Scott Ritter – Interviewed by Judge Andrew Napolitano on Judging Freedom podcast:
“I’ve been to war. In the Gulf War, I was involved in targeting. One of the things we did we targeted the Amiriyah bomb shelter. We knew it as a bomb shelter, but he had good intelligence that said it had been converted to be used as a national level command and control facility.
Just so people will understand what I’m talking about, we were hunting Scud missiles, unsuccessfully. Israel was about to become involved in this war ,and we had to prevent them from doing that. In order to do that, we had to show that we were seriously hunting down Scud missiles. We believed that the command and control for the Scud missiles was being carried out by Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein used a system called the Mark 14 radio telephone. It was made by Siemans. It was an encrypted system with a unique signature, unique frequency ranges, etc. And we had detected the Mark 14 signal coming from antennas associated with this bomb shelter. We had reason to believe that the Iraqis had located senior command and control within this place. So we reviewed it, we reviewed it, we reviewed it. There was no indication that it was being used as a bomb shelter.
I helped pick the impact points. My job was – when the mission strike came back – to look at the photographs to determine whether or not we did it. I knew that we had to put two GBU 28s through that same hole to achieve the result. And we destroyed it, and I signed it off as destroyed and I was feeling pretty good.
A little while later, CNN came on and we found out we had hit a bomb shelter and 408 women and children were dead, the most horrible kind of death. When the first bomb went in, it created a fire that trapped them. Neighbors could hear the women and children trying to get out. When the second bomb came it, ignited, and it boiled. The firefighters were putting the water in, and all of these bodies go turned into fat. That’s what happened there. And there’s not a single day you know that that doesn’t haunt you. It haunts you for the rest of their life.
We have hit two children’s schools (Saturday around Teheran). We have bombed two children’s schools. 63 children dead, girls, little girls. Their mothers waiting for their daughters to come home. They sent their daughters to school on the belief that there wouldn’t be a war because there was diplomacy going on. There wouldn’t be a war because Marco Rubio said he was traveling to the region on Monday.
So they sent their daughters to school, the girls were in school, and we bombed it, and we bombed another one. There’s 100 girls buried under that rubble being dug out now. Girls that will not survive. This is horror of war. At least when I was involved in the bombing of the shelter, we did our damnedest to make sure it was a military target. We were wrong. And it haunts you forever.
What in God’s name could lead us to bomb two girls’ schools? I’m involved in this! I did this for a living! I know you don’t make those mistakes! This is the sloppiest kind of targeting possible! This is what happens a military is told you must sustain a strike. You must hit a certain number of targets, and they’re given artificial metrics to meet, and so they’re desperately looking for anything, and they bomb two girls’ schools, killing scores of young girls.
This is what we’re doing, Judge. This is the war we’re fighting. It’s indefensible. It’s not inhuman; it’s criminal. We have waged an illegal war of aggression against a nation that did not pose a threat to us, was bending over backward to meet any demand we put on them about their nuclear program, and we lied, lied, lied, lied, and now 63 little schoolgirls are dead.
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