Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Scott Ritter; American Hero FEATURED ARTICLES - SCOTT RITTER - The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript, August 31, 1998 - Exclusive: Scott Ritter in His Own Words, Time Magazine, 9/14/02 - Kerry, Too, Needs to Clear the Air, by Scott Ritter, Newsday / Long Island, 2/9/04 - The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament, by Scott Ritter, Arms Control Today, June 2000 - Not Everyone Got it Wrong on Iraq's Weapons, by Scott Ritter, International Herald Tribune, 2/6/04 QUOTE OF THE DAY "I went to war against Saddam Hussein in 1991. I spent 7 years of my life in this country hunting down weapons of mass destruction. I believe I've done a lot about Saddam Hussein. You show me where Saddam Hussein can be substantiated as a threat against the United States & I'll go to war again. I'm not going to sit back idly & let anybody threaten the United States. But at this point in time, no one has made a case based upon facts that Saddam Hussein or his government is a threat to the United States worthy of war." - - Scott Ritter (On CNN, Sept 8th 2002) Former U.S. Marine, U.N. Weapons Inspector & author of "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America." KNOW YOUR HISTORY - FEBRUARY 11th 1812 -- At Republican Governor Elbridge Gerry's behest, Massachusetts is redistricted to give Republicans advantage in the election of State legislators. One grotesquely shaped new district, described as looking like a salamander, results in the coining of the word gerrymander. 1890 -- US opens 11 million acres of Sioux land to white settlers. Later that year, on December 29th, hundreds of Sioux are massacred by the U.S. Army 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek. 1978 --  "The Longest Walk" begins. 300 Native Americans start a march from Oakland, California to Washington D.C. to call attention to a Congressional attempt to abrogate all Indian treaties. That attempt is quashed... so far. 1990 -- The US-supported apartheid government of South Africa releases political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, after 27 years in prison for the crime of "high treason." RHINO HERE: With all the recent talk by shrub gang members about faulty or misinterpreted intelligence on Iraqi WMD's, it might be easy to forget that millions of people round the world had little doubt that the shrubies were lying through their teeth during the buildup for war. Rhino sez, "Let no one forget that we knew they were lying, we said so at the time, and when they try to put it off on their intelligence sources, we know without a doubt they're continuing to lie." And to those who would call "unpatriotic" or even "traitors", anyone who accuses their government of lying to the citizenry, Rhino sez, "Study history! Even recent history." Today's Rhino's Blog honors a true American hero & patriot. Some may know portions of the career of Scott Ritter, but it's likely many are not aware of the headlines this former U.S. Marine & U.N weapons inspector made years before he tried to warn America & the world that lies were afoot in the shrub gang's claims of the Iraqi imminent threat. Transcripts below from an August 31, 1998 broadcast of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer tell why Ritter resigned as UN Weapons Inspector after 7 years of service in Iraq, citing ineffective policies & insufficient support to the inspectors by The Clinton Administration and the U.N. SCOTT RITTER - The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript , August 31, 1998 Questioning both the United States' and the United Nation's resolve to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, U.N weapons inspector Scott Ritter resigned from his post after seven years of service. MORE: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec98/ritter_8-31.html As the shrub gang war drums were pounding, Ritter stepped forward to say there was no evidence Iraq possessed viable WMD's, that the half lives of the active ingredients for WMD's Saddam supposedly still had were far shorter than the years it had been since he'd had them, & that overthrowing Saddam would not be the cakewalk the shrubies were making it out to be. The gang & their tri-letter cheerleaders (FNN, CNN, ABC, etc) accused him of being a traitor & even a spy. Here's a Time Magazine piece from September of 2002. Exclusive: Scott Ritter in His Own Words by ALI HAIDER , Time Magazine, 9/14/02 Scott Ritter was the UN's top weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998, when he resigned claiming President Clinton was too easy on Saddam. Now he says the dictator doesn't seem to have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that trying to oust Saddam is "extremely dangerous." TIME's Massimo Calabresi asked the voluble former marine about his recent private trip to Baghdad, Jane Fonda, and accusations he's a spy for Israel, Iraq or Russia.   MORE: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,351165,00.html This week, Scott Ritter wrote a telling article about the actions of Democratic Presidential frontrunner, John Kerry from 2000 through the shrub gang's Summer 2002 PR campaign for war. In this piece, he cites an article he wrote in response to a request by Senator Kerry. The article was written for, "Arms Control Today" , the periodical of The Arms Control Association (ACA), founded in 1971, to promote public understanding of & support for effective arms control policies. That article is linked below Ritter's piece on Kerry. http://www.armscontrol.org Kerry, Too, Needs to Clear the Air by Scott Ritter, Newsday / Long Island, 2/9/04 On April 23, 1971, a 27-year-old Navy veteran named John Kerry sat before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and chided members on their leadership failures regarding the war in Vietnam. "Where is the leadership?" Kerry, a decorated hero who had proved his courage under fire, demanded of the senators. "Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned?" Kerry lambasted those who had pushed so strongly for war in Vietnam. "These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude." Today, on the issue of the war in Iraq, it is John Kerry who is all pious rectitude... MORE: http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vprit093662615feb09,0,359814.story The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament by Scott Ritter, Arms Control Today, June 2000 Efforts to resume weapons inspections in Iraq have long been at an impasse. It has been 18 months since inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) were withdrawn from Iraq and six months since the Security Council created a successor organization to assume UNSCOM's mantle. Resolution 1284 established the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in December 1999 and tasked it with verifying Iraq's elimination of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers... MORE:   http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2000_06/iraqjun.asp And finally, in today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE, Scott Ritter challenges the recent comments by David Kay on "inaccurate assessments" of intelligence and his much quoted line, "We were all wrong." 7:25:36 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - Not Everyone Got it Wrong on Iraq's Weapons Not Everyone Got it Wrong on Iraq's Weapons by Scott Ritter, International Herald Tribune, February 6, 2004 'We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's former top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find any such weapons lay with the U.S. intelligence community, which, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments. The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data to the political advantage of President George W. Bush. The president's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate this intelligence failure only reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November presidential election. The fact, independent of the findings of any commission, is that not everyone was wrong. I, for one, was not. I did my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up their allegations regarding Iraq's WMD and, failing that, spoke out and wrote in as many forums as possible in an effort to educate the publics of the United States and the world about the danger of going to war based on a hyped-up threat. In this I was not alone... MORE: http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=128281&;owner=(IHT)&date=20040208152820 "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 6:09:56 AM    comment

© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.