Iraq Confidential (the Untolds Story Of America’s Intelligence Conspiracy)

Scott Ritter is the straight-talking former marine officer whom the CIA wants to silence. After the 1991 Gulf war Ritter helped lead the UN weapons inspections of Iraq, and found himself at the centre of a dangerous game between the Iraqi and US regimes. As Ritter reveals in this explosive book, Washington was only ever interested in disarmament as a tool for its own agenda regime change. Operating in a fog of espionage and counter-espionage, Ritter and his team were determined to find out the truth about Iraq’s WMD. The CIA were equally determined to stop them. For the truth, we now know, was that Iraq was playing a deadly game of double-bluff, and actually had no WMD. But to have revealed this would have derailed America’s drive for regime change. Iraq Confidential charts the disillusionment of a staunch patriot who came to realise that his own government sought to undermine effective arms control in the Middle East. Ritter shows us a world of deceit and betrayal, in which nothing is as it seems. A host of characters from Mossad, MI6 and the CIA pepper this powerful narrative, which contains revelations that will permanently affect the ongoing debates about Iraq. About Author: S Scott Ritner was one of the UN’s most senior weapons inspectors in Iraq after having served for eight years as an intelligence officer in the US Marine Corps. As a Marine, he conducted arms inspections in the former Soviet Union, and provided analysis of Iraq’s missile capacity to General Schwarzkopf in the 1991 Gulf War. He resigned from UNSCOM in 1998, and has since worked in a private capacity to promote non-proliferation and arms control. Seymour Hersch is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist currently writing for the New Yorker. In his long and distinguished career he has uncovered some of the most important stories in US foreign policy, including the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia and more recently, the relationship between the Pentagon and the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.