As we were composing this article, it occurred to us that when mainstream media ignores an authoritative voice, it can become a very involved task to try and point to and amplify that voice after being left behind. It also doesn't help when the voice of reason sometimes contradicts itself, or appears to do so rhetorically.

This article will involve some detailed study. There are several years of history to attempt to digest in order to understand criticisms, smears and the other mainstream tactics used to keep a voice crying in the wilderness. You, as reader, surely must conduct your own detailed confirmation of what is written here beyond the links we have supplied. Google is your friend.

The voice in question belongs to Scott Ritter. Generally, Mr. Ritter spoke out loudly against the reasons for making war in Iraq before we began to deploy. As you should have read from the link, Mr. Ritter has intel experience from service in the USMC and was a weapons inspector inside Iraq prior to the current war.

What Mr. Ritter was saying in July of 2002 is capsulated in an article originally printed in the Boston Globe, Is Iraq a True Threat to the US?. One example of how mainstream media responded to Mr. Ritter was described in a September 2002 article from the Toronto Star, CNN's Hatchet Job on Scott Ritter. Be sure to take the time to further explore the extent that mainstream media pursued the smear of Mr. Ritter and certainly take their claims into consideration - then and now.

Sadly, for mainstream media and America, Mr. Ritter was correct. There have been few acknowledgements of this to date. Part of the problem is that Mr. Ritter makes it easy for media to attack his consistency as they use errors in what he writes and says against him. It is easy, and it works. We could do so as well. In a recent interview with Robert Sheer, Mr. Ritter states that, "But even Hillary had to be aware that it was Bill Clinton that initiated the policy of regime change when it comes to Saddam Hussein". Then, only moments later he states, "Again, I give Bill Clinton the benefit of the doubt here. I think it's only fair to note that the initiator of regime-change policy in regards to American-Iraqi relations was George Herbert Walker Bush". Easy pickings for a 30 second sound bite bash, eh? Every bit of valuable content he provides then goes down the tubes and has then to be resurrected by blogs and alternative news venues that will be immediately labeled as "progressive" or "liberal" - which they many times might easily be.

The point here then is to highlight the most coherent statements Mr. Ritter makes in relation to our current foreign policy predicaments and his assertions that the majority of Americans and their representatives are virtually clueless about the world we live in and what is being perpetrated in our name. What follows are categorized ticklers, presented in order to get you to read the associated links to transcripts of discussion with Mr. Ritter.

Note that the following are copied portions of transcripts that represent Ritter speaking live and contain errors.

ON HILLARY

Hillary wants us to believe that the vote she made was a vote made in good faith. She wants us to believe that she was a victim of misleading intelligence. She wants us to believe that she is an individual of strong character and that we can trust her to do the right thing when it comes to leading our nation should she be elected to the highest office in the land. The most powerful office, by the way, in the entire world. She asks too much.

For us to say that Hillary was misled is for us to believe that there wasn't ... that we need to erase eight years of Bill Clinton presidency. I know that Bill and Hillary didn't have the closest of relationships during this period of time. I'm not being facetious here. It's very possible that she could have been doing her thing and he was doing his thing: running the country. But even Hillary had to be aware that it was Bill Clinton that initiated the policy of regime change when it comes to Saddam Hussein. It was Bill Clinton that initiated the policy of economic sanctions, base containment and destabilization to achieve regime change. It was under Bill Clinton's tenure that the CIA undermined the weapons inspectors, creating the perception of a noncompliant Iraq when the facts spoke other.

Never forget that the CIA today commits to the reality that Iraq was disarmed in the summer of 1991. The CIA today says, "Yes, this was true." As a weapons inspector, we were reporting these facts to the CIA in the fall of 1993, right in the beginning of Bill Clinton's tenure. It was the Clinton administration that refused to accept the findings of the weapons inspectors, instead maintaining the perception of a noncomplying Saddam in order to continue United Nations-based economic sanctions for the purpose of undermining Saddam's regime, leading to regime change. Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, authorizing $100 million of U.S. taxpayers' funds to go into overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The Iraq Liberation, which made it public law-of-the-land policy to change the regime in Baghdad.

And now Hillary is saying, "Oops"? She got it wrong? No. Hillary and the other politicians who voted in favor of war in 2002 took the route of political expediency. She, like John Kerry before her and others, were examining, weighing the costs/benefits of this vote. She and others knew that, should she vote against this war, she would be subjected to immediate and harsh criticism that would undermine her viability as a national political leader. With all due respect to Hillary Clinton and her current posturing, she is-frankly speaking-a damn liar and should be treated as such, and never be given the opportunity to lead the United States of America. [1]

ON THE EMBARRASSMENT OF THE GOP RETREADS

And the reason George Herbert Walker Bush chose to eliminate Saddam Hussein from power was that Saddam Hussein had become a political embarrassment to the first Bush administration. Because Saddam Hussein's existence reminded everybody of the reality of the Reagan administration and the George Herbert Walker Bush administration's very close ties with Saddam Hussein.

