Posted on 11/25/2002 8:21:53 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
At the back of the auditorium, a man cupped his hands over his mouth, improvising a megaphone, the better to bellow: ''Iraq is not the problem. Enron is!'' By then, the waiting crowd had already overstuffed Old Snell Hall on the campus of Clarkson University in northern New York. With all 500 seats filled, 100 people wedged themselves onto spare patches of the peeling linoleum floor. Most of the crowd wanted to hear the case against war, and they were exuberant to be hearing it from Scott Ritter, the onetime United Nations arms inspector and now America's most unlikely peacenik.
Ritter did not disappoint them, talking powerfully without notes for nearly an hour and drawing the kind of prolonged ovation he has come to expect and relish. President Bush is force-feeding Americans ''a whole bunch of oversimplified horse manure,'' he told them boldly. ''None of what you are being told remotely resembles the truth. Facts do matter, and it is time that you, the American people, start demanding the facts.'' War is not a video game where a reset button resurrects the corpses, Ritter said. ''War is about dead people.''
At 6-foot-4, Ritter is a man of imposing bulk, with arms long enough to bear-hug a podium. An astonishingly tireless talker, he buries listeners in an avalanche of opinions, anecdotes and details. The pile-up of his words seems all the weightier because he draws on his seven years as a weapons sleuth. He is also astonishingly self-confident. The day we first met, he spoke of a rare capacity to distill truth. ''I'm a great analyst,'' he said, firmly and without irony. ''I've never been wrong.''
Ritter's current view, which he dispenses with the earnest vigor of a revivalist, is that the administration's case against Saddam Hussein is based on elaborate falsehoods and exploited fear. He says he would ''be surprised if there is anything in Iraq worth finding,'' claiming inspection efforts between 1991 and 1998 resulted in the Iraqis giving up 90 to 95 percent of their most deadly weapons, rendering Saddam ''fundamentally disarmed'' -- if still unrepentantly evil. His suspicion is that the renewed inspections soon to begin will be but a show trial before the hanging. ''The U.N. resolution is worded to allow President Bush to act militarily without Security Council approval,'' he scoffs. ''For evidence, he'll pull the same unquestioned charade he has been pulling right along.''
When listening to Ritter on stage, speaking as he does with the authority of first-hand experience, it can be easy to overlook that his present renown as a dove is his second turn at celebrity. The first was his renown as a hawk, in August 1998, when he very publicly quit his job, complaining that Iraq was blocking inspections and the Security Council was disinclined to stop them. ''The sad truth is that Iraq today is not disarmed anywhere near the level required,'' Ritter wrote in his letter of resignation, quickly becoming a hero to many of the same people who now revile him. The following week, in a widely reported Senate hearing, the former major in the Marine Corps said that even if disarmed, the Iraqis had a ''breakout scenario'' to fully replenish their biological and chemical weapons within six months. He beseeched America to pressure Iraq into ''full compliance.'' Then, writing for the New Republic, he offered a long list of horrors likely to remain viable in Iraq's remnant arsenal if inspections were discontinued, including ''biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic-missile warheads.''
This seeming contradiction is routinely called a ''flip-flop'' by critics, and the perplexity it has created now dogs Ritter as he travels. Recently, I made two road trips with him as he kept to a grueling schedule of speechmaking. At each stop, even among the friendliest of audiences, he was asked about it. In public, his tendency is to be brusquely dismissive: ''I don't see where I've changed one iota.'' In private, however, he is prone to answer this and other questions with harangues, loosing a stream-of-conscious flow that churns and circles, carrying along glimmers of brilliance, incoherence and self-pity. He is not easy to fathom.
''It's not that I was lying or misleading anyone,'' he said of his earlier remarks. ''It's just that I said things very forcefully when the fact is there should have been a statement afterward, a 'but' kind of thing.'' Back then, he said, he was using his ''quantitative filter,'' speaking as an arms inspector about an unfinished job, seeing a cup 10 percent full. Later, he switched to his ''qualitative filter,'' seeing Iraq as 90 percent empty and enfeebled.
This is typical of Ritter. Even when admitting he is wrong, he is insisting he is right. His self-image requires it, for more than a life story, he has a personal mythology. Ritter, 41, loves the telling of it, which he does exceptionally well. In each chapter, he is the courageous man of principle, a stout-hearted citizen up against the dimwitted, the wicked and the power-mad.
