‘HE broke the law. He engaged in an illegitimate war of aggression that history has condemned,’ former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said yesterday, indicting British Prime Minister Blair for war crimes for joining the US invasion of Iraq.
Ritter likened the 2003 invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq to Nazi aggression in World War Two.
‘Read the 1946 Nuremberg conclusions,’ he said. ‘Read the statements made by the judge; and read what the German generals were found guilty of, then compare and contrast that to the actions taken by George W Bush and Tony Blair.
‘We swore, our respective democracies swore, at the end of the Second World War that we would not allow this to occur again.
‘We created the United Nations, we formulated the Charter and we signed the Charter and now we’ve violated the Charter.’
Ritter added: ‘Your own Attorney General wrote in a decision that if you go to war without a second (United Nations) resolution, you’ll be violating international law, and that was one of the primary charges put forward against the Nazi generals – planning and executing a war of aggression.’
In an interview with BBC Radio Five, Ritter backed earlier comments he was quoted as making, that: ‘We have been wilfully deceived by Bush and Blair, who could be pulled up as war criminals for engaging in actions that we condemned Germany in 1946 for doing.’
He said that justifying their invasion of Norway and Denmark at Nuremberg, ‘The Germans said “we had to do so pre-emptively in our self defence’’. So the whole issue of “pre-emptive strike’’ was laid out.’
Ritter added that it was an ‘absurdity’ to suggest that the CIA ‘made an honest mistake’ about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
‘It’s public knowledge, the public record, that the United States had a policy of regime change.
‘When the president orders the CIA in 1992 to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and determines that weapons inspections are only useful if they facilitate this primary objective . . . then we can’t talk about an “intelligence failure’’.
‘It’s an intelligence success: the CIA lied, they maintained a false sense of guilt on the part of Iraq.
‘I’ve laid out case after case after case where the CIA prevented the inspectors from telling the truth about Iraq’s programmes.’