We were just talking at dinner about the fact that Saddam Hussein-the two crimes he was being tried for before he was executed, were crimes that took place prior to Donald Rumsfeld's visit, when Donald Rumsfeld embraced Saddam, passed on a message that said, "You are a friend of the American people." George Herbert Walker Bush sent Sen. Bob Dole to Iraq in March of 1990 with the same message. "You are a true friend of the American people." It's only in August 1990, when Saddam invades Kuwait, that he suddenly becomes the personification of evil. And it's the requirement to get the American public from going from viewing Saddam as a true friend to the personification of evil worthy of military intervention that we had to change the mind-set. Saddam Hussein became the Middle East equivalent-and this is where Bush made his fatal mistake-the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler, requiring Nuremberg-like retribution. These are direct quotes from a speech made by George Herbert Walker Bush in October of 1990. Now, when you call someone the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler, requiring Nuremberg-like retribution, that means at the end of the day he has to be gone, in prison, held to account.

At the end of the Gulf War in 1999,[ED: the Gulf War ended in 1991] Saddam Hussein was still in power. We didn't go into Baghdad. We were never supposed to go into Baghdad; we were supposed to simply liberate Kuwait, which we did. Now Saddam Hussein is still in power and George Herbert Walker Bush has a political problem. And this is the point that I've made from day one. Why is regime change so important? It's not about national security. Saddam Hussein never posed a threat to the national security of the United States that warranted American military intervention, whether it be in 1991 or 2003 or any time in between.[1]

ON THE IGNORANCE IN AMERICAN

How easily we, the people of the United States of America-and I use that term because it is derived from the preamble of the Constitution, a document which defines who we are and what we are as a nation-how easily we, the people, are deceived. How easily we, the people, are manipulated. How easily we are pushed in one direction or the other. How quickly we bought into Saddam Hussein being the personification of evil. And while we were calling him the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler, how little we knew of Iraq. How many people here truly know the difference between a Shia and a Sunni? Don't feel bad if you don't; the head of the Intelligence Committee of the United States Congress certainly doesn't. How many people here know whether al-Qaida is a Sunni-based organization or a Shia-based organization? Don't be upset if you don't because the head of the Intelligence Committee certainly doesn't. Do you know where Wahhabism ... do you know what Wahhabism ... ?

The point is, I throw out a lot of these terms, which are very relevant about modern-day Iraq, and you have complete ignorance about it. Not maybe you in the audience, because you're here trying to make an effort to try and learn. But Los Angeles, last time I checked, has a population greater than 400 people. The vast majority of the people walking and driving the streets of L.A. today, or any city and town in America, know nothing about Iraq, and yet they feel free to have opinions about Iraq. [1]

ON WHAT SADDAM HUSSEIN WAS AND WHO BAATHISTS WERE

Saddam Hussein was a product of Iraq's modern history. Saddam Hussein was a product of a nationalist movement that had its roots with Nasser in Egypt, that recognized that in modern Arab society you have tendencies to rip this society apart, called religion, that schism between Shia and Sunni. So you better damn well know the difference between those two if you want to talk about coming up with a solution, Mr. [Silvestre] Reyes, congressman from Texas, head of the House Intelligence Committee! But we might want to remind Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, who appointed this man. I bet you she couldn't pass the pop quiz, either. None of them can.

You better know that there's not just the difference between Sunni and Shia, but a difference between Kurd and Arab, a difference between a Turkmen and a Kurd. You better know the difference between Wahhabism and those who embrace the following of Saddam Hussein. You better know the different religious holidays. You better know all of this. Saddam Hussein did. You better know that tribes have a tendency to rip society apart, too. That's why Baathism, modern Baathism-and I'm not here condoning Baathism, I'm just stating reality-rejected tribalism, rejected ethnicity, rejected religion, and spoke of a unified secular Iraqi state. In order to achieve that vision, Saddam Hussein had to suppress the very tendencies that rise up and tear modern Iraq apart. And we condemned him for this? We called him a war criminal for this? Yet now we're in Iraq, we took away the glue that held together, and we're doing the same damn thing, but even worse. We've accused Saddam Hussein over the course of 30 years of killing 400,000 Iraqi people. Hell, it's taken us four years and we've killed 600,000. [Ed: 600,000 Iraqi fatalities is a disputed statistic.] [1]

