Сканталды қару инспекторы және жазушының өмірі мен қызметі

American weapons inspector and writer (born 1961)
Ritter was the subject of police sting operations for sex crimes in 2001 and 2009, and was convicted of sex crimes involving a minor in 2011.

Ritter was born into a military family in 1961 in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kaiserslautern American High School in Kaiserslautern, Germany in 1979, and later from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a Bachelor of Arts in the history of the Soviet Union and departmental honors. He served as the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran–Iraq War. Ritter's academic work focused on the Basmachi resistance movement in Soviet Central Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, and on the Basmachi commanders Fazail Maksum and Ibrahim Bek. During Desert Storm (1991), as a Marine captain, he served as a ballistic missile intelligence analyst under General Norman Schwarzkopf. Ritter filed multiple internal reports challenging Schwarzkopf's claim that the US had destroyed "as many as 16" of Iraq's estimated 20 mobile Scud missile launchers, arguing that they could not be confirmed. In 1992 Ritter was quoted in a New York Times op ed saying "No mobile Scud launchers were destroyed during the war."

Ritter worked as a weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission from 1991 to 1998, which was charged with finding and destroying all weapons of mass destruction and WMD related manufacturing capabilities in Iraq. He was chief inspector in fourteen of the more than thirty inspection missions in which he participated. Ritter was amongst a group of UNSCOM weapons inspectors that regularly took Lockheed U 2 imagery to Israel for analysis, as UNSCOM was not getting sufficient analysis assistance from the United States and the United Kingdom. This was not authorized by UNSCOM, the American U 2 having been loaned to UNSCOM and caused Ritter to be subjected to criticism and investigation by U. S. authorities. Iraq protested about the supply of such information to Israel.

Beginning in December 1997, Ritter, with the approval of UNSCOM head Richard Butler and other top UNSCOM leaders, began to supply the UK's foreign intelligence service MI6 with documents and briefings on UNSCOM's findings to be used for MI6's propaganda effort dubbed "Operation Mass Appeal": "I was approached by the British intelligence service, which I had, again, a long relationship with, of an official nature, to see if there was any information in the archives of UNSCOM that could be handed to the British, so that they could in turn work it over, determine its veracity, and then seek to plant it in media outlets around the world, in an effort to try to shape the public opinion of those countries, and then indirectly, through, for instance, a report showing up in the Polish press, shape public opinion in Great Britain and the United States. "I went to Richard Butler with the request from the British. He said that he supported this, and we initiated a cooperation that was very short lived. The first reports were passed to the British sometime in February of 1998. There was a detailed planning meeting in June of 1998, and I resigned in August of 1998. [ ] This is an operation—Operation Mass Appeal, that had been going on prior to UNSCOM being asked to be the source of particular data, and it's an operation that continued after my resignation." When the United States and the UN Security Council failed to take action against Iraq for their ongoing failure to cooperate fully with inspectors (a breach of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1154), Ritter resigned from the United Nations Special Commission on August 26, 1998. In his letter of resignation, Ritter said the Security Council's reaction to Iraq's decision earlier that month to suspend co operation with the inspection team made a mockery of the disarmament work. Ritter later said, in an interview, that he resigned from his role as a United Nations weapons inspector over inconsistencies between United Nations Security Council Resolution 1154 and how it was implemented: "The investigations had come to a standstill, were making no effective progress, and in order to make effective progress, we really needed the Security Council to step in a meaningful fashion and seek to enforce its resolutions that we're not complying with." Ritter said that Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright had supposedly "blocked more inspections in 1997 than Saddam Hussein did," a charge which Albright disputed. During the testimony on September 3, 1998, Ritter was asked by then Senator Joe Biden about his position on inspections, which Biden criticized as "confrontation based policy." According to Barton Gellman, Biden questioned if the inspector was trying to "appropriate the power 'to decide when to pull the trigger' of military force against Iraq," with Biden stating that the Secretary of State would also have to consider the opinion of allies, the United Nations Security Council and public opinion, before any potential intervention in Iraq. Later on, Biden stated that the decision was "above [Ritter's] pay grade."

Richard Butler, Ritter's former UNSCOM boss, said that Ritter "wasn't prescient" in his predictions about WMDs, saying, "When he was the 'Alpha Dog' inspector, then by God, there were more weapons there, and we had to go find them—a contention for which he had inadequate evidence. When he became a peacenik, then it was all complete B. S., start to finish, and there were no weapons of mass destruction. And that also was a contention for which he had inadequate evidence." However, in his 1999 book Endgame, Ritter explained that he was the one who had originally pushed for the fateful inspection of the Ba'ath party headquarters over the doubts of his boss Richard Butler and also planned to use 37 inspectors. It was temporarily canceled because Iraq broke off cooperation in August 1998.

In Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem — Once and For All, Ritter restated that Iraq had obstructed the work of inspectors and attempted to hide and preserve essential elements for restarting WMD programs at a later date. However, he also expressed frustration at alleged attempts by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to infiltrate UNSCOM and use the inspectors as a means of gathering intelligence with which to pursue regime change in Iraq – a violation of the terms under which UNSCOM operated, and the very rationale the Iraqi government had given in restricting the inspector's activities in 1998. In the book's conclusion, Ritter criticized the U. S. policy of containment in the absence of inspections as inadequate to prevent Iraq's re acquisition of WMD's in the long term. He also rejected the notion of removing Saddam Hussein's regime by force. Instead, he advocated a policy of diplomatic engagement, leading to gradual normalisation of international relations with Iraq in return for diplomatic recognition of Kuwait, Kurdish autonomy and de escalation of tensions with Israel. Ritter again promoted a conciliatory approach toward Iraq in the 2000 documentary In Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq, which he wrote and directed. The film tells the history of the UNSCOM investigations through interviews and video footage of inspection missions. In the film, Ritter argues that Iraq is a "defanged tiger" and that the inspections were successful in eliminating significant Iraqi WMD capabilities. (For more see below under "Documentary".) In 2002, Ritter traveled to Iraq to address the Iraqi Parliament as a private citizen. He told the parliament the U. S. was about to make an "historical mistake" and urged it to allow inspections to resume.

Despite identifying himself as a Republican, and having voted for George W. Bush in 2000, by 2002, Ritter had become an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's claims that Iraq possessed significant WMD stocks or manufacturing capabilities, the primary rationale given for the U. S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Prior to the war, Ritter stated that the U. S. and British governments were using the presence of WMD's in Iraq as a political excuse for war.

In February 2005, writing on Al Jazeera's website, Ritter wrote that the "Iraqi resistance" is a "genuine grassroots national liberation movement," and "History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilize and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government." In 2012, Ritter said the U. S. was "bankrupt, morally and fiscally, because of this war. The United States is the laughingstock of the world". Ritter's book Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change was published in 2006. Nathan Guttman in his review for The Forward said Ritter accused the "pro Israel lobby of dual loyalty and 'outright espionage'". Ritter said that Israel was pushing the Bush administration into war with Iran.

Ritter's documentary In Shifting Sands was released in 2001. It argued that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction because of the UN weapons inspection programme. Al Khafaji pleaded guilty to multiple felony charges in 2004 for his involvement with the U. N. Oil for Food scandal. Ritter said there was no quid pro quo with Al Khafaji and that he told Al Khafaji the finance "can have no connection to the Iraqi government". When Ritter was asked "how he would characterize anyone suggesting that Mr. Khafaji was offering allocations in [his] name", Mr. Ritter replied: "I'd say that person's a fucking liar and tell him to come over here so I can kick his ass."

Ritter was the subject of two law enforcement sting operations in 2001. He was charged in June 2001 with trying to set up a meeting with an undercover police officer posing as a 16 year old girl. He was charged with a misdemeanor crime of "attempted endangerment of the welfare of a child". The charge was dismissed and the record was sealed after he completed six months of pre trial probation. over communications with a police decoy he met on an Internet chat site. Police said that he exposed himself, via a web camera, after the officer repeatedly identified himself as a 15 year old girl. The next month, Ritter waived his right to a preliminary hearing and was released on $25,000 unsecured bail. Charges included "unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communications facility, corruption of minors, indecent exposure, possessing instruments of crime, criminal attempt and criminal solicitation". Ritter rejected a plea bargain and was found guilty of all but the criminal attempt count in a courtroom in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, on April 14, 2011. In October 2011, he received a sentence of one and a half to five and a half years in prison. He was sent to Laurel Highlands state prison in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in March 2012 and paroled in September 2014. Investigators such as Human Rights Watch link the killings to the Russian military. He compared Ukraine to a "rabid dog" that needed to be shot. He compared the treatment of Russians under Ukraine law to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews. In October 2022, he posted a provocative tweet about Bucha to test the reaction of Twitter. The tweet stated "Bucha was a war crime, Ukraine did it". In July 2022, the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation included Ritter on a list of what it called Russian propagandists. In April 2022 and April 2023 Ritter said that Russia was winning the war. American government owned news outlet Polygraph. info wrote that Ritter's claims about Russia winning the war and about the Bucha massacre were false. In January 2024, Ritter visited Chechnya, addressing thousands of Chechen fighters in a central square in Grozny. BBC journalist Francis Scarr called it "one of the most surreal moments of the war yet Scott Ritter has turned up in Chechnya and spoken in broken Russian (some of which I couldn't make out) to thousands of Ramzan Kadyrov's fighters about his efforts to strengthen the 'friendship between Chechnya and America'." Ritter, in his speech, once again repeated his belief that 'Russia will win' (its war with Ukraine). Following Ritter's speech in Grozny, where he was being welcomed as a guest of the Chechen Republic, Kadyrov made a public statement that had given Ritter a list of 20 Ukrainian prisoners of war he was prepared to release in return for a lifting of United States sanctions on him and his family. Kadyrov subsequently called his public statement 'trolling', and said that it had not been serious.