Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in an op-ed published in RT, exposes the recently deceased former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a serial threat inflator and concoctor of genocidal tales going back to his days with Dick Cheney on the staff of the Ford White House in the 1970s. Ritter’s account, based both on what he knew of Rumsfeld’s reputation before 1998 and his direct encounters with the blowback from Rumsfeld’s policies afterwards, includes the following:
• Rumsfeld, Cheney and neo-con Paul Wolfowitz ran a scheme called “Team B” of politicized analysts whose mission was to second-guess a more nuanced and balanced assessment delivered by the CIA, and which generated exaggerated claims of Soviet nuclear missile superiority. The “Team B” analyses went on to influence the Reagan Administration in the 1980s.
• Rumsfeld went to Iraq to meet with Saddam Hussein in 1983-1984 as part of an effort to improve U.S.-Iraqi relations aimed at Iran. The complication was that while the U.S. was backing Iraq in the 1980-88 war against Iran, the Reagan administration also found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to condemn Baghdad for using chemical weapons. In fact, the Iraqis were using satellite intelligence provided by the U.S. to find targets for their chemical shells.
• The 1999 Rumsfeld Commission report on ballistic missile threats used Ritter’s own language from his UN inspection reports to describe Iraq’s ballistic missile programs, but then lied that Iraq would have an ICBM capability to attack the U.S. within 10 years.
• In December 2003, Ritter learned from an Iraqi officer that he interviewed in Jordan, that the Office of Special Plans, which had been created within the Office of the Secretary of Defense by neocons working under Rumsfeld, had tried to goad the Iraqis into creating false evidence of a nuclear weapons program in order to save the U.S. President from embarrassment. But they gave up the effort when the Iraqi officer refused to do it on the grounds that such fake evidence would never get past Ritter himself. Ritter had been instrumental in uncovering Iraqi programs in the 1990s, despite Iraqi efforts to cover them up. This incident, Ritter writes, “underscored the extent to which Rumsfeld and his minions would go to mislead the American people about issues that eventually cost the lives of thousands of U.S. servicemen and women, bankrupted the country they served both morally and fiscally, and left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and their country in ruins.”
“There is a place in hell reserved for those who deliberately put the lives of those entrusted to secure our nation at risk for their own personal gain,” Ritter concludes. “Rumsfeld is one such person, and his seat should be right next to the Devil himself.” [https://www.rt.com/op-ed/528141-donald-rumsfeld-dead-hell/]
