More fallout from Oil for Food

Read about how UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter received money from oil vouchers from Saddam under the UN administered Oil for Food program. How he tried to get Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev to go to Iraq in support of Saddam prior to the invasion.

No wonder he switched his tune or said that we're going to lose just before we won phase I. It's also no wonder that he is now writing for al Jazeera.

So, let's get this straight, he quits being the head UN weapons inspector because he felt that Clinton was being to soft on Saddam.

"In testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees on Sept. 3, 1998, Ritter affirmed that UNSCOM had intelligence suggesting Iraq had assembled the components for three nuclear weapons. All Baghdad lacked, Ritter said, was the fissile material. Ritter also said then that if Iraq were to reconstruct its old program for producing fissile material, it could have a bomb in several years."

Then he said that he was "misreported".

However, Ritter opposed the war against Iraq, arguing that there was no proof Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Now he was saying that the regime had no nuclear weapons capability and any remaining chemical weapons stocks would likely be so degraded as to be useless. Ritter maintains that he never "flip-flopped" on the issue, but that his positions were misreported by journalists.

None of the articles can ascertain when he "changed his mind" about Iraq. What would it take to "change the mind" of someone who saw Saddam's weapons programs first hand, wrote articles about them, testified in front of the UN and the US Congress about them, and then quit in disgust because action wasn't taken? He wasn't on the inspection team anymore, so he can't claim that Saddam destroyed the weapons. How would he know? Just what did it take?