Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter (born: 15 July 1961) was a US Marine officer and a former UN 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 and became a major voice of opposition to the U.S. policy in Iraq. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Scott Ritter was one of the very few voices who had it right about Iraq's weapons threat.

Publications

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

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