Talk:United Nations Special Commission

Too much information on Scott Ritter?
Is it me or does this article have a little too much information in regards to Scott Ritter? I am going to write it over and talk about events that actually happened to UNSCOM in general, not just Ritter. Perhaps some of this should be melded into his article. Will post a link when its done, 2-3 days. -- zero faults  undefined  20:58, 13 June 2006 (UTC)


 * It would be a good idea for this article not to be a coatrack article: see Coatrack. —Lowellian (reply) 04:28, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Copy-editing tag?
Anyone know the reason for the copy editing tag? There are some British English spellings and idioms, but I don't see anything blatantly wrong. Warren Dew 03:38, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't see much of problem with copy at all. Kaizer Souze (talk) 08:51, 29 August 2008 (UTC)


 * It did need copyediting -- lots of run-on sentences and verb tense disagreements, not to mention a lack of continuity. Done. --fraise (talk) 19:07, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

UN transcripts
Have begun to go into the official UN transcripts over this. If the links don't work, you have to find the PDF files through the un.org website. I would recommend pulling much of the material about UNSCOM off of the Desert Fox page and keeping these incidents separately documented. AFAIK, UNSCOM was superceded by UNMOVIC when there was no chance it was going to return. There are obvious questions about the bombing which I has so far been unable to find asked in official sources. The BBC listed the set of goals and some of the bombing maps. Question is: what things were being bombed that couldn't be inspected? The official justification for what happened doesn't wash, and the theory that Desert Fox was a decapitation strike (like the early strikes of the 2003 invasion) is very compelling. Scott Ritter is not the only person making these allegations.Goatchurch 20:19, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Information in wrong article
UNSCOM ended in 1999, so either the entire section about the 2000s should be merged into UNMOVIC, or both articles should be merged together. —Lowellian (reply) 04:38, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree but don't yet have the time to do the merge, so I've copy-pasted the section in question below. --fraise (talk) 19:08, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

2000s
In 2002, Ritter stated that, as of 1998, 90–95% of Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical capabilities, and long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering such weapons, had been verified as destroyed. Technical 100% verification was not possible, said Ritter, not because Iraq still had any hidden weapons, but because Iraq had preemptively destroyed some stockpiles and claimed they had never existed. Many people were surprised by what they regarded as Ritter's "bizarre turnaround" in his view of Iraq during a period when no inspections were made. In 2000, Ritter produced a film that portrayed Iraq as fully disarmed. The film was funded by an Iraqi-American businessman who had received Oil-for-Food coupons from Saddam Hussein that he sold for $400,000.

During the 2002–2003 build-up to war Ritter criticized the Bush administration and maintained that it had provided no credible evidence that Iraq had reconstituted a significant WMD capability. In an interview with Time in September 2002 he stated: "We have tremendous capabilities to detect any effort by Iraq to obtain prohibited capability. The fact that no one has shown that he has acquired that capability doesn't necessarily translate into incompetence on the part of the intelligence community. It may mean that he hasn't done anything."

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on United Nations Special Commission. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20060213090623/http://www.csmonitor.com:80/specials/inspections/suspicions.html to http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/inspections/suspicions.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 06:06, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Unsourced claims that Scott Ritter said in 1998 that "Iraq still has proscribed weaopns"
I'm deleting the following unsourced claim, because it contradicts statements Ritter has made repeatedly since 1999:


 * On 31 August 1998, Ritter said: "Iraq still has proscribed weapons capability. There needs to be a careful distinction here. Iraq today is challenging the special commission to come up with a weapon and say where is the weapon in Iraq, and yet part of their efforts to conceal their capabilities, I believe, have been to disassemble weapons into various components and to hide these components throughout Iraq. I think the danger right now is that without effective inspections, without effective monitoring, Iraq can in a very short period of time measure the months, reconstitute chemical biological weapons, long-range ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and even certain aspects of their nuclear weaponization program."

If someone can find a credible source for this statement, I trust they will put it back into the article, presumably at the start of the current section on "Ritter on Iraq's WMDs after 1998". NOTE: I added that section heading, because that remark did not seem to belong under the section on "Allegations of CIA infiltration of UNSCOM". DavidMCEddy (talk) 00:05, 27 February 2017 (UTC)