For what it's worth, I found him very likeable and, as he burst into his diatribes with my tape recorder spinning, I rooted for him, wanting to warn him not to do what he so often does, shooting himself in the foot by shooting off his mouth. So much sincerity is rarely companion to so much vainglory, and so much certainty rarely accompanies such vacillation. Ritter is reliably convincing. He just doesn't always agree with himself.
Yet there has been constancy, too. His foremost goal remains unchanged, he said. ''I've always wanted the inspectors back at work, and I wanted to preserve the integrity of the inspection process.''
So ''flip-flop'' is actually an inapt word, he protested, suggesting as it does a lack of integrity. ''I think 'evolved' is a term I am comfortable with, because it implies a passage of time and everything changes over time. I mean, my taste in beer might evolve over time.''
Besides, as Scott Ritter tells the saga of the past decade, with all the intrigues and double-dealing -- it wasn't he who flip-flopped on America.
It was America that flip-flopped on him.
That story begins in Baghdad, but for me, the hearing of it began last month on U.S. 87, heading north in Ritter's Dodge Caravan from his home in suburban Albany. ''So I said, I want to be an intelligence officer,'' he told me, recounting a favorite tale. He was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the Marines. There was a rule: intelligence work first required three years in the combat arms. With stunning moxie, he wrote the Marine commandant. ''I said, My name is Lieutenant Ritter, and I'm the best damn intelligence officer you're ever going to meet.'' For him, they changed the rules, he boasted.
Being the best was important to him. Both his parents were career Air Force. But he chose the Marines. In 1988, four years into his career, he was sent to Votkinsk, a Russian city in the foothills of the Urals, well known for producing Tchaikovsky, the composer, and SS-25's, the missile. Ritter monitored compliance to a ballistic-missiles pact.
When the gulf war began in 1990, his missile expertise was valuable. But as Ritter tells it, his analytical skills only got him in trouble. His job was to assess battle damage to Iraqi forces, and his analyses, while dependably correct, differed from those of the generals, who saw only what they wanted. He was told to ''sit down at a desk and shut up,'' he said.
Ritter would eventually leave the Marines in June 1991. He had been looking for a civilian job when he was contacted by one of his superiors from the days in Votkinsk. There was a chance to do something challenging. The gulf war, however crushing a defeat for Saddam, left him in power. Among the cease-fire conditions, Iraq was to fully disclose its weaponry for mass destruction so that the stockpiles and means of production could be gutted under United Nations auspices. For this, the Security Council formed a special commission, called Unscom.
As a whip, earlier economic sanctions were to stay in place until the disarmament was complete. But this was not lash enough for Saddam. With shell games and outright obstruction, he kept his weapons as best he could. Unscom was expected to end its main task within months and then set up a system of long-term monitoring. Instead, the job went on year after year, with Ritter, as he later wrote, at the center of it, passing ''through the looking glass of Saddam Hussein's hellish netherworld.''
Ritter frequently led Unscom inspection teams. Several of his former colleagues make him sound like an action figure in a kid's cartoon: honest, intrepid, smart, pathologically patriotic. Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who was Unscom's first chief, said Ritter lacked ''a good understanding of the complexity of the political issues,'' but he had total confidence in him as an ''excellent operational planner.'' Roger Hill, an Australian, marveled at Ritter's snapshot memory: ''We'd be in an Iraqi office and he'd memorize things in Arabic script -- and he wasn't even an Arabic speaker.''
By Ritter's count, he was nearly killed three times while on Unscom business. The retelling of one incident injects drama into his speeches: his United Nations convoy stopped at multiple gunpoint, AK-47's and pistols aimed every which way, two directly at his head. ''A day in the life of the inspector in Baghdad!'' he says, as the story crescendos to its conclusion.
Ritter describes inspections that required up to six months of meticulous study and rehearsal. Imagine the choreography of it, he says. With helicopters hovering above, his people hit the site from four directions, intercepting the radio traffic, cameras recording everything. ''That's an inspection, ladies and gentlemen!''
Unscom destroyed more of Saddam's doomsday weapons than the heavy bombardment of the gulf war. But it was always impossible to know what percentage of the total had been eliminated without knowing what the total was to begin with and whether that total was somehow expanding. Increasingly, nations took morbid notice of the effect of the sanctions on the Iraqi people. Support began to wane for an equation that would always have an uncertain answer: Iraq minus how many weapons equals enough?
For his part, Ritter enjoyed being such an important gumshoe. It was hard to catch the Iraqis red-handed, but sometimes when you confronted them, they tripped up like second-rate burglars, he said: ''There wasn't anyone there I couldn't crack. They were putty in my hands.''
