Ex-weapons inspector and former Marine Scott Ritter 
is calling for regime change in Washington.
By Jan Barry

05/05/03: (VIAW)Scott Ritter may be the Bush reelection team's worse 
nightmare.  

The former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq and card-carrying 
Republican is barnstorming America with a blunt message: George W. 
Bush's war on Iraq was waged on a "bodyguard of lies."

"We need regime change, and we need it quick," Ritter told a gathering 
of peace activists in New Jersey on Sunday. "George W. Bush does not 
have the right - to represent the American people, if he told a lie. 
And he told a whopper."  

That whopper, said Ritter, was claiming that the US government had 
evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding massive amounts of 
weapons of mass destruction and that was why Iraq must be invaded. 
The facts, he said, are that "the inspections worked. The United 
Nations did disarm Iraq."

"I want the president impeached because he lied to the Congress of the 
United States," Ritter said. "He may well go out and tell another lie 
about weapons of mass destruction" being found amid the rubble in Iraq. 
But, Ritter said, any scheme to plant evidence would run afoul of 
professional soldiers like those he served with in Gulf War I. "I can 
tell you, my fellow officers won't sustain that lie."

Ritter is a former Marine major who worked as a weapons inspector 
for the United Nations in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. These days he's 
an antiwar activist on a mission to pacify Washington, DC.  

"What happened in Baghdad last month was not in accordance with 
international law. What happened in Baghdad last month was a west 
Texas lynching," Ritter said at New Jersey Peace Action's annual 
dinner, where he was the guest of honor. "President Bush is 
implementing a policy of imperialism."

Ritter said Americans who don't want the United States to go the way 
of all empires - which, he said, die of indigestion - will have to 
fight an historic political battle over the nation's future. "We can't 
allow a bunch of neoconservatives to hijack America," he said. "It's 
not a right-wing fraternity pin - the American flag, we own it, the 
American people."

Ritter said he has been taking his blunt message to college campuses 
and other forums around the country. And when anyone demands that 
he support the war in Iraq, he replies: "What part of war do you want 
to support?" and describes in graphic detail the hell hole of war.  

Recounting the story of a Marine in a battle in Iraq, Ritter said that 
a soldier is only one face of patriotism. "Ladies and gentlemen, let me 
introduce you to the other face of patriotism - the people of the United 
States. ...The other face of patriotism is the American citizen who gets 
up in the morning" and carries out the duties and responsibilities of 
citizenship.  

"If you give up now, you are giving up on American democracy," he said. 
Ritter urged the assembled peace activists to reach out to Republicans 
like himself and raise the constitutional issues and uncomfortable facts 
that Bush has run roughshod over. Among those facts, he said, is this 
glaring one:  

"Bush was a deserter from his unit during the Vietnam War. He doesn't 
know what it means to support the troops." 

Jan Barry, a Vietnam veteran, is a journalist living in New Jersey. Jan 
is also an editor of VAIW and a contributing editor of Intervention Mag.

                                -==-

Source: Information Clearinghouse
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3233.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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