The Times’ Tabloid Trolling
Is there any reason on earth that can justify Matt Bai’s article in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Magazine? Ostensibly a profile about Scott Ritter, the well-known former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, and his present-day troubles, the piece plumbs the depths of supermarket tabloid journalism.
Ritter, you might recall, had reached a level of notoriety when he shifted in 2002 from a man certain of hidden WMDs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to an anti-war activist assuring the world (way before he or anyone else had real evidence) of the opposite and the necessity of peace with the dictator. (You can read his bio in the Wikipedia entry about him)
Back in that early era, he told The News Hour with Jim Lehrer that “without effective inspections, without effective monitoring, Iraq can in a very short period of time measured in months, reconstitute chemical and biological weapons, long-range ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and even certain aspects of their developing of nuclear weapons programs.”
In protest against the UN’s do-nothing response to Hussein’s decision to suspend cooperation with inspectors, Ritter resigned. Having opposed containment Ritter suddenly shifted to favoring a policy that one might justifiably call appeasement. He embraced the role of bi-partisan critic of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations for believing the kind of argument he had himself made earlier — that Hussein’s lack of cooperation and intransigence made his nation a very real threat to the world’s peace and stability.
Writing about Clinton, for example, he said that he had witnessed “firsthand the duplicitous Iraq policies of the administration of Bill Clinton, the implementation of which saw a President lie to the American people about a threat he knew was hyped.” Its real aim, he charged, was regime change — trying to “remove Saddam Hussein from power.”
Soon enough, Ritter made the documentary film Shifting Sands in 2000. It was financed by an Iraqi-American later found guilty of felony charges in 2004 in the UN Oil for Food scandal.
From arguing Iraq might reconstitute weapons programs, Ritter quickly moved to claiming that no evidence for development existed at all. Thus, Ritter became a hero to the anti-war movement and, as Bai notes, was entertained and wined and dined by the likes of Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, and others of the Hollywood elite.
All of the above, however, is not the handle for Bai’s story. Rather: the salacious, tawdry portrayal of a pathetic, haunted man — a premature pedophile, who spent his time surfing the internet in search of teenage girls he planned to meet at secret locations (such as deserted parking lots at night) where he could then masturbate in front of them! Yes, this is the theme of Bai’s articles, complete with the details we really do not need to know.
Ritter, as we learned, had an internet handle of Delmarm4fun. Bai begins his article with excerpts of an internet chat Ritter thought he was having with a teen named Emily, but who turned out to be Ryan Venneman, a police officer in Barrett Township, Pennsylvania. The following exchange between Ritter and the cop is, I kid you not, from Bai’s article:
“Age?” delmarm4fun asked.
“15.”
“Aha,” came the response. “New York or Pa.?”
A graphic flirtation ensued. At one point, delmarm4fun asked “Emily” again if she was 18.
“No, I’m 15,” Venneman replied.
“Aha,” delmarm4fun said again. “My bad.”
“What’s wrong?” Venneman asked.
“Didn’t realize you were 15. . . .”
“So why u don’t like me,” Venneman typed, mimicking an adolescent’s mangled syntax.
“I do, very much. LOL. Just don’t want any trouble.”
After about an hour of this, according to logs later presented in court, the man Venneman was talking to masturbated in front of a webcam and announced he was off to take a shower.
In other words — and there are no other words to describe Scott Ritter — he is a sick, very sick man. So why again, I ask, did the Times run this piece, and even ask Bai, their top political journalist, to write it?The clue is in Bai’s very obvious bias to show that this is all so sad, because Ritter should be a hero, since he was purportedly the man who exposed the perfidies of the Clinton and Bush administrations, both of whom wanted to foist regime change in Iraq and oust Hussein. Look at some of the following words in the article:
Ritter’s opponents on Iraq still aren’t willing to grant that he knew something they didn’t. The way they see it, Ritter, whose position on W.M.D.’s swung significantly after he left the country in 1998, was like the stopped clock that finally managed to tell the correct time.
