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Topic Review (Newest First)
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| Jul 28th, 2003 02:05 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
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| Jul 28th, 2003 12:13 PM | |||||
| kellychaos |
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I think of a Vinth and I take away reason and accountability. |
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| Jul 27th, 2003 08:35 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... | As my entire entire argument was based off of a misunderstanding, I don't think there's much to discuss here. As for my efficiency comment, I wasn't speaking so much from the actual fighting as lobbying for support, etc. | ||||
| Jul 27th, 2003 06:47 PM | |||||
| The_Rorschach |
For the record, the way I understood it being presented on CNN, Ritter recieved monies from a US citizen, apostate, living in Saudi Arabia. It was like six to eight months ago though, I could be misremembering. I do support Ritter, I also supported the war. I said at the time I think Bush should have emulated Kennedy's Cuba public campaign presenting a clear cut, and factually supported case to the people. The WMD was a moot point with me because I believed then, as I do now, that the US needs to take one of two stances regarding the ME: One, withdraw support for Israel, and politically step out of the ME altogether. This would be my ideal solution, and what I personally lobby for. Israel is not a nation to be trusted. Two, subdue Iraqi,Iran, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Egypt, and impliment democratic qualities, and leave as quickly as possible. "I'd like to clarify that I'm no Bush lover, and I certainly think the war could have been handled more efficiently." More efficiently? As a prior service member myself, I am still amazed at how efficient it was. I have no fucking idea what criteria you are using to judge efficiency and affect, but I would simply LOVE to be enlightened. |
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| Jul 26th, 2003 11:54 AM | |||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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And what the hell does "Joe the American" have to do with anything? What the hell is that shit? Scott Ritter is a decorated U.S. Marine, he's a war veteran, and on weekends he serves as a volunteer fireman in his community. I think Ritter has got a tiny bit more on "Joe." Quote:
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| Jul 25th, 2003 04:20 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
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In my opinion, there is no such thing as a clean politician: some just don't get caught. |
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| Jul 25th, 2003 02:13 PM | |||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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No middle eastern nation has made a large sum donation to the Scott Ritter for traitor campaign. He received money to make a film from an Iraqi AMERICAN. Quote:
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| Jul 25th, 2003 01:29 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
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Now, I'm not saying he couldn't be telling the truth. After all, I can see why they would give him money for that. What I am saying is that it is all too possible for some underhanded dealings to have been going on here. Hence, I don't trust him. Is that too hard to comprehend? Rorschach: If you really feel the need to make insults to get your point across, then I pity you. All: I'd like to clarify that I'm no Bush lover, and I certainly think the war could have been handled more efficiently. I just think it's sad that the anti-war folks, and often leftists in general, are pulling out everything they can against Bush rather than promote their own damn agendas. I think many americans, idiots or not, would be somewhat skeptical of this man - there is a time and place for everything, and now is not the time to pull out so-so information that could easily be disregarded. |
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| Jul 25th, 2003 06:04 AM | |||||
| The_Rorschach |
"All I'm saying is that he is still a suspicious character." The words can be used to describe one and only perfectly. I would guess he is a character, and a poorly portrayed one as well. |
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| Jul 25th, 2003 12:02 AM | |||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
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| Jul 24th, 2003 04:33 PM | |||||
| ranxer |
pocketing some of what money? ritter is a capitalist.. with morals.. he's got to pay rent like the rest of us.. he's also couragous, do you think he's speaking out against bush and war for profit??!! do you think he's speaking out for popularity?! he's an american doing what he can to help the country, he voted for bush and feels regret. because his values are more important than his party, i give him a lot of respect for the risks he's taken. ignore him if you like, he's still right(correct) |
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| Jul 24th, 2003 01:45 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
Now your just babbling. I didn't say this guy was a leftist: what I said was the the left is the side that is reporting on him. He IS more mud to throw, and the best mud to throw IS FACT. I really don't care what you are. All I'm saying is that he is still a suspicious character. If you can give me proof that he was not pocketing some of that money, then I will trust him more. You won't be able to. To me, this is a neutral person. There is no dirt on him, but there certainly isn't anything pretty either. Thus, I shall ignore him. BTW: Take some of your own advice: quit associating all of the war supporters with pro-bush advocates. And for god sakes, don't think you have to anti-war to be a patriot. 
