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Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein

by Scott Ritter, with a foreword by Seymour Hersh
October 2005 - ISBN 1560258527
[buy it now online]

" Scott Ritter and his team were determined to find out the truth about Iraq's WMD. The CIA was equally determined to stop them. The truth, as we now know, is that Iraq actually had no WMD. But this information would have derailed America's drive for regime change.

Iraq Confidential conveys the disillusionment of a patriot who came to realize that his own government sought to undermine effective arms control in the Middle East. Ritter shows us a world of deceit and betrayal, in which nothing is as it seems. A host of characters from Mossad, M16 and the CIA pepper this powerful narrative, which contains revelations that will have an enduring impact on the ongoing debates about Iraq.

Scott Ritter was one of the UN's top weapons inspectors in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. Before working for the UN he served as an officer in the US Marines and as a ballistic missile adviser to General Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf War.

For more information and an exclusive picture gallery of weapons inspections, please go to www.iraqconfidential.com."


What Happened to Iraq's WMD:How politics corrupts intelligence
by Scott Ritter

Sunday, December 4, 2005

" The recent exchange of vitriol between Republican and Democratic lawmakers over the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and more specifically the disconnect between the intelligence data cited by the Bush administration as justification for invading Iraq and the resultant conclusion by the CIA that all Iraqi WMD had already been eliminated as early as 1991, has once again thrust the issue of the use of intelligence for political purposes front and center.

Democrats accuse the president and his supporters of deliberately misleading them and the American people about the nature of the Iraqi threat. Republicans respond that the Democrats are rewriting history, that all parties involved had access to the same intelligence data and had drawn the same conclusions. Typical of the Republican-led rebuttal are statements made by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who noted that "every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russian, French, including the Israeli, all had reached the same conclusion, and that was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." ....Read rest of this article from theSan Francisco Chronicle (SFGate.com)

posted by Annamarie at 2:23 AM