As time passed, though, it became clear that high-tech surveillance was needed. And, of course, this was a problem. The United Nations had no resources for that kind of spy gear. It would have to come from member nations, which had their own political agendas. Ekeus gave Ritter the O.K. to solicit such help, and in time this strategy gave rise to several odd arrangements. Among them, Unscom used an American U-2 spy plane, which, though piloted by the Air Force, flew under a United Nations logo and followed a United Nations flight plan. The aerial photos required interpretation, and when Ritter thought the Americans were not supplying the required decipherment, he received permission to get help from the Israelis, who became one of his best sources.
Saddam would complain that Unscom was being used as a cover for American and Israeli espionage operations, and it was true that the relationships between inspectors and the intelligence agencies they relied upon were complicated and sometimes compromised. Ritter was enveloped by spy games, and they thrilled him. He had stuff going with the Brits, the Aussies, the Kiwis. He joined the Romanians in a ''major intelligence sting.'' But the clandestine work, however vital, occasionally had his head doing somersaults about vying loyalties. This arrangement -- an American citizen mingling with foreign operatives while being responsible only to the United Nations -- was highly unusual. Ritter felt compelled to ask the Central Intelligence Agency for guidance, but, he says angrily, ''the U.S. government would never commit -- never commit -- to modalities or rules and regulations.'' Ritter sorted it out this way in his mind: America supported the Security Council, which oversaw Unscom, which oversaw him. He felt he was on solid ground as long as he informed his U.N. bosses of everything.
But in January 1998, he learned the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating him for espionage with the Israelis. ''The idea of it, questioning me on the subject of patriotism!'' he said. To add to his ire, he had been told that the F.B.I. also held concerns about his wife, whom he had met in Votkinsk, where she had worked as a Soviet translator. Some in the F.B.I. thought she might be an agent, ''a hostile penetration attempt.'' He was furious.
These personal woes also accompanied other disappointments. By 1998, Unscom itself was flagging. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had earlier declared that even if Iraq disarmed, sanctions would continue as long as Saddam was in power. Iraqis had one less reason to cooperate. They grew more brazen in blocking inspections, and the Security Council was letting them get away with it.
At the same time, Ritter was contending with a reputation as a cowboy. Some promising inspections were canceled from above at the last minute. Richard Butler, the Australian who succeeded Ekeus as Unscom's chief, told me these missions were of the ''kick-the-door-down variety'' and he thought them ''ill conceived and possibly dangerous.'' But Ritter suspected other reasons. He was in a turf battle with some elements of the C.I.A. The Americans were leaning on Unscom, freezing him out of the loop.
After thinking it through, resigning seemed the thing to do. Concerned that he might be arrested, he consulted a lawyer and began talking to the news media even before he quit, protecting himself by preparing to get his story out, raising his profile. People in the American government worried that he might become dangerously talkative. He got a nervous call from someone attached to the National Security Council, he said. So Ritter laid down his terms: ''I'm going to walk away, very critical of your policy. You've got to be grown up about that. What I don't want, though -- if you come after me and call me a liar, I'm going to tell the truth. If you question my patriotism, I'm going to demonstrate how I was a patriot. Come after my family, I will [expletive] you all.' Those were my words.''
The day Ritter resigned, CBS News reported that the F.B.I. was investigating him for showing classified intelligence to the Israelis. Though the report added that ''officials say it appears Ritter did nothing wrong,'' for him, it was the fateful tripwire. He declared war.
When he testified at the Senate hearing eight days later, he constrained his criticisms to those things his adversaries could be ''grown up about,'' speaking of the ''ugly threat'' of Iraq. Along with that, he stressed his main theme: arms inspection works, and when Saddam thwarts the inspectors, America and the rest of the Security Council must intervene. The senators, especially Ritter's fellow Republicans, commended his eloquence, his patriotism, his guts. Only Joe Biden, the Democrat from Delaware, suggested that perhaps the timing of military action against Iraq might better be decided by people at a higher pay grade than Scott Ritter's.
In settling his more personal scores, Ritter went to the press, and when he wasn't going to them, they went to him, aware that his tap was turned on with stories flowing into everyone's notebooks. The most surprising venue for his revelations was the English-language Israeli daily Ha'aretz, where, in a Q. and A., he discussed Israel's featured role in Unscom's intelligence operations.
