TARGET: SCOTT RITTER
The War Party gets ugly

By Justin Raimondo

Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who quit in 1998 and now says the U.S. is intent on manufacturing phony "evidence" of arms violations as a pretext for war, is the victim of what may be the sleaziest set-up job in recent history, a smearing so foul that it makes the Clinton crowd look like a bunch of amateurs. The news that he may have been arrested, in June 2001, as the result of an internet sex sting, in which an undercover cop posing as a sixteen-year-old girl lured him into "sex chat" over the internet, came to light in a very strange way. A local newspaper, the Daily Gazette, of Schenectady, New York, was first to pick up the dirt, which apparently came to light when an assistant district attorney was fired for settling the case and not informing the D.A. According to the Gazette:

"Police and prosecutors have declined to discuss the case, which involved at least one class B misdemeanor, because it was adjourned in contemplation of dismissal and ordered sealed by a Colonie Town Court justice. The Daily Gazette's request for access to the arrest report was denied by the Colonie town attorney's office, which ruled disclosure was barred under the state Freedom of Information Law."

So the police just happened to conduct a "sex sting" operation against the one man who had exposed the lies of our war-mad rulers from the inside. On the eve of war, as hundreds of thousands protest in the streets, this staunch Republican and solid family man who has become one of the War Party's most formidable enemies is suddenly "exposed" as a child molester.

Since the court records have been sealed, and the case was merely "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal," the authorities will say nothing, at least in public. The entrapment was apparently so transparent, so obviously the clumsiest sort of Cointelpro-style operation badly bungled by our newly-empowered political police, that the charges were dropped to the legal equivalent of a traffic ticket. Could it be that the records were sealed not to protect Ritter, but to protect whomever tried to set him up?

Anybody who doesn't believe that Ritter was specifically targeted on account of his political activities needs to seek help: that sort of naivete can be terminal, and the patient probably shouldn't be trusted to cross the street unattended.

In the post-9/11 era of the "Patriot" Act and the Office of Total Information Awareness, what is happening to Ritter is meant as a warning to anyone who dares oppose this government. Former UN inspectors, it seems, are a special target. Remember that other inspector, Jack McGeorge, also an American, who was "outed" as being a member of a sado-masochistic "advocacy" organization? Just as our war birds were wailing in bitter disappointment that the inspections process would delay or maybe even derail the much anticipated bloodbath, suddenly one of the inspectors is "exposed" as a sadomasochist. The point was not to somehow prove that this made him unfit for the job, but simply to degrade him, to make the experience so painful that he would immediately withdraw – which is precisely what happened.

There's nothing at all fishy about a "sealed" court record leaked to reporters, complete with an alleged "mug shot" of Ritter broadcast on television and republished by MSNBC. It's all a coincidence that this comes out just as the war crisis reaches its climax – or anti-climax – and the administration is desperate to come up with a half-way convincing rationale for war. What are you – a conspiracy theorist? Everybody knows the U.S. government is inherently and constitutionally incapable of pulling off such a dirty rotten lowdown trick. After all, isn't that why they hate us – because we're so wonderfully "free"? Free to be spied on; free to be set-up and smeared if we defy the powers-that-be; "free" to be entrapped by cyber-cops who randomly chose the single most convincing opponent of the War Party to snare in a web of deception.

The reaction to this is really a sight to behold. The same "conservative" movement that reveled and rolled around in the muck of the Clinton years like a pig in a deluxe pen, luxuriating in the filth that bubbled up like a perpetual hot bath, is all abuzz. With all the defiant malignity of Lucianne Goldberg and her son, what's-his-name, rolling the latest Clintonian dirtball around on their tongues as if it were the last bon bon in the box, they are drooling over this one. (Look at bottom-feeder Jonah Goldberg lap it up.)

It's sickening, really, to even contemplate what is going on here, but we should look at this ugliness full in the face. Because in forcing ourselves to see it, we can see the War Party – the gang of lying, thieving, conniving thugs with delusions of grandeur who dominate this administration – in its essence.

Look on the face of evil, and, if you don't turn to stone, remember it well. Because this is what we're up against, in America: an evil that is almost demonic in its pure malevolence, a dark destructive spirit that feeds on pain and is animated by the will to crush its enemies underfoot. This is the face of an enemy that must be defeated.

SOURCE:  http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j012203.html

Are the following salient facts.

1. Between 1998 and 2001, Ritter mysteriously changed his assessment of Iraq's possession of WMD's. In 1998, he said that Iraq still possessed WMD's and was thwarting inspection, but then in 2001, with no new evidence (or inspections) he said that Iraq was free of WMD's and in compliance with inspections.

Why the change? What kind of guy would flip flop like this. . . is he mentally unbalanced, or was there something else at work?

2. The Assistant DA who handled the Ritter cases was fired for failing to report it.

Hmmm. A cover-up that coincided with his flip flop!

Go.

your argument is the same as a person I responded to earlier over on SF Indymedia, so here's the same post (ignore the name, "Mr. Toad"):

-------------

Ritter didn't flip-flop on his view of Iraq. He's always held extreme contempt for their hiding and games. What he flip-flopped on was his realization that most of the WMD were found and destroyed, that containment would work (which it is now being employed against N. Korea, among diplomatic efforts and in full demonstration of the bogus explanations coming from the Bush administration that attempt to justify Iraq, right on up to the hyperbolic Dr. Condi Rice editorial in the NYT today).

No, Mr. Toad. You're flat-out wrong.

Yes, Ritter may have had his butt halled in for deviant sex behavior. But that's a totally different issue from what is going on in U.S. foreign policy. The only flip-flop Ritter did was to change his view on how he saw U.S. foreign policy. He came to understand what the policy of regime change by any means and at any cost meant -- even in the face of an Iraq disarmed by 95 some-odd percent, even in the face of inspections that could have done even more disarmament if there were not sabotaged by spying nor artificial time constraints pursuant to objectives of total control over Iraq (the inspections did work).

Don't be a right-wing parrot. Free your mind. This is not a leftist issue. This is just a generic issue of a superpower taking care of it's geostrategic imperatives. It goes beyond left, right, Democrat and Republican frameworks.

Ritter is human. He may have been doing some slimy things re. internet chat rooms. But he went before a judge, and the case was dismissed for a lesser charge in a full legal process. The case was then sealed, and quite suspiciously, it comes back, out of no where exactly when it's of most strategic use for smear value. That stinks of the hand of orchestration.

No, Mr. Toad, the only flip-flop here is Ritter's understanding of U.S. objectives. Ritter constantly and consistently condemns Hussein as a maniacal, dangerous and evil dictator. But Ritter also understands that war should always be used as the last option, and that the U.S. today has chosen to use war as a primary option given that war has the side benefits of offering far more than just "regime change" via diplomacy or "disarmament" -- war offers renegotiation of oil exploration and production contracts and total control over the future of Iraq, including their vital water resources.

Mr. Toad, George W. Bush is an imperial bozo

Mr. Toad, Clinton was a conniving imperial hack

Both are a sad statement on an America that has long since abandoned the principles that are found in our long history, and as we build a police state and empire abroad, our republic dies on the vine.

Wake up. Don't be a hack. Free your mind.