Actually, he was only convicted of most of the charges in the second instance. In the first, the charges were dismissed after a 6 month probation. Personally, I think the most important element is that no minor was actually involved. Both times he was charged, the only thing he was guilty of was having a sexual interaction with an undercover cop pretending to be a minor.
A View from the Frontlines | Scott Ritter
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Actually, he was only convicted of most of the charges in the second instance. In the first, the charges were dismissed after a 6 month probation. Personally, I think the most important element is that no minor was actually involved. Both times he was charged, the only thing he was guilty of was having a sexual interaction with an undercover cop pretending to be a minor.
I corrected a lot of Walt's allegations in my previous post. As to Ritter being "creepy", I don't think so, but there's no question that he was charged and did time for at least playing along with the notion that he was sexually interacting with a minor.
There are plenty of whistleblowers that haven't been charged with this type of thing, some of whom have also covered the war in Ukraine. Canadian American journalist Eva Bartlett comes to mind, as well as former Navy petty officer Patrick Lancaster, who arrived in Ukraine in 2014 to cover the aftermath of the Maidan revolution and has been covering the conflict in Ukraine ever since.
That being said, I think that Scott Ritter is better than the aforementioned journalists when it comes to his expertise in military strategy.
He can claim whatever he wants to stay out of prison, but an American court weighed all the available evidence and determined be is a child predator.
If you still believe in the American so-called justice system then you are an idiot.
"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."
No, the jury in question determined the following:
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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".[2] 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.[5][43]
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Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter#Arrests_and_conviction_for_sex_offenses
That being said, Scott Ritter has always maintained his innocence of everything but betraying the trust of his wife:
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But Ritter has forcefully insisted all along that he did nothing wrong, beyond betraying Marina’s trust. “Why would I plead guilty to something I didn’t do?” he asked me, when I raised the issue of a plea arrangement.
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Source:
Scott Ritter’s Other War | The New York Times
As you may be aware, there is a significant amount of wrongful convictions in the U.S., which the National Institute of Justice estimates to be around 11%:
Estimating the Prevalence of Wrongful Convictions | National Institute of Justice
Of those wrongful convictions, over half of them are caused by government misconduct:
More than half of all wrongful criminal convictions are caused by government misconduct, study finds | Washington Post
There's also the fact that Scott Ritter's initial charge back in 2001 where he interacted with the first undercover cop was wrongfully unsealed by U.S. prosecutors to be used against him . Why was it wrongfully unsealed? Furthermore, the U.S. prosecutors in his 2009 trial weren't even the first to publicly reveal the 2001 charge. This was first done during his time as a Weapons Inspector in Iraq in 2003. Here's what Mr. Ritter said about that when it happened:
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ALBANY, N.Y. – Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a harsh critic of the Bush administration's push toward war with Iraq, suggested that recent news reports of his arrest in an Internet sex sting in 2001 were part of an attempt to silence him.
He said the publicity forced him to cancel a trip to Baghdad, where he said he would have offered an alternative to military action.
"The timing does stink. I was supposed to be on an airplane yesterday to Baghdad," he said. "Let's not forget, we're on the verge of a major conflict in which thousands of American lives may be lost, and I was a leading voice of opposition to this."
"It's a shame that somebody would bring up this old matter, this dismissed matter, and seek to silence me at this time," he said.
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Source:
Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter: Timing of Arrest Reports Suspicious | Fox News
So essentially we have a man who was entrapped twice, records being wrongfully revealed to the public, and evidence suggesting the timing of at least some of it was designed to silence a critic of the Bush Jr.'s Administration decision to go to war in Iraq.
These past 2 entrapments continue to be used even now to silence his highly pertinent points regarding other wars, such as the ones in Ukraine and Gaza.
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The fact Scott Ritter isn’t in prison.
Daniel Ellsberg seems to be the most normal whistleblower to me. I love Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange but we have to admit they're unique. Being different or outcast is something I enjoy. I refuse to be part of groupthink yet somehow business owners love me. They know to stay out of my way.
There was a plea bargain on the first violation, that allowed him to have the charges dismissed after 6 months probation. That gave them 6 months to try to find children in his life being sexually abused. If there was no viable charges, the charges would have been dismissed immediately. This was part of a plea bargain where he promised never to offend again.
Then there was the second violation. That is when he found the legal system was not so generous. He was going to keep offending, so giving another promise of not offending again is worthless.
Ritter was attempting to meet with minors to have sex with them. He had been fully warned that this was unacceptable. He knew that if he were caught doing it again, he would go to prison. And he kept trying to meet with children to have sex with them.
Do you think the police should have to provide minors to have sex with Ritter before arresting him?
He can claim entrapment all he wants, normal people are not trying to have sex with children.
