grassrootspeace.org
November 2, 2007: This website
is maintained by Charles Jenks, who created it 10 years ago and
has authored all of its web pages and nearly all of its multimedia
content (photographs, audio, video, and pdf files). As the author
and registered owner of this site, his purpose is to preserve
an important slice of the history of the grassroots peace movement
in the US over the past decade. He is maintaining this historical
archive as a service to the greater peace movement, and to the
many friends of Traprock Peace Center. Blogs have been consolidated
and the calendar has been archived for security reasons; all
other links remain the same, and virtually all blog content remains
intact.
THIS SITE NO LONGER REFLECTS THE CURRENT
AND ONGOING WORK OF TRAPROCK PEACE CENTER, which
has reorganized its board and moved to Greenfield, Mass. To contact Traprock
Peace Center, call 413-773-7427 or visit its site.
Charles Jenks is posting new material to PeaceJournal.org,
a multimedia blog and resource center.
|
 
Books of the Month
The
War on Truth
From
Warriors to Resisters
Army
of None
Iraq:
the Logic of Withdrawal |
Download International Press Conference with Scott Ritter
(mp3 audio - broadcast quality)
on July 9 at Traprock Peace Center
See also Ritter interview with Wolf Blitzer (CNN)
See related resources on Home Page and
history of Traprock's educational campaign with Scott Ritter
Ex - UN Inspector Ritter: Bush Based War on 'A Lie'
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Time has shown that the United
Nations did a good job disarming Iraq while President Bush went to war based on
``a lie,'' former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter said on Monday.
``The inspectors went in, got good cooperation, got
immediate access to the sites they needed to get to, and they found nothing --
nothing related to weapons of mass destruction programs,'' said Ritter, a
former U.S. Marine and senior weapons inspector turned anti-war activist.
``And yet, we heard over and over again that 'The president
knows that these weapons exist, the president knows that this is a threat that
can only be responded to by the United States acting unilaterally,' because the
United Nations was unable or unwilling to complete the (disarmament) task
mandated by the Security Council,'' he told reporters at U.N. headquarters.
``The entire case the Bush administration made against Iraq
is a lie,'' he said.
Ritter leveled his latest blast at the U.S. administration
as Bush fended off critics' charges that he misled the American people by
relying on faulty intelligence to justify the war.
A top inspector in Iraq for nearly seven years before
resigning in 1998, Ritter was a vocal critic both before and after the war of
U.S. claims that Iraq possessed illicit weapons of mass destruction. His latest
book, ``Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of
America,'' was just published.
Ritter said Washington had never meant to let U.N.
inspectors finish the task of disarming Iraq, as assigned to them by the
15-nation Security Council.
``The policy of the United States toward Iraq was not
disarmament. It has always been regime removal -- eliminating Saddam Hussein
from power. It's been the stated policy of the United States since 1991,'' he
said.
Bush has come under fire for citing an allegation in his
State of the Union speech in January that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa
to make nuclear weapons. Administration officials now say they have doubts
about the evidence the statement was true.