US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration's Foreign Policy
denniskucinich.substack.com
State-ordered Purge of Truth-Tellers in Time of War. Scott Ritter Passport Seized, WaPo Smears Indy Journalists

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist. He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.

Ryan Grim @ The Intercept, 2020: Joe Biden, Five Years Before Invasion, Said the Only Way of Disarming Iraq Is “Taking Saddam Down”

Biden told Ritter that no matter how thorough the inspections, the only way to eliminate the threat was to remove Saddam Hussein. […] “You and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam is at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program relative to weapons of mass destruction. […]

Hussein, it turned out, did not have an active WMD program.

During questioning, Biden mocked Ritter as “ol’ Scotty boy” and suggested that his demands — that the international community compel Iraq to cooperate with inspectors — if met, would give Ritter the unilateral authority to start a war in Iraq. Biden argued that such decisions belonged to higher-level officials. “I respectfully suggest they have a responsibility slightly above your pay grade, to decide whether or not to take the nation to war,” Biden said. “That’s a real tough decision. That’s why they get paid the big bucks. That’s why they get the limos and you don’t. I mean this sincerely, I’m not trying to be flip.”

  • protist@mander.xyzEnglish
    11·
    6 months ago

    Wow, thanks for posting this, now I know what an utter piece of shit Scott Ritter is:

    Ritter is a contributor to Russian government-owned media outlets RT and Sputnik. He compared Ukraine to a “rabid dog” that needed to be shot. He compared the treatment of Russians under Ukraine law to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. In October 2022, he posted a provocative tweet about Bucha to test the reaction of Twitter. The tweet stated “Bucha was a war crime, Ukraine did it”. DisInfoChronicle (the website of NGO Detector Media that claims to refute Russian disinformation) wrote that Ritter was being used by Russia to “promote narratives needed by the Kremlin”.

    As if that’s not enough:

    Ritter was the subject of two law enforcement sting operations in 2001. He was charged in June 2001 with trying to set up a meeting with an undercover police officer posing as a 16-year-old girl. He was charged with a misdemeanor crime of “attempted endangerment of the welfare of a child”. The charge was dismissed and the record was sealed after he completed six months of pre-trial probation.

    Ritter was arrested again in November 2009 over communications with a police decoy he met on an Internet chat site. Police said that he exposed himself, via a web camera, after the officer repeatedly identified himself as a 15-year-old girl.

    The next month, Ritter waived his right to a preliminary hearing and was released on $25,000 unsecured bail. Charges included “unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communications facility, corruption of minors, indecent exposure, possessing instruments of crime, criminal attempt and criminal solicitation”. Ritter rejected a plea bargain and was found guilty of all but the criminal attempt count in a courtroom in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, on April 14, 2011.

    In October 2011, he received a sentence of one and a half to five and a half years in prison.[3] He was sent to Laurel Highlands state prison in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in March 2012 and paroled in September 2014.