And it was Ritter who then did an about-face and emerged, during the long period that led to the war, as the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. In a bizarre moment in 2002, Ritter even made the long journey back to Baghdad to address the Iraqi Parliament as a private citizen, warning that his own country was about to make a “historical mistake” and urging the Iraqis to allow inspections to resume. For this, and for his relentless insistence that the presence of hidden W.M.D.’s was nothing but a political pretense for war, Ritter was dismissed and even mocked by much of the media establishment (including writers for this magazine and The New York Times)
Was Ritter really “credible,” as Bai argues? One must remember that when Ritter started shilling for Saddam Hussein you could not find one Democrat or Republican who had any inkling that Iraq was not hiding weapons. And to whom did he speak when he went to the controlled parliament — a rubber stamp for the totalitarian Ba’ath Party — as a “private citizen”? Who let him do that? Would any real independent person be welcomed by Saddam to play such a role? Do those actions make Ritter any real kind of hero? Would a legitimate journalist, someone with the integrity of the late Christopher Hitchens, let us say, be welcome to speak in Iraq?
Yes, and Bai also makes it clear: “It’s fair to say that the war…produced few real heroes…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.” (my emphasis)
That above sentence gives you the real agenda: We should separate our disgust for Ritter’s personal behavior — which hurts no one but himself — and pronounce him as a hero because he was always right, when no one else was. Bai even insinuates — but does not quite say — that it is suspicious that the charges against him emerged “just as the administration was preparing to invade Iraq,” and seemed “to indicate that his political adversaries meant to destroy his credibility.” Perhaps. But it was Ritter himself who engaged in this behavior, and his detractors did not have to invent it.
Indeed, Bai tells us that “he claims that the American government suspected him of spying for Israel; that Norman Schwarzkopf, the gulf-war general, once had him arrested; that the F.B.I. hounded [his wife] Marina for years because it suspected she was former K.G.B. You can’t help wondering how one man managed to attract so much institutional persecution.”
And yet, this is the same man of whom Bai also writes that “History will record…that Ritter was right, while those who showed him nothing but contempt were flat wrong.” Ritter, he says, was “the one with the most on-the-ground intelligence.” And Bai rationalizes his continual flip-flops, by writing that he “demonstrated a capacity to evolve in his thinking.” He was “never taken in.”
Yet, a few paragraphs before, he quotes Ritter’s boss at the UN agency, “ ‘Oh, no, he wasn’t prescient, I can’t agree with that’ said Richard Butler, who was Ritter’s boss under the United Nations in Iraq. ‘When he was the “Alpha Dog” inspector,’ Butler said, referring to Ritter’s own description of his aggressive tactics, ‘then by God, there were more weapons there, and we had to go find them — a contention for which he had inadequate evidence. When he became a peacenik, then it was all complete B.S., start to finish, and there were no weapons of mass destruction. And that also was a contention for which he had inadequate evidence.’ ” Butler should know the truth, but Bai simply disregards what he says entirely.
Then we have Bai’s strange seeming apologias for Ritter’s repulsive current behavior. Take this line from the article:
It’s not as though Ritter, who is the father of twin 19-year-old daughters, was trolling an adolescent site looking to prey on minors. Nor did he ever hint at meeting with the fictional Emily face to face.
No, he was trolling regular websites looking for minors.
As Bai writes:
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.
Yes, Bai shows he was his own worst enemy. Ritter knows he has only himself to blame for his behavior, and for not taking the years since he was first caught, and justice was lenient with him, to get real help. Now he is going to prison.
But since anyone who wanted to know about Ritter could find the sordid details years ago when they first appeared in print, Bai cites the leftist journalist Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote of the “murky but effective charge of something like attempted pedophilia” in 2003 – what is the purpose of now dredging this up once again?
The answer is rather clear: We are supposed to sigh our collective heads and feel very, very sorry for Scott Ritter, an unsung hero whose personal problems have led him to lose the ability to earn a living, and to go to jail, instead of being praised galore and used as a pundit on CNN.
Chalk up Bai’s article as one more example of the Grey Lady’s continued efforts to get out of prison anyone who was a 60s leftist terrorist or an anti-war person who exposed the would-be lies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The only problem is that if these folks are in prison, their own behavior got them there. We may feel sorry, especially if it is the likes of Ritter who is psychologically damaged, but the politics the editors and writers of the Times approve of and which in this case Ritter holds, is no excuse for the freedom.
I think another reason for the article is that the Times wants to differentiate itself from those Republicans like Rick Santorum and his supporters who would be much too uptight to write about a man masturbating in front of a teenage girl, whereas sophisticates like those who read the NYT know that this is a part of life, and those who can’t accept all parts of life, even the most degenerate parts, are really people who hate life and hate sex and hate everything good. Or some thought process like that.