Perhaps you're unaware of his defense here. For starters, as you correctly state above, there was no 15 year old girl, just a police decoy/undercover officer. From the New York Times:
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On a February afternoon in 2009, Ryan Venneman, one of only five full-time police officers in tiny Barrett Township, Pa., decided to spend some time hunting for sexual predators online. Venneman entered a Yahoo chat room, where the minimum legal age is supposed be 18, and passed himself off as a teenager named Emily.
[snip]
At trial, Ritter told the jury that he assumed Venneman was a housewife pretending to be 15, and that he had never for a moment believed he was talking to a minor
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Source:
Scott Ritter’s Other War | The New York Times
I think another passage in the New York Times article is particularly poignant:
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“Everybody who lied about the [Iraq] war got rewarded,” Ritter said. “Because they played the game. Tell the truth about the war, you don’t get rewarded.” He paused. “And then, you know, let’s be frank — you compound it with me shooting myself in the foot on personal, behavioral issues.” An awkward moment passed between us. “I’ll just ask the fundamental question,” Ritter said, looking at me squarely across the table. “My personal missteps — how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America seems to have no problem with that.”
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Blix was a weapon inspector who said there were no WMDs in Iraq... In fact, every weapons inspector agreed there were no WMDs in Iraq. Let's not forget that the weapons inspectors were forced by Bush to leave just before the war, because they kept saying there were no WMDs in Iraq. And, that Bush refused to let the weapons inspectors back in when Iraq was invaded.
Not bad, Walt. It almost looks like you wrote that out yourself. How'd those necon wars work out? It's clear to all that Biden is owned by the zionist. I predict another false flag so msnbc can sell you on reason we have to bomb Iran.
Neocons are a Republican movement, and it was Republicans that started the wars. Blaming the Democrats for it all is insane.
Republicans are all over the place on this, saying Biden is too pro-Israel, and too anti-Israel.
It is the Republicans who have been constantly calling for bombing Iran. Obama got an entire peace treaty to avoid having to bomb Iran, which trump broke claiming he would get an even better peace treaty. trump failed. Now we have a real problem.
But Biden is showing no signs of wanting to bomb Iran. He keeps trying for an agreement.
Neocons started out with Carter then jumped ship to Reagan when Carter refused to invade Iran. Biden was selected by the establishment for the sole purpose of bombing Iran.
So you are claiming that NeoCons have existed for 50 years with the sole purpose of invading Iran, and somehow have failed to even get close?
NeoCons, also known as Neo-Reaganites, came about after Reagan. They believed that even after the Cold War, Reagan would have wanted to see an America that aggressively engages with the world. They were Republicans, because Democrats would not care what Reagan would have wanted. Throughout the 1990's NeoCon groups like the Project for the New American Century, and The Vulcans(Rice's led Bush foreign policy advisors) focussed more on what being "aggressively engaged" would actually mean.
First as a side note, they were an offshoot of Kissinger's political realism, which assumed that only nation states were actors on the world stage. It was impossible for a non-nation state to do anything interesting internationally. If there is one doing so, it is a front for a nation state. Therefore, the NeoCons did not believe Al Qaeda could or would attack America in a meaningful way. No amount of proof would convince them that 9/11 happened like it did happen. This was not part of their plan, or even a possibility in their world.
So their plan was to invade 5 to 10 countries over 10 to 20 years at the beginning of the 21st century. Each country would be in a different region, and would be quickly turned into a "seedling democracy" that would not just be a democracy, but would turn its neighbors into democracies. The whole world would be transformed in 20 years or less, and then we would have the American century that they speak of.
They had already picked Iraq to invade, so had no reason to invade Iran... at first, but then everything went wrong. Well, first it went wrong with having to invade Afghanistan before Iraq, but then it went wrong in Iraq. It turns out that you cannot turn Iraq into a showcase democracy in one or two years, that the Iraqis would continue to fight against an occupation of Iraq. The NeoCons blamed Iran for their failure in Iraq, and started to talk about invading Iran too.
Meanwhile, American politics began turning on the NeoCons. Their entire ideology had failed, and everyone but them saw that. The Project for the New American Century collapsed even while their members were ensconced in government. It made the directionless Bush Administration even more directionless.
Check which universities and thinktanks necons came out of. Fifty years of figuring out how to get global dominance. All they can do is bomb and steal money.
The think tanks that the NeoCons came out of were right wing think tanks, like the Project for the New American Century. The universities were all sorts of universities. For instance, Rice got her PHD from the University of Denver, and taught at Stanford.
Did you know Rice wrote the Chicken Kiev Speech? I did not. It was a speech where Bush senior tried to preserve the USSR, and keep Ukraine from getting independence. It was bizarre how the Bush Administration tried to keep the USSR, and even the Berlin Wall.
And still the Republican descendants of the NeoCons are against Ukraine.