July 16, 2003	Wednesday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 15, 1424

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UNITED NATIONS, July 15: A former UN weapons inspectors on Monday charged the Bush administration with lying to the American people and the Congress on Iraqi weapons programme and called for a “regime change” in the US in the next elections.

Scott Ritter, a former US marine who was one of UN’s top weapons inspector in Iraq for seven years, said at a press conference here that time has shown that the United Nations did a good job disarming Iraq while US President George Bush went to war based on “a lie.”

Mr Ritter, who launched his book “Frontier Justice, Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwacking of America”, said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan lacked courage, and that former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix is “a moral and intellectual coward.”

He argues in the book that there is no evidence Iraq possesses, produces or concealed nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Therefore, Mr Ritter charged that “the United States carried out an illegal war of aggression.”

“The inspectors went in, got good cooperation, got immediate access to the sites they needed to get to, and they found nothing — nothing related to weapons of mass destruction programmes,” said Mr Ritter.

“The policy of the United States towards Iraq was not disarmament. It has always been regime removal — eliminating Saddam Hussein from power. It’s been the stated policy of the United States since 1991,” he said.