Scott Ritter with Richard Glover

Transcript: (Provided by a reader: Thank you) 

What's your view of why the intelligence service got it so wrong?

Well, first of all, the intelligence services did not get it wrong. This is
an absolute false assumption. You know, in 1998, when I left the United
Nations, there was not a single intelligence service in the world that said
Iraq retained massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Even the
CIA recognized that the bulk of Iraq's WMD capability had in fact been
accounted for by the weapons inspectors. There was still unaccounted for
material, and that's the important distinction, between unaccounted material
and retained material. There was absolutely no factually-based intelligence
information to sustain any allegation that Iraq retained weapons of mass
destruction. This is something that holds true for American intelligence,
British intelligence, and since Prime Minister Howard has acknowledged that
Australia did not develop its own capabilities, you know, those are the top
two players right there. But I would also remind people that this held true
for Israeli intelligence as well. I liaised with the Israeli intelligence
services from 1994 to 1998, and by 1998 even the Israeli intelligence
services, who have the most to fear from an Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction threat, were saying that, thanks to the work of the United
Nations, Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed.

Okay. And so if Israeli intelligence knows it, you would imagine the CIA by
that very fact must know it, too.

Well, but, as I said, that's not guesswork. I know the CIA knows this. I
know what their assessments were because I was liaising with the CIA as well
and with British intelligence. So what happened between 1998 and 2003 to
change the factual basis of any intelligence assessments? And the answer
is: nothing. Therefore, the only way you can explain the radical departure
that occurred in assessing the intelligence is political, meaning George W.
Bush, the President of the United States, had made the determination that he
was going to wage war and that he would exaggerate and hype up the
intelligence concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and he got his
good friends and close allies, the British and Australians, to agree with
him, although there was no factual basis to sustain this.

But, Scott, it doesn't say much for the spying or the security services if
they're willing to bend so quickly to a political instruction.

It doesn't say much for the spying of hardly anybody involved in this
process. Again, people need to be clear on one thing. I'm not speaking out
in defense of Saddam Hussein and his despotic regime. But I am speaking out
in defense of democracy and the democratic processes involved when nations
like ours go to war. We cannot tolerate our elected officials lying and
misrepresenting fact to put our troops in harm's way, and this clearly is
what happened in Iraq. And it's not just a condemnation of George W. Bush,
Tony Blair, and Prime Minister Howard, it's a condemnation of the Congress
of the United States and the Parliaments of both Great Britain and Australia
and, indeed, of the people who seem to be willing to go along with what
their leaders said without questioning it, although their leaders never once
presented any hard fact to sustain the allegations that Iraq posed a threat
worthy of war.

Scott, isn't there a chance that it could have been an honest mistake? You
re dealing with a despotic regime and Saddam Hussein was increasingly acting
in bizarre and hard-to-interpret ways. He was obviously denying access to
sites and things like that. It couldn't have been an honest mistake working
in difficult territory? 

Well, again, I'm somebody who believes in due-process, and so before
President Bush and Tony Blair and Prime Minster Howard are led off to the
gallows, they should be given a chance to make their case. But I would say
this, although David Kay speaks of bizarre behavior by Saddam Hussein, so
far the facts speak otherwise. You know, the Iraqi government had been
saying for some time that it had no weapons of mass destruction. And they
do have a history of cooperating with weapons inspectors if the inspection
regime focuses on the technical aspects of disarmament. One aspect of the
puzzle that no one seems to want to talk about is the fact that the United
States and Great Britain both have policies of regime removal going after
Saddam Hussein, and that the CIA not only was actively trying to eliminate
Saddam, but was using the weapons inspection process of the United Nations
to gather intelligence about the location of Saddam and the security of
Saddam. So when one looks at the obstruction of the weapons inspectors, at
no time did the Iraqis ever stop the inspectors from going to a factory or a
scientific site. The only obstructions that took place were obstructions
related to presidential palaces and presidential security locations that had
nothing to do with the technical nature of weapons of mass destruction.

Okay, I mean people like Richard Butler and Hans Blix were arguing that the
palaces could have been used to hide things.

Well, again, you can't hide something unless you've produced it. Richard
Butler and Hans Blix never had any hard intelligence. As the person who led
the investigations into Iraqi concealment, and led many of the inspections
trying to gain access to the palaces, I can tell you that all we were
concerned about was the potential that documents were hidden in palaces. At
no time --at no time -- did we believe or have intelligence that weapons of
mass destruction or major manufacturing processes were hidden at the palaces
We were looking for documents, and this was guesswork on our part, not
hard intelligence. So, you know, ask Richard Butler, what in God's name
does he think they were hiding at the palaces, because clearly the answer
today is: nothing.

