[fintstone]

Scott Ritter's testimony to Congress, 3 Sept 98…before he left the military to accept a high paying job working for Iraqi (Saddam's) interests.
quote:

Mr. Chairman, with all due respect, I cannot speak on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nuclear disarmament issues in Iraq are their purview. But what I can say is that we have clear evidence that Iraq is retaining prohibited weapons capabilities in the fields of chemical, biological and ballistic- missile delivery systems of a range of greater than 150 kilometers. And if Iraq has undertaken a concerted effort run at the highest levels inside Iraq to retain these capabilities, then I see no reason why they would not exercise the same sort of concealment efforts for their nuclear programs.

After Ritter is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Iraq he comes out with the conclusion that there are no WMD there:

Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected in August 1995. We achieved our final breakthrough prior to his defection. I have the transcripts of the debriefs of the son-in-law, Hussein Kamal. Listen to what he said: "I ordered in 1993 that all remaining weapons be destroyed. Today in Iraq there are no weapons. We destroyed them all." How does Dick Cheney turn that statement into one saying Saddam Hussein's son-in-law spilled the beans about Iraq's weapons program? All he did was confirm our conclusion that in fact these weapons had been destroyed."

Ritter quit in 1998 during the the Clinton administration after claiming that Iraq had not disarmed and that he felt that Clinton was not nearly hard enough on Iraq. After 4 years of not going to Iraq or receiving any type of intelligence...suddeny he started claiming Iraq was disarmed. Of course his current liberally funded lecture circuit story is otherwise. I guess it is good to be a liberal and when things don't work out as you planned...all you have to do is change your story and all your supporters ignore your previous mistatements..Kerry is not the only flip-flop down artist in liberalland.

If Ritter resigned as an inspector in 1998, he has less knowledge of current intel than even I do. How do you suppose that he is any more knowlegeable about Iraq's weapons programs after he stopped being an inspector than when he was one? We know that on the day he resigned, he felt Saddam had an active program. The only thing that really changed was where his paycheck was coming from. Of course he done a good job, aided by the liberal press, revising what he said and wrote about at the time.