TONY ADRAGNA WONDERS what the hell is wrong with Scott Ritter? I’ve gotten a lot of email from people telling me Ritter was paid off by the Iraqis, but nobody seems to have a solid source on it, and I couldn’t find one when I looked.

UPDATE: Balaji Srinivasan sends this link with more information on Ritter. Excerpt:

Ritter doesn’t entirely disagree. Though he claims the film is an attempt to be “objective” about the situation in Iraq, he predicted before its completion, “the U.S. will definitely not like this film.”

He acknowledges, as well, that the U.S. government doesn’t like how the film was financed. Shakir al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-American real estate developer living in Michigan, kicked in $400,000. By Ritter’s own admission, al-Khafaji is “openly sympathetic with the regime in Baghdad.” Al-Khafaji, who accompanied Ritter as he filmed the documentary and facilitated many of the meetings, travels to and from Iraq regularly in his capacity as chairman of “Iraqi expatriate conferences.” Those conferences, held in Baghdad every two years, are sponsored and subsidized by Saddam Hussein.

The conferences are little more than propaganda shows, designed to bash the United States and demonstrate to the world that Hussein has support even among Iraq’s expatriate community. The official conference website posts several articles condemning U.S. “terrorism and genocide” against Iraq.

Ritter says al-Khafaji had no editorial input on the film project but that without his help, the movie would not have been made. “I tried to get independent sources to fund the movie,” he says. “People can talk about the funding all they want. If I’d been able to be bought–from ’95 to ’98 the CIA paid me. Did I do their bidding?”

Hmm. What did Ritter’s positions on Iraq look like from 1995-98? Reader Steven White sends this link to a mirror of a Washington Post story that also says Ritter got $400,000 from Iraqi-born American Shakir Alkafajii to make a documentary. I’m not sure I’d call that being paid off by the Iraqis, exactly, though the Standard’s description makes it look worse. I checked the story via Westlaw and it’s genuine. I also found this NPR transcript involving Colum Lynch, the author:

Mr. LYNCH: Well, let’s talk about the Iraqi businessman. That’s sort of an interesting point. This is a fellow that he met at a congressional hearing that was put on a few months back by Representative John Conyers. And Scott Ritter will, you know, admit to you that this gentleman, Shokeroff Alka Fauki(ph), has interest in developing good relationships with the Iraqi government. I mean, he already has relationships, he already has contacts, but he wants to be

able to profit off of business with Iraq once the sanctions are lifted. He has sort of an economic interest in changing US policy.

And Scott Ritter’s position is, ‘That’s fine. That’s his position. He can do whatever he wants, but I’m my own man. As far as I’m concerned, I have total independence on the positions taken in this documentary. We needed money and this is the only place it came from.’

In terms of inadvertently supporting the Iraqi government’s sort of conflict with the United States, he seems to take the position that, ‘Listen, I’m the truth teller. I’m going to go in there and I’m going to lay this dispute out in very clear terms and I’m going to leave it to the outside world to decide what to do.’

So there you are. I’m very surprised I didn’t find the Post story when I tried to look for this a few weeks ago, because it has the search terms I plugged into Google, and it certainly didn’t show up. I should have tried Westlaw then, but I don’t like to search things I can’t link to. See this Jay Caruso post, too. Oh, and Charles Johnson has a lot of interesting reader comments.