Scott Ritter is joining us now live from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Scott, thank you for joining us. What do you say to David Kay's bottomline report? Do you feel vindicated?
SCOTT RITTER, FMR. U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Well, it goes beyond any sense of personal vindication, I think we're dealing with a national issue here where all Americans need to reflect long and hard on the reason why 130,000 troops are at war.
I think David Kay made the only conclusion the facts would allow him to make which is that there is no evidence to sustain the pre-war assertions made by President Bush and others that Iraq had massive stockpiles of chemical and biological agent. That they had an ongoing nuclear weapons program. That they had a ballistic missile capability. Clearly there was no substantive fact to back up the allegations and David Kay has drawn the right conclusion on that front.
BLITZER: Scott, as much as you opposed the war, even you suspected they were concealing some quantity, some stockpiles of banned weapons, as I recall from all of our interviews?
RITTER: Look, I never wanted to gift Iraqis a clean bill of health. They didn't deserve any gift of that nature. I've always, since my resignation in 1998, have been a proponent about getting U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq to complete the mandate of the security council without interference from either Iraq or the United States, which was pursuing, you know, an independent policy initiative of regime change that took precedence over disarmament.
Clearly, I've said that we could account for 90 to 95 percent of Iraq's weapons capability, verifiably, but that there was 5 to 10 percent that we don't what the final disposition of it was and we needed to let U.N. weapons inspectors figure that out. And that's what I was pushing for. United Nations inspection to do this important task. Not an invasion which puts American military lives at risk when a threat has yet to be quantified.
BLITZER: David Kay, as you well know, says that not the Bush administration, the political leadership, the president or the vice president. They didn't get it wrong, the career professionals in the intelligence community in the U.S. military, they were the ones who got it wrong, as a result, there should be an outside investigation into how they came up with apparently faulty intelligence, is that your assessment?
RITTER: This is where David Kay and I part ways. You know, I know what the intelligence community of the United States, Great Britain and indeed Israel felt about Iraq in late 1998. While there was concern about the unfinished business of disarmament, nobody maintains that Iraq had massive stockpiles of chemical, biological agents.
Nobody maintained that Iraq represented a clear and present risk of growing danger that needed to be confronted. Indeed this assessment was upheld until 2001. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice both maintained in 2001 that Iraq was a containable threat, that it didn't pose a threat. Something occurred between 2001 and 2003 that changed the way...
BLITZER: Let me interrupt you, Scott. What happened was 9/11.
RITTER: 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq and now we come down to the crux of the matter here. This isn't an intelligence failure, this is a policy failure. This is policymakers like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice and others who used 9/11 to pursue their own agenda on Iraq when they knew there was neither substantive factually based information to sustain Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threat or links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
We have to go back to Harry Truman's old adage. The buck stops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I agree, there has to be a full investigation but not just of the intelligence community but of the policymakers who made the decision to go to war based upon faulty (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
BLITZER: Having said all that, you lived in Iraq, you were a U.N. inspect. You saw what life was like under Saddam Hussein's regime, when all is said and done, despite some apparently faulty intelligence, are the people are Iraq better off today? RITTER: That's a question that has to be asked of the people of Iraq.
BLITZER: But what do you believe?
RITTER: I believe that the people of Iraq are going to -- they're suffering now, and they're going to suffer for years to come because of our unilateral actions, that there were ways to deal with Saddam Hussein that didn't involve unilateral invasion with the United States stepping away from international law, et cetera.
More importantly, though than the Iraqi people, I care about the American people. I care about the damage that's been done to democratic processes. The president of the United States misleading Congress, misleading the American people, the Congress abrogating the constitutional responsibilities regarding the declaration of war.
I think this country has been hurt tremendously by this war in Iraq, and we're going to continue to suffer. And that's why I think it's imperative that we complete the phase of democratic processes which is accountability. We hold those whom we elect to higher office accountable for what they do in our name. The president of the United States either lied or misled the American people and I think everybody in the United States has to look themselves in the mirror and say what are we going to do about it?
BLITZER: Scott Ritter, we're going to leave it right there. Thank you for joining us.
RITTER: Thank you.
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