2005