Some of the Arab world feasted on that. ''What did I say in the Ha'aretz interview that was incorrect?'' Ritter asked me. ''Nothing! What did I say in the Ha'aretz interview that was politically inflammable? Just about everything!'' But hadn't he warned the American government? When he recalls these events now, he seems to relive them, as if the words were the vital dialogue in a play's climactic turn: ''If you want to play the game of truth, I'll tell the truth, and the truth will burn. It's not going to burn me. It'll burn you. Why did you play the Israel card? Why did you play it, America? To try to discredit me?''
Many of Ritter's Unscom friends, who had cheered him on before, were now disturbed by what they read. ''I like Scott, but the fact that he disclosed all this Unscom activity was a very big mistake,'' said a fellow inspector, Fouad El Khatib.
Ritter was in high demand. The talk shows applied their makeup. Some of the super-rich invited him to a retreat in Aspen. Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell listened to his take on foreign policy. NBC used him as a military analyst. At the network, he tried to wow his new colleagues. William Arkin, another NBC analyst, remembers joining Ritter in the company cafeteria. ''Unbelievable diarrhea of the mouth,'' he said. ''He's got a serious case of I've-got-a-secret.''
Simon & Schuster paid him a $250,000 advance for a book. Ritter's preference would have been to bang out the whole cloak-and-dagger story, something to ''out-Tom Clancy Tom Clancy and out-John le Carre John le Carre.'' But the editors wanted more of a policy book, and they needed it in a hurry, while Ritter and Iraq were still in the news. The deal was signed in early December, three and a half months after his resignation. Ritter saw the writing task as straightforward: explain what a brute Saddam was and how to get rid of him.
But then, in the middle of his high-velocity writing, the author suffered a jolt of analytical whiplash. On Dec. 16, 1998, the United States, with British support, launched Operation Desert Fox, four days of bombing. With the Clinton administration finally hammering Saddam, one might have expected Ritter to be elated, but in fact, he thought it a travesty. Desert Fox had come without the approval of the Security Council. In Ritter-think, America was bound to the United Nations by treaty, and treaties were backed by the United States Constitution. ''We've broken the law and compromised our morality,'' he says. Besides, speaking as a Marine intelligence officer, he also thought the operation nothing more than a futile pinprick. If they wanted to bomb, they should have hit Saddam for a full 60 days. ''I could've shown them the targets,'' he says.
Ritter's book, ''Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem Once and for All'' would have to end with a different solution, he realized. Further complicating things, Simon & Schuster moved his deadline up to Jan. 15. He had but a month more to write and think. This frenzy of introspection resulted in a turnabout. In the final chapter, Ritter's ''endgame'' swerves from the use of overwhelming military force to patient diplomacy. Several reviewers thought it a muddle.
At any rate, the book sold poorly. By the time it came out in April, Kosovo had elbowed Iraq from the news. The world was looking elsewhere.
Though Ritter's celebrity withered, his urge to speak out did not. He was willing to go anywhere, said Jennifer Horan, a Boston peace activist who knows him well: ''He went from being taken in limos to 'The Today Show' to driving himself to the basements of ill-heated churches to talk to 30 people.'' His messianic side, once solely directed at finding Saddam's lethal weapons, had reversed compass and was targeted now at Washington's failed policies. He spoke often of the thousands of Iraqi children dying because of the sanctions. And at least once he publicly regretted his own part in America's misreading of the situation. In May 2000, appearing at a Congressional briefing, he said Saddam was incapable of ''world or regional domination'' and admitted that ''a lot of the blame for the perceptions'' to the contrary could ''be laid at my doorstep.''
That briefing proved significant, not for what Ritter said but for whom he met. Shakir al-Khafaji, a wealthy Iraqi-American businessman, was in the audience. The two men struck up a conversation. Within weeks, Ritter was telling al-Khafaji about a documentary he hoped to make, a film about Unscom that might find the audience that ''Endgame'' had missed. The two agreed to become partners in Ritter's production company, with al-Khafaji's real-estate development firm, the Falcon Management Group of Southfield, Mich., investing $400,000. While the businessman did not have any control over the editorial content, both men say, al-Khafaji would be supplying his connections as well as his money, easing Ritter's way back into Iraq.
