GENEVA, 7 June 2003 — The United States and Britain should admit they lied when claiming the ousted Baghdad regime had weapons of mass destruction, Scott Ritter, a former UN senior weapons inspector in Iraq, said in an interview published here yesterday.
Ritter, speaking to the Swiss daily Le Temps, called on US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to “have the courage to be held responsible” for telling lies to the public into backing the conflict.
An outspoken critic of Bush’s handling of the conflict, the ex-Marine said the two leaders should “explain frankly and honestly why they went to war.” They should “admit their lies”, he said.
Ritter’s comments were published in French. “If this is a noble crusade to liberate the world from a crazy dictator, admit it,” he said.
But, Ritter added, Saddam Hussein could not have destroyed a possible arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) “without leaving traces... (US Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld has furnished no proof of their supposed destruction, just as he has never furnished the slightest proof of their existence.”
Ritter, a former intelligence officer in the US Marines once dubbed a “cowboy” by UN officials for what they called his intrusive inspection procedures, headed up the inspections team in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.
He resigned in August 1998, citing a lack of UN and US support for his tough disarmament methods, which rattled the Iraqis.
In his “Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem — Once and For All”, Ritter slammed Bush’s policy of regime change as having corrupted the inspection process in Iraq.
He also dismissed US intelligence information purporting to show the existence of WMDs, saying doubt would now be cast upon any further declarations made by the US president.
“(Bush) says that Iran has weapons of mass destruction. On the basis of what information? And what about Syria, or North Korea?” he told the paper.
Meanwhile, UN nuclear experts arrived in Baghdad yesterday for the first time since the war that toppled Saddam Hussein to begin a two-week mission to inspect Iraq’s largest nuclear facility.
The scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will assess what may have been looted from the plant in the aftermath of the war but will have no role in the hunt for Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Controversy has been raging over whether the United States and Britain fudged the data to back up their claims about those weapons, which were cited as the main reason for the war but have not been found inside the country.
The seven-person IAEA team will instead examine the Tuwaitha nuclear plant outside Baghdad, where there are fears nearby residents may have been contaminated by radioactive materials after the site was looted.
In another development, an intelligence report released by the US Defense Department yesterday found “no reliable information” to prove Iraq had chemical weapons.
“There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has — or will — establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities,” the September 2002 report by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said, according to Bloomberg news.
