#4 Bush, CIA Led Conspiracy to Oust Saddam, Book Alleges -- GOPUSA

Bush, CIA Led Conspiracy to Oust Saddam, Book Alleges -- GOPUSA

When Ritter resigned his position with the United Nations Special Commission in August 1998, he actually warned about a looming threat from Iraq.

"The sad truth is that Iraq today is not as disarmed anywhere near the level required by Security Council resolutions," Ritter said at the time. "As you know, UNSCOM has good reason to believe that there are significant numbers of proscribed weapons and related components and the means to manufacture such weapons unaccounted for in Iraq today."

ut by the time the U.S. invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, with the goal of ousting Saddam and eliminating his allegedly illegal weapons cache, Ritter had changed his mind and was aggressively criticizing the position of President Bush and American allies known as the "Coalition of the Willing."

Ritter had directed, written and starred in a 2001 documentary called "Shifting Sands," in which he contradicted his own 1998 warnings about Iraq's potential supply of weapons of mass destruction. Instead of the Iraqi weapons continuing to pose a threat, Ritter claimed in the documentary and in a later news column that 90 to 95 percent of them had been disarmed by 1995.

The funding for Ritter's documentary -- $400,000 - had been supplied by Iraqi-American businessman Shakir al Khafaji, who had used his connections with Saddam's regime and the United Nations Oil for Food Program to pocket $1.1 million, according to the Financial Times of London.

Ritter's new book, released this week, alleges that the Bush administration was interested only in advancing an agenda of invading Iraq and had no interest in listening to Ritter's opinions on the progress of Iraqi disarmament.

However, Ritter's claims are "intellectually dishonest," according to Laurie Mylroie, author of the book "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War against America."

"For Ritter to say that people knew there weren't weapons but claimed there were is just intellectually dishonest," Mylroie said. "I have never in my entire professional life ... seen a situation in which people had such a blatant disregard for known truth."

Mylroie told Cybercast News Service that Americans should remember that the original information about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) came from Ritter while he served as an inspector for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) after the first Persian Gulf War.

Mylroie added that other world leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah, had verified Saddam's possession of WMD and warned of his desire to use chemical and biological weapons.

"There was a consensus internationally that Iraq had a significant amount of weapons," Mylroie said. "No one doubted it."

As for why coalition forces have yet to find Saddam's WMD after searching for more than two years, Mylroie said there are a number of possibilities. "The Iraqis did something with them," she said, "moved them to Syria, they destroyed them in part, they hid them in part, some combination of that."

She added, "It's not clear that we were fooled" by bad or manipulated intelligence.

Last year, Mylroie analyzed 42 pages of Iraqi Intelligence Service documents that a senior government official provide to Cybercast News Service and which showed the Iraqi regime's purchase of mustard gas and anthrax as well as its extensive ties with the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda.

The subsequent Cybercast News Service article, authored by Scott Wheeler and published on Oct. 4, 2004, quoted Mylroie as saying that the Iraqi papers represented "the most complete set of documents relating Iraq to terrorism, including Islamic terrorism" against the U.S.

Representatives from Nation Books, publishers of "Iraq Confidential," did not return calls requesting comment from Scott Ritter for this report. Ritter did, however, attend a National Press Club discussion about his book earlier on Wednesday.

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the firing squad is too sweet for these sheet/js