Scott Ritter: some got WMDs right
iht.com
"The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data to the political advantage of President George W. Bush...
The fact, independent of the findings of any commission, is that not everyone was wrong....
I, for one, was not. I did my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up their allegations regarding Iraq’s WMD and, failing that, spoke out and wrote in as many forums as possible in an effort to educate the publics of the United States and the world about the danger of going to war based on a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone. Rolf Ekeus, the former head of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, has declared that under his direction, Iraq was ‘‘fundamentally disarmed’’ as early as 1996. Hans Blix, who headed UN weapons inspections in Iraq in the months before the invasion in March 2003, stated that his inspectors had found no evidence of either WMD or WMD-related programs in Iraq. And officials familiar with Iraq, like Ambassador Joseph Wilson and State Department intelligence analyst Greg Theilmann, both exposed the unsustained nature of the Bush administration’s claims regarding Iraq’s nuclear capability...
The CIA did eventually produce a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for Iraq, but only in October 2002, after Bush had already decided on war....
But my finding — that ‘‘because of the work carried out by Unscom, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn [in December 1998]’’ — was an accurate assessment of the disarming of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA’s October NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services....
The Bush administration, in its rush to war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq’s WMD. Sadly, no one listened.....
the writer was chief UN inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998" |