As a veteran intelligence officer, Ritter knew he ought to be wary of this deal. The F.B.I. probe had not resulted in any charges, but here he was, about to receive cash from a wealthy Iraqi with important friends in Baghdad. Ritter said he went to great lengths to check things out, though on this score he is less than convincing. Where did he get his information? ''I called a reporter who has sources in the C.I.A.'' Does he know where the $400,000 came from? ''They showed me the stocks and bonds that were being liquidated.'' Was al-Khafaji getting any quid pro quo from the Iraqi government? ''Shakir said he didn't,'' Ritter told me on one occasion. On another he said, ''That was always in the back of my mind, that the Iraqis have an interest in funding the movie.'' Before going to Baghdad, Ritter informed the F.B.I., he said. This candor was a supposed safety net. ''I raised our profile so high that the F.B.I.'s got us dead to rights. If he is getting a quid pro quo, you'd think the F.B.I. would know about it.''
Al-Khafaji, 46, has lived in America for 27 years. I spoke with him twice on the phone. While he is an active critic of American policy, he had no praise for Saddam either. On the other hand, he does have many friends in the Iraqi government. He comes from a prominent family. Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, ''is our neighbor,'' he said. Scoffing at any notion of a quid pro quo, he said to the contrary, it was hard to convince the Iraqi government to cooperate. ''They didn't trust Ritter,'' he said.
The businessman, like Ritter, said he had hoped the film would make money. If so, this was a naive miscalculation. ''In Shifting Sands'' presents a 92-minute story Americans are unused to, with the United States at least the equal of Iraq in bad faith. Indeed, America is portrayed as a bully, needlessly inflicting pain on a woebegone nation. Ritter bemoans the shame of it, the United States ''pursuing a brutal dictator to the point of debasing our own moral and intellectual values.''
Whatever the film's merits, TV stations and movie theaters had little interest. All investors, including Ritter, lost money, they say. This of course was a disappointment. More important for the former arms inspector, it denied him the influential role he believed he deserved. Not only did he consider himself one of America's leading experts on Iraq, he says he thought he could become a peacemaker between the nations. Last August, he began to feel a greater urgency for that mission as carrier of the olive branch. He expected President Bush to use the anniversary of 9/11 as a ''jingoistic springboard'' for attacking Saddam. To prevent war, he believed the Iraqis needed to respond to worldwide pressure and allow the weapons inspectors back in, and he wanted to go to Baghdad to convince them. ''My feeling was that -- and it's not an ego thing -- but in military terms I am a silver bullet. I can generate attention quickly. I have a credibility on the subject that most people don't.''
He phoned al-Khafaji. ''I need to speak to the Iraqi National Assembly,'' he remembers telling him, adding two requirements: ''It has to be televised live. And it has to be before Sept. 11.'' Impressively, al-Khafaji was able to arrange a meeting with Tariq Aziz, who asked, Why do you want to speak to the National Assembly? They're nothing. ''I know they're nothing,'' Ritter says he replied. ''But I'm looking for something symbolic. It's theater being played out here. We are staging an event, a media event!''
Ritter loves this new chapter to his myth. ''The Iraqis trust me because for seven years I held their feet to the fire,'' being tough but fair, he told me. No American had previously addressed the Iraqi National Assembly. Ritter wrote his speech on his laptop, on the drive into Iraq from Jordan. On Sept. 8, parliamentarians listened politely as Ritter told them that America ''seems on the verge of making a historical mistake.'' We Americans are a good -- no, a great -- people, he told them. But because of 9/11, ''we are a nation fearful of the unknown and more easily prone to exploitation by those with agendas other than legitimate self-defense.'' He said in the current crisis, the truth was on Iraq's side. He praised the Iraqis for their ''full cooperation'' with past arms inspections.
That last part, certainly, was an ''evolution'' in thinking. But one thing had remained the same. Ritter still wanted the inspectors back to work.
War, definitely by Christmas, is Ritter's prediction. He told me this the other day, just after the latest Security Council resolution demanding the return of the inspectors was passed. As it turns out, even with the resumption of inspections, he sees no room for optimism. ''Just a setup, a smokescreen,'' he said. The Bush administration has put its reputation on the line. Whether or not weapons are found, expect the bombing to begin. When he hears Bush speak of underground facilities, he says, ''I know I spent five years investigating that with ground-penetrating radar, with the best geophysicists around.'' The presidential palaces may have underground bunkers, but not underground factories. ''There's no James Bond; there's no Dr. Evil. The Iraqis are incompetent! They can't do it.''
Well, maybe they could. Occasionally, Ritter is scrupulous in pointing out that he doesn't know for sure what the Iraqis have been up to these past four years. Mostly, however, he shuns such overcomplication.
These days, Ritter is in greater demand than ever. The schedule is crazy: Madrid on the weekend, Texas on Monday, over to Strasbourg on Tuesday. In Europe, he speaks at political forums, while in America, he mostly appears on college campuses and on talk TV.
