Again, his only "offense" was falling for yet another police sting.
So Ritter was arrested for trying to lure children into sex
I've seen no evidence that Ritter has ever tried to lure children into sex.
The New York Times article written about him makes it quite clear that his pattern was to meet with -adult- women, either in person or online:
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According to court testimony, by 2004, when he stopped attending therapy, Ritter had made an almost daily habit of trying to meet adult women from the chat rooms, in cars or out-of-the-way places, so they could watch him masturbate. (Ritter maintains that he never engaged with an actual minor online, and there’s no evidence to suggest he did, beyond his interactions with undercover police officers in chat rooms for over-18-year-olds.) In 2007, he started using the webcam instead.
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What appears to have happened is that undercover police officers lured -him- into attempting to be an exhibitionist with them. Again, no minors were actually involved.
The first time, he could legitimately argue that it was all play acting, and just a game. The courts decided to let him go with a warning. At that point, he knew that doing it was a huge crime that he would serve felony time for.
The irony is that the first time, he actually attempted to -meet- with the undercover officers pretending to be minors. The second time, all he did was expose himself to an undercover officer via webcam. In both cases, no minors were involved. They were victimless crimes, which wouldn't have even happened had undercover cops not lured him into engaging in them. This is also called entrapment, as I imagine you're aware.
The Russians know this. Ritter has a conviction as a sex predator of children. There is no requirement he be admitted into Russia.
I can certainly believe that the Russians know that he was entrapped by police officers a few times, certainly. They probably also know that no minors were involved in any of the incidents for which he was charged. There is also another issue that is ignored, one that Scott Ritter brings up in the New York Times article. In that case, he's referring to Iraq, but it could certainly be brought up in the cases of Ukraine and Gaza, 2 recent wars that he has also covered in great detail:
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Those who came to Ritter’s defense around Iraq always argued that he was a courageous and patriotic American, unjustly defamed by opponents, while his critics portrayed him as unreliable and attention-starved — an “unstable” character, as Richard Perle, one of the administration’s war planners, once described him.
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I imagine you know who Richard Perle is? Well known journalist Seymour Hersh, writing for the New Yorker wrote an article on him that packed quite a punch. From
Wikipedia's article on the man:
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Seymour Hersh and "Lunch with the Chairman"
In July 2001, George W. Bush appointed Perle chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, which advises the Department of Defense. Two years later a newspaper article accused Perle of a conflict of interest, claiming Perle stood to profit financially by influencing government policy. The article alleged that Perle had business dealings with Saudi investors and linked him to the intelligence-related computer firm Trireme Partners LLP, which he claimed stood to profit from the war in Iraq.[37]
That same day, Perle was being interviewed on the issue of Iraq by CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Shortly before the interview ended, Blitzer quoted the aforementioned news article and asked for Perle's response. Perle dismissed the premise of the article and argued that it lacked "any consistent theme". Added Perle: "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly."[38]
On March 11, Perle told the New York Sun as regards Hersh's article that "I intend to launch legal action in the United Kingdom. I'm talking to Queen's Counsel right now".[39] He claimed it was easier to win libel cases in England, and that therefore made it a better location. In the end, Perle did not file any legal case. Instead, on March 27, 2003, he resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, although he still remained a member of the board.[citation needed]
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As you can see, Perle has a penchant for attacking people who expose his machinations. Interestingly, Hersh also came to Ritter's defense as a character witness. This is also detailed in the New York Times article:
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As the last American troops left Iraq, it’s fair to say that the war and the debate that surrounded it produced few real heroes; rather, it served as a kind of vortex of destruction that sucked in and defiled nearly everyone associated with it. In Ritter’s case, the public vindication to which he would seem entitled — and which he has never quite received — has now been replaced by a very public disgrace, his life having slowly come undone in the years after the invasion. “It’s tragic,” Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker’s investigative reporter, said when we spoke this fall. Hersh grew close to Ritter in the late ’90s and appeared as a character witness at his trial in Pennsylvania last April. “He understands the Arab world in a way that few Westerners I know do. You have no idea how smart he is.”
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As to Ritter's own feelings as to whether he should be acknowledged for his role in trying to stop the Iraq war, again from the New York Times article:
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“I’ll tell you why it doesn’t matter,” Ritter was saying. This was in October, a few weeks before he was to be sentenced for his crimes. I had asked him whether he thought he deserved some public acknowledgment that his warnings about Iraq and its supposed W.M.D.’s were correct. “Because today everybody knows I was right. I was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history.
[snip]
“And yet,” Ritter went on, “the common reaction seems to be: ‘Well, that was then, this is now. Yeah, he was right back then, but how does that impact us today, 10 years later?’ ” He shook his head in disbelief. Ritter is an uncommonly articulate man, and when he gets going, the indignation flows in fully formed paragraphs. “What is the relevance of being right 10 years ago? I don’t know — talk about all the dead Americans. It’s relevant to their families, I would think. Talk about the tens of thousands of wounded Americans and the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis.”
**
Almost every country on earth would reject Ritter.
Do you have any evidence for that assertion?
Russia has admitted Ritter because he is an asset.
I can certainly agree that Ritter has benefitted Russia in that he's one of the few relatively well known Americans who has provided Americans with a window into the true Russian world, as opposed to the usual propaganda from the mainstream media. I personally only know of 4 Americans that Russia has allowed to cover the Ukraine war from their side of the front- Tucker Carlson, Eva Bartlett, Patrick Lancaster and Ritter.
Here is a trick to avoid being "entrapped" by police... Just say no.
That would certainly work if the undercover cops would tell their targets that they were undercover cops from the get go. They don't, ofcourse. Ritter has testified that he believed the undercover cop that ultimately helped send him to jail was just a housewife pretending to be a minor. He learned the hard way that though he was right that the cop was only -pretending- to be a minor, exposing himself to him still meant he'd get jail time.