Not surprising. Look how many on the Left defend Roman Polanski.
“Chalk up Bai’s article as one more example of the Grey Lady’s continued efforts to get out of prison anyone who was a 60’s leftist terrorist or an anti-war person….”
Nonsense. The Times in no way calls for Ritter’s release. And the fact that RR, a tabloid columnist, can consider this a piece of tabloid journalism, shows how warped his judgment is. (I was going to write “how warped his judgment has become,” but his jump from one lunatic fringe to the other just proves the old adage that the leopard doesn’t change his spots.)
PATRIOT493: hey, silly….did you miss the whole point of Radosh’s article for a reason? Even when I was a skeptic of the war and the conclusion that there were WMD’s in Iraq, I still thought Ritter was a nut. He was the biggest advocate for Saddam’s removal based upon the existence of WMD’s, then overnight he’s the biggest advocate that there never were! And then he gets caught doing pervy things with what he believes to be little girls! If those three moments of truth do not speak volumes to the rational mind that Ritter has NO credibility in ANYTHING that he says, then nothing does. And that’s the point: The NYT IGNORES the basic, simple, in-your-face, truth and promotes an article that hails Ritter as a hero!? Do you not see the madness here? And if you do not, why is that? What is it about Ritter that you approve, or fail to disapprove? Ask yourself that friend.
I was responding to a specific claim in RR’s piece, and I repeat: Nowhere does the Times argue that Ritter should be released.
As to the “hero” question, the bottom line is that Ritter was correct, there were no WMDs, and he tried to avert war by appealing to the Iraqis to allow inspectors free access. Does that make him a hero? Is the Times calling him a hero? RR emphasizes the sentence, “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.”
Of what should he be vindicated? The Times answers that question in a previous paragraph not cited by RR:
“For … his relentless insistence that the presence of hidden W.M.D.’s was nothing but a political pretense for war, Ritter was dismissed and even mocked by much of the media establishment (including writers for this magazine and The New York Times).”
The Times article describes a man, once in the public eye, now disgraced and imprisoned, and who has lost touch with reality. An interesting story.
You know, here’s the thing: Ron Radosh writes under his own name. You, “Patriot493,” call Mr. Radosh – author of many books including a recent well-regarded history of Truman and Israel – a “tabloid journalist,” yet you hide under a cowardly pseudonym. What is the reader supposed to think? I certainly know what I think.
Pat sez: “And the fact that RR, a tabloid columnist, can consider this a piece of tabloid journalism, shows how warped his judgment is.” Pat, do the word non-sequitur strike a familiar note?
But I think I am getting your points. Writing a column for a “tabloid” is much worse than planning to strangle the fowl in front of a 15-year-old. And, incontrovertibly crying WMD and shortly thereafter saying there are no WMD? Hey that’s as much as to aver that Ritter is an interesting guy.
As I recall, prior to our invasion of Iraq and thereafter, here and there, mostly on the Internet-based “undermedia,” there was a fair amount of information and a lot of very specific detail about how Saddam–with the help of specifically named Russian military units (with mention of satellite images of caravans of trucks heading for the border)–had transported much of his WMD arsenal across the border into Syria on the eve of our invasion.
Then, there were the downplayed official reports of all sorts of odds and ends–of small amounts of what appeared to be left behind/overlooked chemical and biological warfare agents and nuclear material, chem/bio protective suits and anti-CW atropine syrettes, and bits and pieces of the technology needed to produce WMD that kept being discovered as our forces moved through Iraq.
Evidence all totally ignored by the MSM, explained away, or just very briefly reported and then never followed up on; dots deliberately not connected, because they would destroy the Left and the Democrats preferred “narrative” about how Saddam didn’t have and never did have any WMD, and how the U.S. fabricated evidence of the presence of WMDs in order to justify an unnecessary war (no mention–I notice–about how, in the days leading up to our invasion, every intelligence service in the world, and virtually every world leader, and politician in the Congress was convinced and believed that the WMDs were there, and were a deadly threat, and said so publicly–all that has been stuffed down the “memory hole” and is no longer mentioned–that part of history has been “disappeared”), a narrative about the “lie” about WMDs that has been repeated so many times by the MSM now, that it is just assumed to be the Truth i.e. this narrative’s version of “the science is settled.”
