mea culpa

Hindsight, of course, is 20/20 in retrospect …

SADDAM DEFENDER STUNS COLLEAGUES
New York Daily News
Sept. 10, 2002
page 9
By DEREK ROSE

Former colleagues of chief U.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter were baffled yesterday over why he has become Iraq’s chief defender.

Ritter, an ex-intelligence officer for the U.S. Marines, led reporters on a tour of Iraq yesterday and spoke to the country’s parliament Sunday to rebut White House claims that Saddam Hussein is a threat.

But other ex-inspectors said Ritter should know better and criticized his participation in the Baghdad-sponsored tour of Iraq.

“We can be reasonably confident they had VX [nerve gas] and additional biological agents, but we never verified they were gone,” said Tim McCarthy, a former deputy chief inspector and nonproliferation analyst at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

On Sunday, Ritter told the Iraqi parliament, “The truth is Iraq is not a threat to its neighbors, and it is not acting in a manner which threatens anyone outside its borders. Military action against Iraq cannot be justified.”

McCarthy disagreed. “It’s very safe to assume that Iraq is coming along with its nuclear weapons program,” since inspectors were barred in 1998, he told the Daily News.

Ritter has urged Saddam to submit to full inspections to counter the White House case.

Yesterday, he accompanied reporters to a camp 25 miles east of Baghdad that Iraqi dissidents say is a terror training camp. Ritter said it is used by Saddam’s military to train security forces to respond to hijackings.

Former biological and chemical weapons inspector Jonathan Tucker accused Ritter of becoming “an apologist for Iraq.” He said Iraq never proved it destroyed 38 tons of material that bioweapons scientists could use to culture anthrax and smallpox.

Former inspector Raymond Zilinskas, a chemical and biological weapons expert at the Monterey Institute, said Iraq might also have stores of smallpox from a 1960s outbreak.

“If his regime is going down the tubes, then the question is, in this extreme moment would they then release the smallpox,” Zilinskas said.

Many scientists agreed that there was no smoking gun but said the evidence points to a robust Iraqi biological and chemical weapons program.