The significance of former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s arrest, allegedly in a police sex-sting operation a year and a half ago, was underscored today when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told of Baghdad’s use of personal information to intimidate the inspectors.
 Scott Ritter in CNN interview last night |
Ritter – who confirmed yesterday that he was arrested in June 2001 but refused to give details – has dramatically reversed his position on Iraq’s weapons threat and become an outspoken critic of the U.S., telling WND last week that President Bush should be impeached for his policy toward Baghdad.
“In the past, Iraq did not hesitate to use pressure tactics to obtain information about the inspectors,” Wolfowitz said today in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Noting that often the pressure was “quite crude,” Wolfowitz said that during the previous inspection period in the 1990s, “one inspector was reportedly filmed in a compromising situation and blackmailed.”
Ritter served during this period under the auspices of UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission.
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Dave Lapan told WND today he would seek further elaboration from Wolfowitz concerning his remarks about the inspectors.
The deputy defense chief said in his speech this afternoon that sometimes Iraq’s pressure on the inspectors was subtler.
Wolfowitz said, “Richard Spertzel, a former UNSCOM specialist in biological warfare, recalled the case of an Iraqi official coyly asking a new member of his team: ‘How far is it from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis?’ Having moved from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis just days prior to her arrival in Iraq, she was unnerved by the comment, according to Spertzel.”
More recently, according to Wolfowitz, “Iraq has again begun referring to the inspectors as spies, clearly hoping to make them uncomfortable at best, and afraid at worst, and intimidate Iraqis from interacting with the inspectors.”
Last December, it was reported that the State Department and U.N. – without any background check – selected a munitions expert for the inspection team who had no specialized scientific degree and a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs.
‘Evolving’ assessment
Ritter said in a Nov. 24, 2002, New York Times magazine feature that he has “evolved” in his assessment of Saddam Hussein’s capability of threatening the world with weapons of mass destruction.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees on Sept. 3, 1998 – just eight days after resigning as chief weapons inspector – Ritter affirmed that UNSCOM had intelligence suggesting Iraq had assembled the components for three nuclear weapons. All Baghdad lacked, Ritter confirmed, was the fissile material.
Ritter said in that 1998 testimony that if Iraq were to reconstruct its old program for producing fissile material, it could have a bomb in several years.
He said he resigned because he felt “Iraq remained insufficiently disarmed and ready to restart its nuclear and biological weapons programs.”
Now, Ritter says he would ”be surprised if there is anything in Iraq worth finding,” maintaining that U.N. inspection efforts in the 1990s have forced Iraq to dispense with 90 to 95 percent of its deadliest weapons, meaning that Saddam is ”fundamentally disarmed.”
Wolfowitz claimed today that Iraq has not destroyed its chemical and biological arsenal and is working hard to produce nuclear weapons. Iraq has failed to cooperate fully with weapons inspectors, he said, treating “disarmament like a game of hide and seek – or, as Secretary of State [Colin] Powell has called it, ‘rope-a-dope in the desert.'”
Ritter’s public turnabout came just a few months after his Senate testimony, when on Dec. 16, 1998, he unexpectedly criticized Operation Desert Fox, a four-day U.S.-British bombing operation, for not having the approval of the U.N. Security Council.
Last September, Ritter made a speech before the Iraqi National Assembly in Baghdad in which he said his country “seems to be on the verge of making a historical mistake” in its calls to remove Saddam.
A leading Iraq observer, Laurie Mylroie, who also serves as a Defense Department consultant, told WND that the best explanation for Ritter’s reversal that she has heard is that, after he resigned and spoke out on Saddam’s threat before the Senate, the Clinton administration turned on him.
“They sicced the FBI on him, and he just got so mad that he turned against the U.S., and his ego just won’t let him see what he’s doing,” said Mylroie, publisher of Iraq News, adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America.”
CBS News reported on the day Ritter resigned that the FBI was investigating him for revealing classified intelligence to Israel. The probe resulted in no charges.
“The strange thing is, that until Ritter resigned, no one could talk about how dangerous Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were,” Mylroie noted.
“Everything had been politically spun,” she explained, “Clinton was ignoring the issue, [presidential candidate] Bob Dole didn’t want to deal with it because he was afraid, and rightly so, that Clinton would bring up a very embarrassing trip he made, and things he said, in Baghdad in the early 1990s.”
Mylroie’s book, “Study of Revenge,” makes a well-documented case for Saddam’s involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and gives evidence of Iraq’s support of al-Qaida in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
Recent revelations
Reports of Ritter’s June 2001 arrest in upstate New York began surfacing just one week ago.
During an appearance last night on “CNN Newsnight with Aaron Brown,” Ritter admitted he was arrested but evaded questions dealing with reports he was caught in a police sex-sting operation, citing legal counsel. He questioned the timing of the revelations as he canceled a trip to Iraq due to this “distraction.”
The Schenectady Daily Gazette and New York Daily News originally reported Ritter allegedly had an online sexual discussion with someone he thought was an underage girl but who turned out to be an undercover police investigator.
 Ritter allegedly tried to lure underage girl to this Burger King parking lot (WNYT-TV) |
WTEN-TV, the ABC affiliate in Albany, reported that Ritter contacted the “teen-age girl” twice in the spring of 2001, and that he has since undergone court-ordered sex-offender counseling from a psychologist in New York’s capital.
Sources also told the Albany Times Union that Ritter had two run-ins with police.
The first occurred in April 2001, as he reportedly drove to a Colonie, N.Y., business to meet what he thought was a 14-year-old girl with whom he had chatted online. Instead, he reportedly was met by officers, who released him without a charge.
Two months later, the source told the paper, Ritter was caught in the same kind of sex sting after he tried to lure a 16-year-old girl to an area Burger King restaurant.
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