Thus, when Ritter abruptly switched 180 degrees from being a pit bull trying to go after the evidence verifying their presence and the actual WMDs that he knew were there–I remember one particular report of him trying to get into the front gate of a facility and being purposely delayed there while trucks pulled out of the back gate and away–to totally denying that there were ever any WMDs in Iraq or any good evidence for that proposition–I thought that he had been “gotten to.”
Knowing what we know now, perhaps he was being blackmailed, or perhaps being supplied with his drug of choice as an inducement to so abruptly and totally change his position.
I think it’s obvious that he flipped because somebody got a handle on him. The biggest question is WHO flipped him — Saddam’s Iraqis, Russians, or some faction of the American left.
Thank you for reminding us of those discarded facts…..inconvenient facts for those who opposed our getting into Iraq in the first place. I remember those events just as you recount them here. Especially shunted aside (by the MSM?….who else besides the anti-administration types had that capability of seemingly unified opinion?) were the widespread conclusions of the intelligence agencies of various nations that Saddam was hard at work getting WMD’s organized. They weren’t making that stuff up…cooperation in some areas is assumed, but unified action across so many governments’ closely held intelligence agencies just doesn’t seem very plausible.
Beside, for the WMD stuff that didn’t make it out crossing over into Syria on the truck convoys, there’s a lot of shifting open sand out there to hide evidence of burials. OK, where does one start to dig? When or if we get deeply into Syria, where do we start digging there?….by following rice trails back across another border into Russia….we shouldn’t be surprised at not finding those WMD crates on pallets in warehouses.
The “news” media don’t have all of the credibility they’d like us to think they have and apply daily, so healthy skepticism of the media from us public, unwashed stiffs is to be cultivated among ourselves for our own health.
I remember thinking it strange when Ritter did his about-face on WMD in Iraq–and then suddenly thinking it not so strange at all when the story of his extracurricular activities came out. After all, I assume that Saddam Hussein’s people would have been very active in trying to find weaknesses in people like Ritter, and if they had managed to discover his secret predilections, then the next step would have been obvious…
YES! During one of the hearing held about the Saddam’s weaponry, Scott Ritter spoke of the dreadful ‘childrens prison, run by Saddam, to keep various Iraqis in line.
Well. I noted this, and have decided that the Iraqis let Ritter into this (to him) lollipop factory, took videos, and thus… the famous 180 switcheroo.
Scott Ritter was likely blackmailed by Saddam or his allies. It would have probably a relatively easy thing to do. Ritter was not exactly subtle and discrete. A few days of intense investigation might have been sufficient. Also, how lucrative were the financial rewards for reversing his position? Leftists normally make sure their people are well compensated.
– make it into Syria. Let’s see what Assad uses.
Good article
Two points
1–Christopher Hitchens confessed to molesting underage boys in the 70s in his recent autobiography
2–Hitchens supported the Kurd Trotskyists–who murdered many, many 1000s Christians in Armenia and Iraq–Hitchens never condemned the murder or Christian
3-Hitchens was a long term friend and supporter of the Holocaust denier David Irving
Victor has a nutty hatred for Hitchens, he didn’t wait till the body was cold before posting lies.
This isn’t the first time.
It’s not just Hitchens, it’s all us loathsome neocons. But Hitchens was special case, vis-a-vis the Zionazis. That alone shoulda redeemed him in Victor’s eyes.
How I’d love to tear the mask off that guy Ritter… What you’d find is the same ugly character as his surface portrays, although in different construction.
If every charge against him is false, he is still just as evil.
Why would anyone even want to read NYTimes. It has been established time and time again that there is no true journalism at NYT. They are only interested in propagating the leftist ideology by any means and they lie to push their point. Nobody in their sane mind can ever trust what NYT and other liberal rags say!!
…Bai’s very obvious bias to show that this is all so sad, because Ritter should be a hero, since he was purportedly the man who exposed the perfidies of the Clinton and Bush administrations…
Scottie Ritter was revealed as a sexual predator & a pervert in the aftermath of his schizophrenic Iraq gig.
His shape shifting on Iraq was, in and of itself, a function of whatever he perceived to his personal advantage at the moment.
