For a while I thought the intelligence community might have entrapped former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter into approaching a 16 year-old girl in a Burger King in retaliation for his public insistence that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction. But, it turns out that Ritter really is a pervert who likes to approach underage girls on the internet.
Officer Ryan Venneman was posing as 15-year-old “Emily” in an online chat room when he was contacted by someone using the name “Delmarm4fun.” This person, later identified as Ritter, told “Emily” he was a 44-year-old male from Albany, N.Y.
“Emily” told Ritter she was a 15-year-old girl from the Poconos, at which point Ritter asked for a picture other than the one “Emily” had posted on her account. Ritter then sent her a link to his Web camera and began to masturbate on camera.
“Emily” asked Ritter for his cell phone number, which he provided.
Ritter again asked “Emily” how old she was. Told she was 15, Ritter said he didn’t realize she was 15 and turned off his webcam, saying he didn’t want to get in trouble.
Ritter told “Emily” he had been fantasizing about having sex with her, to which she replied: “Guess you turned it off …”
Ritter then said: “You want to see it finish,” reactivated his webcam and continued masturbating and ejaculated on camera.
There seems to be a never ending supply of these creeps in our society based on MSNBC‘s ability to produce weekly programs exposing them. The internet has some strange side-effects.
Assuming all that is actually true, it is really disgusting, but it did not make him wrong on Iraq, nor does it make him wrong in Iran, nor does it negate the value of his knowledge and his willingness to speak out on these subjects.
It doesn’t make him wrong about subject matters he knows, but it does pretty well negate his ability to be a voice for any point of view.
That’s the point of busting him.
Just like busting Spitzer for using his own money to buy sex. The FBI used laws to follow drug money being laundered to follow Spitzer’s payments to the call girl service. They used laws for phone-tapping terrorists in order to listen in on his conversations.
Meanwhile, Mark Foley, who left emails all over the place in his attempts to seduce underage pages, has not been prosecuted. You wonder why? And the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum had child porn on his computer, but no one seemed interested in child porn from a guy threatening to kill Jews and blacks.
The problem with all the increased intelligence, the internet snooping, the eavesdropping, etc., isn’t that it won’t catch bad guys, although one can argue that Ritter’s crime doesn’t rise to the funny guy who used to rob panties from the neighbors’ clotheslines: creepy but not dangerous. The problem is that when the government has the ability to prosecute everybody, it chooses to prosecute its enemies. That’s the history of the Stasi in old East Germany, the Nazis, in the old USSR.
J. Edgar Hoover kept an extensive card file on his enemies and every public and political figure, to include rumors about them, in order to control his fiefdom and influence the powerful. Soon after the CIA was formed James Jesus Angleton allegedly showed up with pics of Hoover practicing his hidden sexuality. It is foolish to think that every agency with the power to snoop hasn’t been doing this all along.
Bernie Ward, who was a liberal talk show host out of San Francisco, was busted for child porn. I don’t think that was a coincidence, or that Edwards’ bimbo eruption hadn’t been in some agency’s quiver in case his populist campaign had gained traction.
Bottom line, everyone here should take an inventory of his or her personal life and the lives of those around her. Think of what could embarrass you or hurt your family. Why do you think that it’s a secret from the government?
When a government has too much power what do you think the government does with that power?
First time I am hearing about this.
What a shame!
SMH.
Scott Ritter has been correct – and devastatingly so – on virtually everything he has spoke out about. I say this as someone who had a huge chip on my shoulder the first couple of times I met him. It is just plain stupid to discount the content and significance of what he has to say on account of an (alleged, so far) unfortunate, and completely unrelated proclivity, no matter how creepy and gross.
Of course, Bob is absolutely correct. Those who do not want the public exposed to certain realities will use anything they can to shut truth tellers down. Even if the charges don’t stick, as they did not before, it is devastating.
Exactly. And I don’t see your initial hypothesis as completely wrong – it was probably intel that found this out and exposed him. It just wasn’t a fiction.
