http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/101204A.shtmlBearing Bloody Witness
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 12 October 2004
The release of the report by Charles Duelfer and the Iraq Survey Group, which involved 1,625 U.N. and U.S. inspectors searching 1,700 sites in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction over two years at a cost of more than $1 billion, told me what I have known for more than two years.
More than two years ago, in August of 2002, I wrote a book titled 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know.' The book was published in September of 2002, six months before the Iraq invasion was undertaken, and took a simple stand:
"The case for war against Iraq has not been made. This is a fact. It is doubtful in the extreme that Saddam Hussein has retained any aspect of the chemical, nuclear and biological weapons programs so thoroughly dismantled by the United Nations weapons inspectors who worked tirelessly in Iraq for seven years. This is also a fact. The idea that Hussein has connections to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists is laughable - he is a secular leader who has worked for years to crush fundamentalist Islam within Iraq, and if he were to give weapons of any kind to Qaeda, they would use those weapons on him first." - p. 9
I wrote it after hearing former U.N weapons inspector Scott Ritter speak at Suffolk University in Boston on July 23, 2002. I stayed up all night after his talk to write about his dire predictions in an article for this publication that, I believe, helped in a small way to begin the unprecedented surge of activism against the invasion which eventually swept across the world.
"The Third Marine Expeditionary Force in California is preparing to have 20,000 Marines deployed in the Iraq region for ground combat operations by mid-October," Ritter told that Suffolk crowd in July of 2002. "The Air Force used the vast majority of its precision-guided munitions blowing up caves in Afghanistan. Congress just passed emergency appropriations money and told Boeing company to accelerate their production of the GPS satellite kits, that go on bombs that allow them to hit targets while the planes fly away, by September 30, 2002."
"The clock is ticking," continued Ritter to the Suffolk gathering, "and it's ticking towards war. And it's going to be a real war. It's going to be a war that will result in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It's a war that is going to devastate Iraq. It's a war that's going to destroy the credibility of the United States of America."
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