ON WITHDRAWING FROM IRAQ

I believe this is fair debate to have. It's a very legitimate debate to have. I would, first of all, say that it's a debate that all Americans must be participants in, because to stay in Iraq.... I believe you don't talk about solving a problem unless you've properly defined the problem. If we're going to say the problem revolves around saving Iraq, rebuilding it, we're talking about decades-long involvement that's going to cost trillions of dollars-not billions: trillions of dollars-and will cost us significantly more lives. And it may not work. Some people say it's a gamble worth taking. Fine. I'd just ask the American people to pass a pop quiz. Tell me about the city of Karbala. Tell me about the city of Baghdad. Tell me about the city of Kirkuk. Explain to me the significance of these three cities both in terms of Iraqi history past, current and future. And if you're sitting there shaking your head, going, "What the hell is he talking about?" ladies and gentlemen, we need to get out of Iraq right now! Because if you can't answer that question right now, you are not even equipped to weigh in intelligently about a policy decision that has America committed to several decades of involvement in this nation.

Karbala is the birthplace of Shiism. That's where Hussein [in the seventh century] was wiped out by Sunni apostates, creating not only the Shia faith but creating the schism between the Shia and the Sunni.

Baghdad was sacked in the 12th century by the Mongols. As a result of the sack of Baghdad, the Sunnis said, "We got defeated because we lost pure Islamic faith." It's the birth of Wahhabism. Wahhabism, Osama bin Laden's version of Sunni Islamic fundamentalism, was derived by foreign occupation of Baghdad. Huh? We're at war with al-Qaida and the Wahhabists. And we just empowered them by occupying Baghdad. If it isn't sinking into your head yet, it never will.

Kirkuk. Oil. Kurds. Turkmen. Shia. Kirkuk. If you're going to have any hope of a unified Iraq, you have to tell me how Kirkuk is going to emerge from any post-Saddam environment, a unified city. Kirkuk is where the formal civil war in Iraq will start. Not Baghdad, not Karbala: Kirkuk.

And if you don't know this, if you can't tell me why, if you can't tell me who the players are, ladies and gentlemen, you're ill equipped to enter into a debate about the long-term presence of Americans in Iraq. So that's where I come down to. Can we get out of Iraq? Absolutely. Should we get out of Iraq? If we, the people of the United States of America, don't know enough about a country where we're asking our armed services to give the ultimate sacrifice for, then we have no business being in that country.[1]

ON IRAN'S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

Being 10 years away from having a nuclear weapon means you don't have anything. Nothing. You're starting from scratch. Yeah, you know, you can sit there. But what the CIA is saying-when they say they're 10 years away-is: "We don't have any hard data on Iran. We're just making this stuff up as we go along." The most current one is that Iran is one year away from having it. You heard the talk. They can have fissile material in one year. That's derived from the premise that they will get 3,000 centrifuges to be up and running tomorrow and to run, nonstop, for a year-a year of nonstop operation, at the end of which you're going to get 20 kilograms of 85 percent enriched, highly enriched uranium. Theoretically, that's possible. Right now the Iranians can only get 164 centrifuges up and running; they have another 164 cascade-ready, but they're testing it. And they have bits and pieces of the total 3,000, but they can't assemble them. Here's the other, unknown secret, ladies and gentlemen: They can't do it. They can't do it. Centrifuges are complex. They're about yea big. Cylindrical tube. They have to spin around at 70,000 rpm. Did you ever play with a gyroscope as a kid? Spin it up and hold it in your hand and just doing this? That's mass. It's moving you because the mass is shifting around. That's only a couple of hundred rpm. Seventy-thousand rpm. If it's not perfectly balanced, it blows up, falls apart. To be perfectly balanced, not only do you have to have precision machining throughout, you have to have ball bearings, magnets. The Iranians don't have enough ball bearings and magnets that work, so when they spin these things up, they tend to pop, and when you pop open in a centrifuge, it shuts down. They can't get them running for a day, let alone a year. Then, there's the problem of feeding in the gas, the uranium hexafluoride. It's contaminated with a substance called molybdenum. Molybdenum-even if you're just talking about a few, microscopic pieces of it-when it spins up at 70,000 rpm, develops a mass the equivalent of several kilograms. And what happens when you have something spinning with several thousand kilograms moving around inside? It pops. It blows up.

The Iranians can't do it. Everybody knows this. Except we, the people of the United States of America, who continue to believe anything we're told by a media that repeats without question the assertions put forward by an administration that doesn't give a damn about disarming Iran and is only focused on regime change using the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran as an excuse. [1]

ON NEGOTIATING WITH IRAN

The true power in Iran rests with the Supreme Leader. The Supreme Leader is the Ayatollah Khamenei. He is supported by an organization called the Guardian Council. Then there's another group called the Expediency Council. These are the people that control the military, the police, the nuclear program, all the instruments of power. And not only has the Supreme Leader issued a fatwa that says that nuclear weapons are not compatible with Islamic law, with the Shia belief system that he is responsible, in 2003 he actually reached out to the Bush administration via the Swiss embassy and said, "Look, we would like to normalize relations with the United States. We'd like to initiate a process that leads to a peace treaty between Israel and Iran." Get this, Israel and Iran. He's not saying, "We want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth." He is saying, "We want peace with Israel." And they were willing to put their nuclear program on the table.