I suspect a lot of people in our government are controlled in this manner, but that few of them are publicly ridiculed. A photo, a recording, a stained dress – these are enough to silence most.
I heard someone describe American politics as “bedrooms, bullets and bribes.”
Yes, you’re right. I can’t tell you how many times I argued with people about WMD using Scott Ritter’s expertise and reputation for investigative accuracy to bolster my argument. Now I feel that, even though the facts haven’t changed, I can’t rely on him anymore.
I’m curious. Does anyone know if he’s married or has any children? His Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention anything, and they don’t even have the usual “bio” box that appears in the right hand column.
I really don’t understand what motivates a man (or a woman) to engage in sex with a minor. But I also don’t understand how someone could be so stupid as to have been caught by the authorities in a sting once before and then gone back to the same behavior. I’m trying to be compassionate here and tell myself that he must be disturbed and very lonely and alone, but then the creepiness factor rises to the fore and I find myself running out of compassion.
.
See my diary – Scud Hunter, Who Is Scott Ritter?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."He’ll need to totally shut up now about all public issues, assuming the report is true. All he can do now is bring discredit on whatever cause he advocates.
According to MIT scientists, the Y chromosome is evolving rapidly:
All that evolving and human males still mostly think with their dicks.
I wrote a song once that went:
“When my trousers talk it’s not on purpose.
When the tent goes up you know there’s gonna be a circus.
When my trousers talk my mind is worthless
and I talk that stuff
off the cuff
when my trousers talk.”
Sad to know! (Not the song, but that that’s really how men are!)
They didn’t say in which direction the evolution was taking place, did they?
LOL. Ugh, they could get worse??
Difficult to imagine, but devolution is always a possibility!
.
ALBANY, New York (CNN) Jan. 23, 2003 – Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine and U.N. weapons inspector who has been an outspoken critic of a possible war with Iraq, was arrested in 2001 and charged with a misdemeanor after allegedly communicating with an undercover officer posing as a 16-year-old girl, a source close to the investigation has told CNN.
“The facts are simple,” Ritter said. “I was arrested in June of 2001. I was charged with a Class B misdemeanor and I stood before a judge in the town of Colonie in a public session with my wife by my side.”
“The file was sealed. Those are the facts. I am ethically and legally bound not to discuss any aspect of this case,” Ritter said. “So is everybody else involved. Unfortunately, there appear to be those who don’t feel to be bound by rule of law.”
The source said Ritter had arranged in an Internet chat room to meet with the girl at a Burger King in Colonie, a suburb of Albany, so she could witness him masturbating. The source said Ritter was charged with “attempted endangerment of the welfare of a child,” a Class B misdemeanor.
The source also said Ritter was confronted by police in April 2001 after communicating with an undercover officer posing as a 14-year-old.
TV station claims tape shows ex-U.N. inspector caught in sex sting
(WND) Jan. 19, 2003 – Ritter lives in the Albany suburb of Delmar [using the name “Delmarm4fun” – Oui], and was reportedly arrested by police in Colonie, N.Y. The case was apparently kept so secret, the head local prosecutor did not even know it existed.
The Daily Gazette reports Albany District Attorney Paul Clyne fired veteran Assistant District Attorney Cynthia Preiser last week when he finally learned of the matter.
“I was shocked and angered to learn that the case had been disposed of by one of my assistant district attorneys without consulting me,” Clyne told the paper. “Any arguably sensitive case should be brought to my attention.”
Sources told the Gazette that Ritter’s attorney and a town court judge agreed to adjourn the matter in contemplation of a dismissal.
That generally means the case is on hold for six months, and if the defendant doesn’t get into trouble, the case is usually dismissed and the record sealed. The adjournment means neither an admission of guilt or innocence. The charge was reportedly a class B misdemeanor.
Feds obtain Ritter sealed records | Scott Ritter criminal case costs prosecutor her job
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Boo, Do you really mean he is a pervert, whatever that might be? I don’t get it. So then I’m one too. The whole sex angle of the U.S.A. is perverse.
good luck to you.
