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Let’s have a moment of brutal honesty, shall we? During the Late Summer and Fall of 2002, the Bush Administration had done such a remarkable job of whipping up the American public into a frenzy of fear and loathing of Saddam Hussein that there was only a minority of voices within the United States wiling to question our nation’s march to war. There were even fewer who actually spoke out and essentially called the President and the Pentagon liars about their orchestrated assertions that Iraq was so awash in biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that only a pre-emptive military invasion of that land could save our collective souls from such an imminent threat. In fact, anyone who dared to even question the accuracy of the President’s claims or his motives behind them was either ridiculed or shouted down by official government agencies, by national politicians and by both the televised and print news media. Worse, any criticism of the President’s lurch towards war was resoundingly branded unpatriotic.
If the some 3-5 million of the nation’s 280 million citizens who were willing to march in protest against Bush’s plans for war were consistently ignored and demeaned by the Press (including even the falsely-called “liberal” New York Times), then how quixotic was it for two men, Scott Ritter and William Pitt, to attempt to publish a book at that very time not just challenging the President’s claims regarding Iraq’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” but going much further by emphatically pronouncing that there were no WMD’s that would be found? It was not only quixotic, but was considered treasonous by many who were eager to make war with Iraq.
Questioning the rationale behind the war itself was about as far as even many of the most progressive members of Congress would dare go. But Ritter and Pitt went further publishing that there were no WMD’s. Let me repeat that: no WMD's.
Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine and Gulf War veteran who was also an intelligence specialist and an expert on Iraqi military strategy, risked his name and reputation by challenging the tidal wave of false information and “sexed up” intelligence by both the American and British governments. Certainly, Ritter did not have to go against the grain, but he did. What motivated him? I believe that Ritter did it because he loved his country too much to sit by in silence.
One year later, Americans have come to discover that the President of the United States and his Administration lied to us. We have learned that Bush knowingly misled and frightened the country in his State of the Union Address by declaring that Saddam Hussein had been on a shopping trip to Africa for uranium. The Vice-President, Dick Cheney, on Sunday confessed that he had also falsely spoken during a nationally televised interview when he asserted that Iraq had a viable and reconstituted nuclear weapons program.
And as the world mocks the U.S. now after our questionable invasion of Iraq with taunts of “Where are the WMD’s?” today we learn that Hans Blix, the former United Nations Chief Weapons Inspector, has told the BBC that he believes that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago. Ten Years Ago!
I remember being outraged by Colin Powell’s embarrassing presentations to the U.N. which were meant to provide proof of Hussein’s WMD stockpiles, but were quickly proven to be either fabricated evidence, dubious "intelligence" that was plagiarized from 10-year old college papers from off the internet, or out-right fraudulent "information" altogether. Shamefully, the story of African uranium was discounted immediately by many as being untrue right after Bush’s speech, but the national news media stubbornly would not report this important story. The tales by Powell of Iraqi un-manned drones that could deliver WMD’s was also immediately proven to be untrue, but most Americans never were informed of this either.
So how about a little praise and respect for Scott Ritter and William Rivers Pitt who risked their very credibility in print with their bold and courageous book, “War on Iraq”? I think that all Americans owe these two gentlemen a world of gratitude and appreciation for their willingness to not go quietly into the night
Let us call Ritter and Pitt what they are: Patriots!
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