Ritter exposed “perfidies” in the same way that Valerie Plame’s husband Joe Wilson exposed “truth” in the manufactured brouhaha surrounding Plamegate, i.e., in service to nefarious and self-serving motivations.
“Journalists” like Bai are digging deeper and deeper for lies justifying their personal agendas & worldviews.
(The behavior reminds me of a certain president who takes the prize for that dynamic.)
Attempting to rehabilitate a Scott Ritter in service to bolstering a viewpoint is disgusting.
But Ritter is one of the GOOD pedophiles! He should get a pass. Sort of like Roman Polanski. There is no such thing as public disgrace for a famous (notorious) person/convict with left political leanings, no matter how disgusting their behavior.
Sexual predation seems to be just fine with the Left, as long as it’s coming from their guys. Or, in Ritter’s case, guys that Leftists can twist and use to promote the agenda.
As Whoopi said, what Polanski did with a 13 YO girl wasn’t really “rape rape”.
Great post, but there’s an obvious answer to your question: it’s a great story! A man tormented by personal and professional demons, a Cassandra figure whose sexual perversion is a an outgrowth of his own wounded sense of greatness–hell, if the guy were Jewish it would be like a real-life Philip Roth novel. Now all of this means that Bai’s article has more in common with one of Werner Herzog’s famously stage-managed documentaries than with actual, honest journalism. But it’s at least obvious to me that Bai fixated on a novelistic (yet selective and misleading) narrative and just said the hell with it…
Perhaps Bill Clinton could have been asked to comment on Ritter’s serious charges.
Sorry but I thought thre was one and only one “Times” and it is published in London. Given that the subject was on international politics it was wrong to name the New York Times as “the Times”
Hmm. It never seemed all that complicated, to me.
Ritter’s beef was that the UN and the US didn’t take the inspection regime seriously, and let saddam get away with all manner of sneakery. It seemed to me (and I think ritter as well) that saddam simply didn’t WANT the world to think he was disarmed – for extremely obvious reasons, like becoming an easy target.
Ritter wanted the world to pursue the tactic it was authorised to use – rigorous inspections and sanctions. And it didn’t. Instead it let hussein play games with inspectors, make money out of oil and continue to screw over his people. The reason? Because nobody actually really believed saddam was a threat. Not really. He was contained, so it didn’t matter.
Then, one day, for reasons truly know only them themselves, a president and a couple of prime ministers decided that they needed saddam to be a threat again so that they could invade. Ritter (and others) knew how BS the case for war was. Over time, the case for war war with iraq became crafted. Nobody could say he had nuclear, because we actually knew he didn’t have nuclear. We couldn’t (officially) say he had biological weapons, because we knew he didn’t. We weren’t even particularly sure about chemical weapons (and let’s face it – EVERYONE has chemical weapons). So we came up with WMD “programs”, and then bigged-up WMD to make it sound a bit like nuclear (15 minute warnings to a mushroom cloud over new york, and all that sort of garbage). And “weapons trucks” and shady links to al quaeda and other fairy tales. And yes, it was very important that 60% of americans thought he had something to do with 9/11, so the MSM made sure of it.
And when it was all said and done, the german intelligence agencies carried the can, because everyone put all their chips on one dodgy defector … coz he was all anybody had. The coalition had no evidence, but they had that one guy and he’d say anything. He’s out of reach now, though. He did ok.
And now we have the entirely predictable situation where certain groups want the world to believe (as they have since the 80′s) that iran is a couple of years away from having the bomb. But nobody believes intelligence any more. And it’s no wonder. Can anyone really blame level-headed, intelligent people for looking at claims based on secret intelligence and thinking “yeah, right, pull the other one”?
So … does anyone actually KNOW why we invaded iraq? I think everyone’s got a theory. But why did bush (or cheney, rather) actually DO it? Wasn’t about oil. There’s no (actualy) shortage of oil in the world – a couple of billion in government money into production and we’d all be fine. And we could have had iraq’s any time we wanted – he would have been happy to take our money. It wasn’t ever really about WMD, because we now know how weak that case was (we really do, so stop pretending). It doesn’t appear to have been about liberating anything, because bush didn’t send enought troops to do that. Casey apparently didn’t know that was his job until he reached baghdad. He thought he was just supposed to take the capital. So why DID we invade iraq? Anyone? Anyone? Bush rode two terms on that war, so somebody MUST know why.