I`m actually hoping he doesn`t get lucky.
I wasn’t rooting him on. I just figured he’d need some luck in life with an attitude like that.
How`s Finn managing your smiling.
I bet he`s has a lock on that eh?
I got what you meant, no worries.
No. A grown man lusting after a teen-ager is perverse. Roman Polanski is that you?
Go back a few hundred years or so and most women (and men) were married by their mid-teens. There hasn’t been that much evolution since then. Still commonplace in many areas of the world.
The “perversion” is that in Western societies relationships and sex are postponed because teen pregnancies interfere with the extended education (and then careers) that these societies require.
This is not unusual. A lot of societies’ “problems” around the world have to do with putting moralistic rules that conflict with biology.
Not saying that it was particularly wise on Ritter’s part. He knew that they were after him. And it’s never wise to violate a law.
But please cut with the morality. If it were legal and her dad wasn’t around there would be a line of middle-aged men around the block to cop a little from Miley Cyrus.
As long as they didn’t have to make small talk afterward.
This has been a sadly informative thread!
Well, yes it is. At least a lot of pompous, self-righteous scolds came out of the closet.
There is what is natural or unnatural. For a test of what is “natural” for human nature, which is highly malleable and redefined in every culture, I try some cultural comparisons.
Right now there are places on earth where as soon as a girl menstruates she’s a woman and is married off. It’s not perverted in those circumstances. It’s part of the culture. If you go back ten thousand years to hunting gathering cultures it was necessary for women to have children as soon as possible. No one in their right mind back then would delay a person’s sexuality and fertility until their twenties, or even until 18, because you were likely to be dead by the time you were 30. That would be a guarantee of extinction. Today, with an overabundance of people and the need to extend “childhood” (read: education) into the twenties and beyond it serves the culture to eliminate teenage pregnancies.
Wilhelm Reich in THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM wrote at length about how Nazis systematically used shame about sex and sublimination of sexual desire in a moral construct to control the population. (Short explanation: People who don’t get sex are angry and frustrated and that anger makes for good soldiers.) From this distance we can mock the Nazis but, really, all cultures and governments interfere with and impose boundaries on sexuality and use the accrued power to control the individual.
Criminalizing prostitution, homosexuality, all the various kinds of pornography, etc., gives the state the power of criminal law over various groups of individuals. All of these examples are natural expressions of human sexuality that have repeated since the first dirty picture was painted on a cave wall, but each variation doesn’t extend to everyone. Therefore, Joe can feel fine about the legal persecution of gays (hey, that’s perverted) but feel shame about visiting the local whorehouse. It’s a divide a conquer strategy.
The problem some people in the comments section here have is that they’ve so absorbed the cultural dicta that they are unable to see beyond them or to even discuss the reasons why they exist.
Old men preying on young girls is putrid and disgusting and I don’t care how you rationalize it. Stay away from my two nieces.
Read Reich.
Hmmm. “cop a little from Miley Cyrus”. Says a little more about you than you’d probably like to admit. So I guess if You have a daughter and some old geezer tried to get with her, you’d be okay with that. That’s sick.
I think you read way too much into his comment!
Dear Lisa. I read his comment and I don’t think I misunderstood anything.
dannie22,
We must have taken the same reading classes, & I always got “A`s” in reading & comprehension.
But you presume a hell of a lot.
I read what I read & did not mention anything more, nor did I judge.
I did not presume anything, no matter that you just accused me of it.
Back away slowly, I mean you no harm.
Bob if that wasn`t meant for me, I still wish you no harm, & apologize for my comment, posted in error.
Not sure what your point is. dannie is accusing me of being a child molester and expresses concern for her nieces because I mention the simple fact that intergenerational sex is one part of the vast expression of human sexuality. Her accusations against me are not unlike how I’ve been accused of being a homosexual because I defend same-sex marriage. This is the kind of simpleton ad hominem that never leads to enlightenment. dannie cannot grasp the greater point, that what is deemed illegal sexual action or thought by a government is not necessarily “unnatural”.
