“The foundation of our involvement in Iraq is corrupt. You can't build anything positive from this corrupt foundation. If you want to speak of solving the Iraq problem, we have to go back to how we got into this mess to begin with. And today, nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody wants to talk about the deception, the lies, the distortion that took place. They say, look, we all may disagree about how we got into Iraq, but that's old. Now we have to focus on the new situation. And it's very frustrating, because you can't focus on the new situation without comprehending how we got there to begin with.”

-Scott Ritter

Buzzflash interview, November 15, 2005

Position: Weapons Inspector, United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM)
Tenure: 1991-1998

The product of a military family, Scott Ritter joined the Marine Corps shortly after graduating from Franklin and Marshall College. He served for twelve years as an intelligence officer, including a stint as ballistic missile advisor to Norman Schwartzkopf during the first Gulf war. From 1991 to 1998 he served as a weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). The mission of UNSCOM was to find and destroy all Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and weapons related production activities.

Ritter took a leading role in the inspection efforts, serving as chief inspector on nearly half of his missions. His aggressiveness and insistence on unannounced inspections led to conflicts with Iraqi officials. In August 1998, he was expelled from the country. He resigned from UNSCOM shortly thereafter.

In expelling him from the country, Iraqi officials accused Ritter of being a CIA spy. Ironically, in his 1999 book ‘Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem – Once and For All’, Ritter accused the Clinton Administration of undermining the inspection process by using it as cover for CIA infiltration of Iraq as part of a program aimed at regime change.

Despite his status as a Republican and a Bush voter, Ritter was an outspoken critic of the rush toward war with Iraq. Ritter maintained that inspections had disarmed Iraq of 90-95% of its WMD capability and the nation posed no serious security risk to the U.S. His contentions proved to be correct with the failure to discover any weapons systems or programs in the aftermath of the invasion.

Ritter maintained and deepened his critique as the war continued. He has been particularly critical of what he sees as the unconstitutional expansion of executive powers by the Bush Administration and of unwarranted curbs on civil liberties.

Ritter is the author or co-author of four books and has served as a security and military consultant for Fox News.