The Baghdad trip opened his flank to a fusillade of criticism. He has been ridiculed as Ritter of Arabia and Hanoi Jane. But the slight that seems to wound him the most is that he too much loves the limelight. ''I'm going to unplug from this thing so quickly people will be shocked,'' he told me huffily, saying what he wants most is time with his family and his golf clubs. Then he made a surprise announcement. ''I'm going to graduate school next fall; I'm getting a Ph.D. I'm going to teach. O.K.? Is that seizing the spotlight?''
Actually, I can envision this quite well, Ritter eventually with a faculty position, a class of students taking notes. There are plenty of professors who believe their analyses have never been wrong. In time, though, he said, academia could conceivably lose him to public service. ''If my country ever calls upon me to serve, if someone thought I could ever be a good assistant secretary of defense or state, I would smartly salute and go off to serve my country,'' he said, immediately worrying that this sounded as if he longed for the limelight. ''If you write that, people will say I am lobbying for it. I'm just being honest with you here.''
On the drive back to Albany, we took the road through Lake Placid. I pondered the prospect of Ritter without the limelight. He would sorely miss it, just as he now misses his wife and twin daughters and a good tee shot.
As the highway turned east, trees seemed to be tossing leaves into the wind. Everywhere, brilliant oranges and yellows were afloat, though the scenery was more serene than the conversation. Ritter had launched into one of his better rambles, the one where he hates Saddam as much as the next guy, probably more. ''Blow the hell out of him, 60 days of bombing, kill them all,'' he said. I inquired, Who's them? ''All the senior Iraqis. They're poison. They are absolutely poison.''
I asked, But isn't that what Bush wants to do? ''Bush isn't smart enough,'' he said. ''There are only a handful of people that are smart enough to do this'' -- Ritter himself among them.
But in mid-harangue, his peaceable side resurfaced. He was talking again about the Constitution and how Americans needed to honor their commitments to the United Nations. ''The Constitution defines what I have to do,'' he said.
I thought the matter might end there, but Ritter was still in turmoil. ''My heart's telling me to kill Saddam, or, I don't know, maybe my gut tells me that,'' he said. ''My heart's telling me to do what the Constitution says, but the gut's saying kill Saddam. And my brain has no clue which way to go here. It's just twisted. And I'm honest when I say I get up every morning and I just want to get the hell out of this.''
Barry Bearak is a staff writer for the magazine.
They didn't believe it either.
It's easy to forget one 'changed' when that change was paid for with Iraqi funds.
Ah, the university professorship... the last refuge of the arrogant and generally unemployable.
That's funny. My brother turned down a job at UNSCOM precisely because in his view, US participation in the UN is unconstitutional.
Ritter also gets speaking fees. He makes MUCH more as a flip flopper peacenik than a quite person who once served and chosses to keep his mouth shut.
He is doing this for one reason: FAME, albeit short lived and most importantly something that directly flows from this.... FORTUNE.
Now I will post the best reply on another Ritter thread, and that reply was yours:
Next to levelling the WTC using nineteen men with box cutter knifes, turning Scott Ritter with a bit of tail is probably the best return on investment Saddam ever made.
Saddam’s first smoking gun traced to India (Also discussed on FOXNEWS Special Report)
Delmar Weapons Inspector in Hot Water
(updated: January 20th, 5:50pm) The spotlight is back on former UN Weapons Inspector and Delmar native, Scott Ritter. But it's not over Iraq instead its over charges he talked with an underage girl on the Internet.
The Daily Gazette broke the story over the weekend. The paper says Ritter was arrested in June of 2001 after having a sexual conversation on the Internet with someone he "thought" was an underage girl. The girl turned out to be an undercover investigator.
Sources tell NEWS10 that Ritter contacted what he thought was a teenage girl on the internet for the purpose of a sexual interlude not once, but twice within a three month period back in 2001. Ritter also underwent court-ordered sex offender counseling from an Albany psychologist. ============================================================
So when did the publishers of the NY Slimes know about the double hitter sexual predator and decided to spike the news so Ritter could lie for Uncle Saddam?
Forget this long and fabricatted Bravo Sierra Artice by a NY Slimes writer about the Sexual Predator Ritter. Just go to these links to see that the left wing's golden boy Ritter is now burnt toast! (List of just Free Republic threads re the sexual predator Ritter)
The inspection process has about as much integrity as Ritter himself.
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