Scott Ritter.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Scott Ritter has traveled an odd career path. An intelligence officer in the Marine Corps, he was gung-ho on the Gulf War and was an aide to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Then he was one of the leading U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He resigned because he didn't think the United States was acting aggressively enough to combat the threat from Iraq.

But he opposed overthrowing Saddam Hussein. And when George Bush and Dick Cheney were ginning up the case for war, this former Marine became a chief critic. He famously said that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And these days, he is warning loudly about the likelihood that Bush and Cheney will bomb Iran.

Ritter is the author of several books, including Iraq Confidential, Target Iran , and Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement .

I caught up with him in Madison, Wisconsin, in mid-April, where he delivered a public talk and then went drinking with some Iraq War vets.

I asked him if any of his old Marine Corps buddies resent his outspokenness. "No, they love me," he said, adding that he is able to say out loud many of the things that they agree with but are forbidden from mentioning.

Q: I was amazed at how far out on a limb you went before the Iraq War started in declaring flat-out that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Why were you so certain?

Scott Ritter: I don't view it as going out on a limb. Having investigated Saddam's WMD programs from 1991 to 1998, I was simply pointing out the fact that if you're relying on a data set that's derived from that experience, there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein would have these massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that the Bush Administration claimed were being possessed.

Unless someone could demonstrate that the Iraqis had reconstituted their manufacturing base for WMD, simple science takes over. You don't have to be brave to point out that anthrax as produced by the Iraqis has a shelf life under ideal circumstances of three years. The last known batch rolled out in January 1991. One cannot state that any anthrax that may have been hidden at that time is still viable in 2002 unless there was a new anthrax facility put in play. And the Bush Administration never said that. What the Bush Administration said was that 9/11 has caused us to reevaluate the intelligence data that existed up until 1998. That's why I knew I had them because I was intimately familiar here with the intelligence information up to 1998, and there was nothing in that data set that...