[katana]

It was the "$ 400,000 given to Scott Ritter two years ago" that caught my attention. I certainly don't take Newsmax reporting as gospel, but I don't recall hearing that before. It's a startling charge and, if true, explains a lot about Mr. Ritter's behavior. Has anyone seen other reports or documentation (outside Newsmax) for that assertion?

[Catspaw]

Ritter took around $400k from this Iraqi, a good friend of Saddams, to make a "documentary" about Iraq. If you do a FR search on "Ritter," you can turn up a number of threads. This one has links to the stories about Burger King Boy:


http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/750148/posts

[Mister Baredog]

Has anyone seen other reports or documentation (outside Newsmax) for that assertion?

Ritter brags about it. It was susposidly to make a (anti-American) movie.

[kcvl]

Clear and present danger?

The first thing you need to know about this 2000 documentary, which explores the thwarted efforts of UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) to oversee the disarmament of Iraq, is that writer-director Scott Ritter is the former U.N. weapons inspector who noisily resigned from his position as head of the committee's Information Assessment Unit in 1998. The second is that $400,000 of the film's $500,000 budget came directly from the coffers of Iraqi-American businessman Shakir al-Khafaji, who, like Ritter, is determined to see ongoing economic sanctions against Iraq lifted. As the film's Senior Executive Producer, al-Khafaji accompanied Ritter to Baghdad and helped arrange interviews with various Iraqi officials, including Iraq's deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz. Ritter's writer-director credit, which makes it clear that he's calling the film's shots, doesn't appear onscreen until the end of the film. So his talking head appearances throughout — which position him as one among a handful of experts, who include former UNSCOM executive chairman Rolf Ekeus, former UNSCOM spokesperson Tim Trevan and Aziz — are at best disingenuous, and worst betray evidence of bad faith. The film opens with a fairly straightforward question: Why did the UN fail in its mission to disarm Iraq, and who is ultimately responsible? The answer is nowhere near so clear. The film traces Ritter's career with UNSCOM, founded in 1991 to oversee the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and guard against their future reconstitution. From the outset, there was widespread suspicion that Iraq's official declarations concerning its weaponry were less than truthful, and former-marine and intelligence analyst Ritter was brought in to help investigate Iraq's claims. Ritter agreed that Baghdad was lying, but also began to suspect that neither the UN Security Council nor the Clinton administration were fully committed to the mission, and that the U.S. intelligence community actually wanted to use Ritter's team to provoke a military confrontation with Iraq. The facts are all a bit cloudy. Contradicting his 1998 assertion that Saddam Hussein remained a serious threat, Ritter here claims that by 1995 UNSCOM had, in fact, effectively disarmed Iraq. Ritter calls Iraq a "defanged tiger" — even as his film acknowledges that the Iraqis, who never fully came clean about their cache of chemical and biological weapons, were definitely hiding something — and suggests the U.S. turn its attentions elsewhere. Released into theaters at a time when military confrontation between the U.S. and Iraq again seems immanent, a clear, unbiased documentary examining of the UNSCOM debacle would benefit anyone attempting to make sense of the dire situation. This, unfortunately, is not that documentary. — Ken Fox