I first formed an opinion about Scott Ritter in the early 90s based on some network’s clip  showing him--then a UN arms inspector--arguing with some of his Iraqi contacts.  Poorly... Fitting every part of the role of the Ugly American.

Some years later he spoke at some local hall and I went. In the flesh he was an improvement.

That was the last I thought about him until the Huffington Post last week headlined those  comments of his on Lausanne which I linked to in Caviar anyone? I recommend taking a look at that link. Whichever side you’re on, Ritter raises issues which should be dealt with  although he himself, like me, seems  pro Lausanne. 

Much of that “Caviar” link is what I privately think of as “inside baseball.” For example his attempt to deprecate the work, on Iran, of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).Or more precisely, to deprecate the US efforts to overly rely upon  that work.

 In Ritter’s view that  process involved :

• First, our providing IAEA with our own “dodgy dossier” (the phrase the Brits used about the unreliable information which their secret service provided to Tony Blair re Iraq in 2003) but packaging it in a fashion which “precluded any sharing “ with Iran which Ritter thinks would have resulted in its being  disproved..
• Then, second, our buttressing our accusations against Iran by attributing them  to the IAEA.

Got it? We made the bullets and handed them to IAEA. Then borrowed them back.

Ritter deals with the charge that Iran has lied to the IAEA as follows:

A favorite mantra of those opposed to any nuclear deal with Iran is that Iran cannot be trusted to abide by any accord it enters into. It is true that Iran has, in the past, carried out undeclared diversions of its safeguarded nuclear material. Between 1998 and 2002 Iran used 1.9 kilograms of imported uranium hexafluoride stocks to test centrifuges. Iran had originally declared that this material had leaked from its containers. However, when pressed by the IAEA, Iran acknowledged the illicit test, as well as the subsequent production of a small amount of uranium enriched to 1.2 percent. Iran also used 50 kilograms of natural uranium metal, a safeguarded material, in uranium enrichment experiments using lasers. This resulted in a small amount of uranium being produced which was enriched to 3 percent. While these actions were declarable, and Iran's failure to do so represented a de-facto violation of its safeguards agreement with the IAEA, the material produced by Iran was so small as to be insignificant in terms of any nuclear weapons activity, and was in fact consistent with Iran's declared intention to enrich uranium to levels of no more than 3.5 percent to be used as nuclear fuel

Seems like lying to me.

Putting aside the question of whether Iran lied, Ritter’s overall position he himself summed up as follows:

While there has been considerable disagreement between Iran and the IAEA over technical aspects of implementation of nuclear safeguards inspections inside Iran, there emerges one incontrovertible fact: the IAEA has been able to fully account for the totality of Iran's declarable nuclear material. There has been no meaningful diversion of nuclear material, and any diversions which occurred in the past have been fully accounted for. Simply put, void of any significant diversion of material from Iran's safeguarded nuclear stocks, and lacking any evidence of Iranian acquisition of undeclared nuclear material, either through procurement abroad or covert indigenous production, there can be no nuclear weapon, no matter how heated the rhetoric from Israel or Congressional Republicans becomes.

Finally, not included in the “Caviar” post  is the question not of Ritter’s credibility but his morality. He served 3 years in jail on a serious morals charge-details in Wikipedia. Does that wipe out the credibility of his views on Iran? Well it sure doesn't increase it.

The Senate Committee

Today's unanimous decision by the  relevant Committee changes things. I comment below.