Scott Ritter: A Tipping Point Toward Chaos

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53. More importantly, Scott was a conduit for Ahmed Chalabi's disinformation about Iraq WMDs.

That is really the most disqualifying thing that casts doubt on his credibility. Dug this up from an old post of mine on DU2: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3784928&mesg_id=3788665

The claim being made by the White House was that Saddam had "reconstituted his WMD programs". In order to verify that claim, which was the casus belli for the invasion of Iraq, coalition forces would have had to unearth evidence of a recent (post 1991) operational facilities for manufacturing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Recall that at the conclusion of the Gulf War, as part of terms imposed by the Americans, Saddam ordered the Iraqi WMD program dismantled. That resulted in Saddam's "bonfire of the vanities", a mass destruction of equipment used to manufacture WMDs. This was observed and duly reported back to Washington, but kept classified because the details would have revealed the extent to which the Reagan-Bush Administrations had provided the WMD production infrastructure used by Iraq in its 1981-88 war against Iran.

After the defeat of George H.W. Bush in the election of 1992, rumours of Saddam's WMD program reemerged from several sources in the Middle East. This became a rallying cry to push the Clinton Administration to more actively intervene in Iraq, which continued providing support to the Palestinians, and as a way to undermine Clinton's peace talks. This culminated in the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. The main co-sponsors in the Senate were Joe Lieberman and John McCain. The Act set aside up to $90 million for Iraqi regime change pursued by a group of exile groups led by Ahmed Chalabi's INC, and handed an intelligence gathering role to those same groups.

Back in the mid-1990s, the UN inspectors were perplexed as to why they were still receiving intelligence about such Iraqi programs, but could not find operating manufacturing plants or facilities. Some speculated that maybe Saddam had built mobile biowarfare labs, which were moved around, and thus avoided detection. The US even built "replica" biowarfare labs at Ft. Detrick, MD to demonstrate that anthrax could be produced in a trailer. The CIA/DIA/SAIC contractor in charge of that project was a South African named Steve Hatfill.

In 1997, a US weapons inspector met with an Iraqi exile group leader at his apartment in Paris. During that visit, the American brought up the theory that Saddam was making anthrax in mobile biowarfare labs. Some months later, an Iraqi defector emerged in Germany, claiming he had been part of Saddam's WMD program that had built underground laboratories and, you guessed it, anthrax production trailers. He was dubbed "Curveball" by his German hosts, passed on to the CIA, and the rest is history.

By the way, the American and the Iraqi who met in Paris were named, Scott Ritter and Ahmed Chalabi. See, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/07/040607/fa_f...