But David Kay, to go on with this, has talked about the fact that there was
this bizarre behavior whereby money was leaving Saddam Hussein's hands and
going to the scientists and they were supposed to produce weapons, but they
didn't produce the weapons, they went and took the money. But in that
context, isn't it easy to understand how the intelligence services could
take the wrong message from all of that behavior?

Well, David Kay has yet to provide factual information to back up what, so
far, is only rhetoric. I want to know which scientists took what money for
what programs. I would like to see the documents that David Kay refers to,
because there's also another body of evidence that is well documented that
has Saddam Hussein since 1993 bringing his scientists in and forcing them to
personally sign documents in front of him that forswear research and
development on weapons of mass destruction and guarantee to the Iraqi
president that these scientists will not hide or retain weapons of mass
destruction capabilities--now this is documented. So what we have here are
two conflicting and actually contradictory behaviors from Saddam Hussein:
one that is documented, and the other which is only spoken about from David
Kay. So David Kay needs to provide facts before I'm willing to buy into
what so far is only rhetoric.

Scott, do you think David Kay is trying to lay all the blame on the
intelligence services in order to protect the political masters?

There is no doubt. David Kay was a political appointee from day one, I've
said that. He is not there to search for the truth, he is there to spin
data to the political advantage of the President. And for David Kay to
stand before the Congress and say that the President does not owe the
American people an apology, the intelligence services owe the President an
apology, is clearly a politically motivated statement that has nothing to do
again, with the search for truth; but rather to protect the President from
the bad decisions that he made and, in fact, the misleading and often times
fabricated statements that he used to justify this war.

Okay, so you're saying that right down in the bowels of the machine room of
MI6 and the CIA, even while the President and the two Prime Ministers were
making their speeches, there were experts and agents who knew there was a
whole lot of balogney.

Yes. And as the intelligence services are hung out to dry, both in the
United States and Great Britain, you will see these experts come out and
start to say--and they already have--that there is no hard, factual data to
back up anything that the President of the United States or the Prime
Minister Tony Blair said about Iraq, that what they what they went on was
purely speculative analysis, an assessment that worse-cased the scenario,
that didn't act on hard fact. And, you know, I do believe that in the end
the truth will out and both of these political figures will be called to
account.

I mean, an alternative view is one presented by people like Christopher
Heachins [spelled phonetically], the journalist who says: look, if you look
at Germany, where the political leaders were against the war, German
intelligence was still producing these alarming reports about Saddam Hussein
being a moments work away from producing a nuke, for instance. You can't
blame that on, you know, serving up the leaders what they want.

Yes you can. Again, let's go back to--you know, always follow the story
back to its roots. I guarantee you this: the German intelligence reports
were only produced after pressure from the CIA are on the BND, the German
intelligence services, to release something to help out the United States'
case politically. The German intelligence reports, again, are not derived
from hard fact. They're derived from speculation. They're derived from
analysis. But there is no hard fact to back up the German intelligence
reports, and I would be loathed as an American citizen to have American
soldiers in Iraq dying in a war that was only sustained by German
intelligence.

Let me ask you one final question. How explicit do you think the
intelligence services were to their leaders. I mean is this a story of the
truth never really bubbling to the top because of a series of
second-guessing and Chinese whispers, or is a story of private meetings
going on in which the intelligence services said, "look, there is no proof,"
and the leaders basically explicitly saying, "go away and find us some"?

You know, we won't know until the whole story's told, but what I'll say is
this: the senior leadership of the American intelligence services clearly
suffers from moral and intellectual cowardism. And I would say the same
thing of the British intelligence services. At some point in time, they
have to realize that they have a responsibility to the rule of law and to
the constituencies that they served, the people of the United States and
Great Britain, not their political masters, and they have to be willing to
stand up and say, "no, you're policies are not sustained by fact". And
tragically, not a single senior member of either the American intelligence
services or the British intelligence services had the courage to do this.

Okay, one medium-ranking Australian analyst did: Andrew Wilky [spelled
phonetically].

And my hat's off to him. I applaud him and I would certainly hope that the
people of Australia would applaud him as a true hero and a patriot who did
what was right in the face of tremendous political pressure to do the
contrary.

Okay, but you're saying the others found it easier for their lives and their
careers to keep [?] about what they knew in their hearts.

Look, an intelligence officer's job is never to tell the boss what they want
to hear, but to tell them what the facts are. And, you know, it's a job
that's centered on service to country not on career. So if one's career in
the intelligence business depends upon one's ability to lie, misrepresent
and allow anything but the hard facts to go forward, that's not a career
worth having.