Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Sooooo....he only accidently fell into those forums to discuss masturbating in front of minors? Interesting. What about his conviction?
APP - Former U.S. Marine and U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter
- Thread starter Scott
- Start date
No one said he fell into any forums, accidentally or otherwise. I imagine you're referring to Mr. Ritter's time in internet chat rooms. The New York Times article I've mentioned before illuminates what led up to his arrests:
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In fact, the police in Colonie, N.Y., encountered Ritter twice in 2001 — and quietly arrested him once — after he contacted cops posing as under-age girls in chat rooms. (Ritter was caught using the unsubtle screen name OnExhibit.) In both cases, Ritter agreed to meet the fictional teenagers in the parking lots of fast-food joints, with the intent of masturbating in front of them, only to be confronted by cops when he got there. For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, the prosecutor dismissed the charges, on the condition that Ritter enter intensive counseling, and a local judge sealed the records.
The timing of the revelations about Ritter’s two-year-old arrests, which somehow became public just as the administration was preparing to invade Iraq, certainly seemed to indicate that his political adversaries meant to destroy his credibility. The charges made international news and effectively ended any hope Ritter had of becoming a public intellectual or a war correspondent. He continued churning out op-eds and books (six in all), but he struggled to pay his bills, and his role as an advocate receded to the point where he was talking to only a small community of policy experts.
In the years after, Ritter sought other outlets for his energies. He and Marina joined Delmar’s volunteer Fire Department (he as a firefighter and she as an E.M.T.), and Ritter became one of its most active members, eventually selected as an assistant chief. In the hours left to himself, though, Ritter struggled. 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. He admits he couldn’t stop.
“I always sort of chuckle when people say, ‘What were you thinking?’ ” Ritter told me. “Well, what part of ‘depressed’ don’t you understand? Find me someone who says depressed people engage in coherent thought.”
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Given revelations made by whisteblower Edward Snowden, I suspect that Mr. Ritter was being monitored. From there, I suspect it wouldn't have been that hard to get law enforcement to infiltrate the adult chat rooms he was in and persuade him to try to meet (first arrest) or expose himself online (second arrest) to 2 adult undercover officers posing as female minors.
The New York Times article also remarks on an important point- how is it that the mainstream got hold of Mr Ritter's arrests just as his role as a thorn in George Bush Jr.'s Administration was becoming pronounced via its campaign to invade Iraq. Again quoting from the New York Times article:
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And then there was the vague personal innuendo, tawdry and troubling. In “Cruel and Unusual,” his screed against the Bush administration and the media who covered it, the liberal press critic Mark Crispin Miller devoted about 30 pages to documenting the public campaign to discredit Ritter in the months before the Iraq war began. Near the end of the section, in what felt like an obligatory aside, Miller raised and then dismissed an inconvenient wrinkle in Ritter’s story of heroism: “The drive to neutralize Scott Ritter finally climaxed in a murky but effective charge of something like attempted pedophilia, stealthily ‘exposed’ in January 2003. That slander was, to say the least, gratuitous. . . .”
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Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Ritter is a perv who got caught not once, but twice. I have no doubt those were the only two times he wanted to have young girls do pervy things with him.
I suppose it all depends on your definition of "perv". Mr. Ritter clearly had, and perhaps still has, a wish to be an exhibitionist. If you consider exhibitionists to be "pervs", then I guess he qualifies for you.
I'm -guessing- you meant to say "weren't", rather than "were"? If so, I'd point out that you've yet to show any strong evidence that he -ever- wanted "young girls" to do "pervy things with him". I'd also once again point out that Matt Bai, the author of the New York Times article I've referred to many times, pointed out that Mr. Ritter testified that he never thought either of the undercover officers who posed as minors and led to his arrests were actually minors. They also -weren't- minors.
You want to keep maligning Mr. Ritter, that's your choice to make, but the fact of the matter is that he was one of the few well known people prior to the Bush Jr. Administration's invasion of Iraq who was quite vocal about the fact that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction. As he was doing so, someone leaked the fact that he'd been arrested in a sting operation involving an undercover officer posing as a minor online. Do you think the timing was just a coincidence? For that matter, do you think the fact that an undercover police officer just happened to be in the adult chat room that Mr. Ritter was in was a coincidence? I think it's theoretically -possible- that it was all just a coincidence, but given Edward Snowden's revelations a few years later in regards to illegal U.S. mass surveillance, I strongly suspect that one or more of these events were -not- a coincidence.
anonymoose
Classical Liberal
Who are these people you personally respect?
Because he’s not considered a well respected journalist by anyone I know of.
Quite an accomplishment for a well respected journalist. Anyone can have his own substack page.
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Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Rule 16 and APP rule 6.
anonymoose
Classical Liberal
Who are these people you personally respect?
Because he’s not considered a well respected journalist by anyone I know of.
Quite an accomplishment for a well respected journalist. Anyone can have his own substack page.
Seymour Hersh comes to mind. In case you've never heard of the fellow, he also has a Wikipedia page. Here's the introduction from said page:
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Seymour Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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Source:
Seymour Hersh - Wikipedia
I didn't mention that part for its prestige, but as a segue to an article he's recently written. Here's the paragraph from which your snippets came from for context:
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Now if that's all he had ever done, that'd be one thing, but as mentioned already, he was also a well regarded U.S. Marine Intelligence Officer, U.N. Weapons Inspector, and now, a very respected journalist, at least by people I personally respect, and also has his own substack page where he posts many articles on subjects like the Ukraine war that I think are quite good. Today, he posted an article I've made a thread out of, here, where he writes about an interview he had with a Russian Colonel in regards to the Ukraine war and the West's relationship with Russia:
A View from the Frontlines | justplainpolitics.com
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Source:
I see the that the thread I created is no longer around for some reason, so here is Scott Ritter's actual article if you're interested:
