NEWS: Bush lied, says Scott Ritter
UNITED NATIONS: Time has shown that the United Nations did a good job disarming Iraq while US President George W Bush went to war based on “a lie,” former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter said on Monday.
“The inspectors went in, got good cooperation, got immediate access to the sites they needed to get to, and they found nothing — nothing related to weapons of mass destruction programs,” said Ritter, a former US Marine and senior weapons inspector turned anti-war activist.
“And yet, we heard over and over again that ‘The president knows that these weapons exist, the president knows that this is a threat that can only be responded to by the United States acting unilaterally,’ because the United Nations was unable or unwilling to complete the (disarmament) task mandated by the Security Council,” he told reporters at UN headquarters.
“The entire case the Bush administration made against Iraq is a lie,” he said.
Ritter levelled his latest blast at the US administration as Bush fended off critics’ charges that he misled the American people by relying on faulty intelligence to justify the war. A top inspector in Iraq for nearly seven years before resigning in 1998, Ritter was a vocal critic both before and after the war of US claims that Iraq possessed illicit weapons of mass destruction. His latest book, “Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America,” was just published. —Reuters |
