Scott Ritter
| Scott Ritter | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
William Scott Ritter, Jr. July 15, 1961 Gainesville, Florida |
| Alma mater | Franklin and Marshall College |
| Occupation | United Nations weapons inspector (resigned) |
William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) was a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and later a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction." He received harsh criticism from the political establishment but became a popular antiwar figure and occasional talk show commentator as a result of his stance, later proven to be correct.
In 2001 Ritter on two occasions was detained and later arrested on charges of soliciting minors for sex on the Internet that were both dismissed. He was arrested on similar charges in 2010 that led to a conviction and sentence of one and a half to five and a half years.
Ritter was born into a military family in 1961 in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kaiserslautern American High School 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. In 1980 he served in the U.S. Army as a private. Then in May 1984 he was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps. He served in this capacity for about 12 years. 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, he served as a ballistic missile advisor to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Ritter later worked as a security and military consultant for the Fox News network. Ritter also had "a long relationship [...] of an official nature" with the UK's foreign intelligence spy agency MI6 according to an interview he gave to Democracy Now! in 2003.
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