10-26-05, 7:35 am

Book Review: Iraq Confidential by Scott Ritter Avalon Publishing Group


SCOTT Ritter, a top arms inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, is that rare creature - a gung-ho former US marine bitterly opposed to the official lies and hidden agendas of the US establishment.

In this remarkable book, he recounts his own experience in the US subversion of the UN arms inspections to achieve regime change.

Seymour Hersh, the renowned investigative journalist and a friend, provides a foreword.

In a chronological narrative, Ritter, who is no friend of the Iraqis, charts his mounting disillusionment as he realises that the UNSCOM inspectors were struggling to achieve goals that were directly contrary to the aims of the US intelligence community.

Ritter and the inspectors, striving to locate and destroy Iraqi WMD, were constantly battling against the CIA and Mossad interest in subverting the regime.

The US political establishment never wanted the 'slate to be wiped clean,' to acknowledge that Iraq no longer possessed any WMD.

By now, we are accustomed to graphic revelations about US lies in pursuit of strategic goals, but, here, Ritter has produced a unique first-hand narrative of a years-long scandal that deserves maximum exposure in the US and Britain.

It is difficult to grasp the enormity of the official US deceptions through the long years of sanctions, the countless bombing raids and the launching of an illegal war. Ritter himself records seeing his former boss Charles Duelfer, reported on television six years after Ritter's resignation from UNSCOM in 1998, declaring that Iraq had been disarmed by the summer of 1991. The sanctions - that, in some reports, killed 1.5 million Iraqi civilians, mostly children - the years of bombing and the 2003 invasion were all based on a lie.

The CIA, working in collaboration with Israel - Ritter himself liaised with Israeli intelligence agents - subverted the UN inspection effort as a route to regime change and both the US and Britain 'fixed intelligence around policy' in order to justify a massive military onslaught on a defenceless country, an accredited fellow member of the United Nations.

Ritter concludes that, as a US citizen, he finds it 'very disturbing that the intelligence services of my country would resort to lies and deceit ... When intelligence is skewed to fit policy, then the entire system of trust that is fundamental in a free and democratic society is put at risk.'

Ritter remains a patriot and hopes that lessons will be learned from the many US 'errors of judgement' and 'mistakes.'

His measured response, in view of what he knows and has revealed, is astonishing. The rest on us can only look on with impotent fury and disgust.



From Morning Star