Why didn't the Bush administration embrace this? Because that leads to a process of normalization, where the United States recognizes the legitimacy of the theocracy and is willing to peacefully coexist with the theocracy. That's not the Bush administration's position. They want the theocracy gone. They will do nothing that legitimizes that, nothing that sustains peace. They rejected peace. So, it's not Ahmadinejad that represents the threat to international peace and security when it comes to American-Iranian relations. It's the Bush administration, because the Bush administration refuses to put peace on the table. Bush talks about diplomacy. There will not be diplomacy, true diplomacy, until he puts Condoleezza Rice on an airplane, sends her to Tehran to talk to the Supreme Leader. [2]

ON THE ROLE OF ISRAEL WITH IRAN

Look, Bush has already said that he doesn't want to leave Iran to the next president, that this is a problem he needs to solve now. And the other factor that we haven't woven in here that we need to is the role played by Israel in pressuring the United States for a very aggressive stance against Iran. Israel has drawn a red line that says, not only will they not tolerate a nuclear weapons program in Iran, they will not tolerate anything dealing with nuclear energy, especially enrichment, that could be used in a nuclear program. So, even if Iran is telling the truth -- Iran says, "We have no nuclear weapons program. We just want peaceful nuclear energy" -- Israel says, "So long as Iran has any enrichment capability, this constitutes a threat to Israel," and they are pressuring the United States to take forceful action.

We see -- starting in 2002, you saw the Israeli prime minister and the defense minister come running to the United States in the lead-up to the war with Iraq, saying, "Hey, let's not worry too much about Iraq. That's not really a big problem. I know we've got a lot of rhetoric going on about weapons of mass destruction, but the big problem's Iran." And the Bush administration said, "We don't want to talk about Iran right now. We're dealing with Iraq." In the immediate aftermath of the war, Israel came and said, "Alright, thank you for getting rid of Saddam. We now want you to focus on Iran." And the United States continued to put Iran on the back burner. And it wasn't until the Israeli government leaked some intelligence to an Iranian opposition group, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who came out and said, "Hey, look, there's this site in Natanz. They're doing enrichment there." And suddenly the United States was forced to say, "Oh, we've got to put Iran back on the front burner." And it's been Israel that's been dictating the pace of media operations, let's say, on Iran. [2]

ON IRAN'S NEED FOR NUCLEAR POWER

In 1976, the Shah of Iran came to the United States, sent his representatives to intercede and say, "Look, we've done an analysis, and we've got a finite amount of oil. And right now we need to export it. And if we don't export it, we don't make money, etc. We don't have enough oil to sustain this. We need to come up with an indigenous energy policy that frees up our oil for exportation. We want to use nuclear energy." And the U.S. government went, "Good idea, Shah. We're all for it." That was Gerald Ford.

The chief of staff of the White House at the time was Dick Cheney. The Secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld. So, this argument that both Cheney and Rumsfeld put out today that Iran is a nation awash in a sea of oil, there is no need for a nuclear energy program, they both supported Iran's goals of achieving nuclear energy in 1976. Not only nuclear energy, but they also supported the Shah when he said, "We cannot allow a nuclear energy program's fuel to be held hostage by the vagaries of sanctions and war. We need an indigenous fuel-manufacturing capability inclusive of the full uranium enrichment process." And guess what the U.S. government said in 1976. "No problem, Shah. Good deal." Of course, in 1979, the Islamists come in and suddenly we change our opinion. The bottom line is, Iran has every right legally to a nuclear energy program, and economically, we've already deemed it a responsible way to go. [2]

WAR WITH IRAN

Look, we're already overflying Iran with unmanned aerial vehicles, pilotless drones. On the ground, the CIA is recruiting Mojahedin-e-Khalq, recruiting Kurds, recruiting Azeris, who are operating inside Iran on behalf of the United States of America. And there is reason to believe that we've actually put uniformed members of the United States Armed Forces and American citizens operating as CIA paramilitaries inside Iranian territory to gather intelligence.

Now, when you violate the borders and the airspace of a sovereign nation with paramilitary and military forces, that's an act of war. That's an act of war. So, when Americans say, "Ah, there's not going to be a war in Iran," there's already a war in Iran. We're at war with Iran. We're just not in the declared conventional stage of the war. The Bush administration has a policy of regime change. They're going to use the military, and the military is being used. [2]

READ THESE SOURCES:

[1] - Two Who Got It Right: Scott Ritter in Conversation With Robert Scheer

[2] - Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change

Also see, Calling Out Idiot America

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4.2.2007

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