Charlemagne married a 13 year-old named Hildegard. Did all the Franks go “yuck”? If dannie were around she’d probably have been part of a maypole dance in her village to celebrate the royal wedding. No, what is or isn’t moral is very plastic across human cultures. Prosecuting sexual thought is an easy and powerful way for a government to control its populace. Maybe dannie approves of stoning women who show their faces in public. After all, it’s the law in some places.
My points on this thread should be apparent. First, the prosecution of Ritter is a result of his actions against the permanent government. Second, what is illegal is not necessarily “unnatural” in that people have done what is now illegal quite naturally in other times and cultures. Third, the process of making sexuality illegal is a means of control by the state against the individual and as such people who wish to understand why should at least be aware of the dynamics of what is happening.
Dear Bob. I didn’t want to revisit this discussion but since you write a dissertation about “sexuality and mankind” I decided to respond.
There are a lot of things that man used to do “back in the day” that we don’t do anymore. Once upon a time, man had to go out and kill dinner to survive. I’m quite sure you’d rather go to the grocery store or to a restaurant. Also, a few centuries ago, there was no anesthesia during surgery. But I’m sure Bob that you would rather not have to tough it out without anesthesia. It would be very painful. My point is that man HAS evolved. Not very many years ago, young girls were seen only for their ability to procreate. But a number of movements in society changed that. Society recognized that girl who reached puberty was more than just someone whose time had come to start giving birth. We realized that she should be educated, so that she may be a productive member of society. She was also given, about 40 years ago, the right to have power over her reproductive choices. As they say, we’ve come a long way baby.
Just because some men haven’t kept up with, or accepted the changes, is cruel. Just because some men want to steal a young girls choices because he’s living emotionally in the “stone age” isn’t the child’s fault. So this society, for the most part, would rather old men not prey on young girls. You spoke of Charlemagne marrying a 13 year old. She was young enough to give him lots of heirs. That was how they did then. I don’t follow the royals, but the majority of the young princesses are college-educated and have more independence. Charlemagne’s wife didn’t have those choices.
So I’ll just end now, and you can believe what you want to believe. I’m done with it. I think you should read “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s about a woman with no choices. And for the record, I didn’t accuse you of being a molester. I said anyone who thinks it’s okay for an old man to be with a young girl is sick. I still do. Take care Bob. May the spirits bless you and may peace come to your soul.
Dannie, I like women who can actually remember the sixties.
But to the bigger point, biologically sex is about spreading genetic material to the next generation. The rest is the window dressing which occupies our lives.
…in their December 14th issue is very well worth a read. I was of the camp that Polanski should be cut no slack, but the documentation of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct is compelling.
Still, the fact remains that adults should not mess with kids, and he did, in a nasty way.
Dear Mr. Rush, a letter from your Dominican sex worker
by Zwoof
Thu Jan 14, 2010 at 09:41:55 PM PST
Hi Mr. Rush,
Remember me? Just a note to tell you that myself and the other 3 girls from your sex holiday are ok. The girl from Haiti we don’t know about because she took the $5.50 you gave her home to buy food for her family and never came back. She maybe retired since she said that after sexing you there would never be another man she would rather make the sex with any other animal than you, even fish.
And you left the blue aspirin and my father ate it because his tooth was painful. 4 hours later we had to call the witch doctor because we love satan of course. His tooth is still bad but my mother is feeling much better. So thank you for that.
We know that since you love the island people so much (hee hee) that you are of course using your talking show to ask everyone to send help to our neighbors in Haiti.
We are looking forward to your next sexing holiday here because the economy is very bad. If you have no money because you gave it to charity for the earthquake it’s ok, we will do you for food next time. Mom says bring more aspirin.
OK, I’ve got to go because high school starts at 8 am.
With love from the island,
Lolita