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| Jul 24th, 2003 12:08 PM | |||||
| ranxer |
hahaa, one and only i think it's pretty stupid to talk in left and right..(much of the time) i am waht i am and let others define it.. if you accusers of left and right want to bury the hatchet in left or right so be it.. but i for one don't even want to be partisan.. Scott Ritter isnt the left he's a true patriot.. as many of us are.. patriots, unaffraid to examine and re-examine our opinions and policies, unaffraid to point out the duplicity of either left or right. i think these extraordinary left and right definers are a result of the neo-con definitions coming out('follow bush .. he's the leader even though he wasnt elected.. put all yer chips with him!'  ) but that's another story.. if you continue to associate left with anti-bush.. vs. PEOPLE(or patriots) being anti-bush then you link the administration to more than it is.. the bush administration is NOT a success of the Right.. and the impeachment of bush is NOT a defeat of the right.. unless you want it to be i'm really sick of left vs right crap.. its WAY TOO general. I'm interested in the prosecution of CRIMINALS and especially Corporate Criminal acts within our government.. I am NOT interested in frying the 'right' as much as a few of you think. MUD?! BWHAHA facts are not mud.. have you even ever listened to scott ritter oneandonly? |
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| Jul 23rd, 2003 03:41 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
Re: Hate to say I told ya so, but..... Quote:
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| Jul 23rd, 2003 03:37 PM | |||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
Re: Hate to say I told ya so, but..... Quote:
First you say that him merely being "suspected" to be a turncoat makes him un-trustworthy. So the details behind the mud don't bother you, you're just concerned with the mud itself. Then you say you don't trust him because he's just more mud for the Left to throw. 
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| Jul 22nd, 2003 09:27 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
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I'm too tired for this... I can't even read correctly tonight... I haven't had caffeine all day and it's almost 10... Sorry about the misunderstanding. |
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| Jul 22nd, 2003 09:20 PM | |||||
| Zero Signal |
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| Jul 22nd, 2003 08:57 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
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| Jul 22nd, 2003 08:54 PM | |||||
| The_Rorschach |
Dude, learn to read, I didn't even typo up there. Even if I had, hopefully in a politics and sociological forum we can keep the conversational level above the third grade level. |
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| Jul 22nd, 2003 08:45 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
It still seems suspicious. The claims do not have any evidence to go with them, but even so... Let's just put it this way: I don't believe much, even less some of the things you find off the internet. That, and I don't see anything "uniform" by my comment. I hear a hell of a lot more from people who don't support the war than do, which would suggest they are the ones making "uniform" statements. |
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| Jul 22nd, 2003 08:32 PM | |||||
| The_Rorschach |
One and Only. . .You continue to amaze me. The only reason he was considered a 'turncoat' was because he accepted donatives, from the ME and elsewhere, which helped fund his information dissemination campaign here in the US and there were allegations he profited from it. Furthermore he spoke against US policy in the ME, and elsewhere, hoping that if he could not persuade the US public, he might be able to appeal to the international community. Hardly the actions of a turncoat, simply an active patriot whom tried to save their country from committing a costly blunder. Rumours of him and a fifteen year old girl were what caused the most injury to his reputation. Later, I believe, they were discovered to be unfounded. I supported him then, though I was not certain whether or not intelligence was as current as he believed I did respect his cautious outlook, and I am pleased to know he has not been forgotten. One and Only, if you know absolutely nothing about an issue, it is often better to simply be silent. Chiming in halfassed uninformed remarks doesn't help anyone, least of all you. |
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| Jul 22nd, 2003 08:13 PM | |||||
| The One and Only... |
Re: Hate to say I told ya so, but..... Quote:
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| Jul 22nd, 2003 02:42 PM | |||||
| KevinTheOmnivore |
Hate to say I told ya so, but..... .....Scott Ritter told ya so. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0721-03.htm Published on Sunday, July 20, 2003 by the Baltimore Sun A War Critic Returns to the Spotlight by Robert Little Scott Ritter watched the televised war unfold like everyone else, and writhed with anxiety as Americans in chemical suits rumbled toward the unknown treacheries of outer Baghdad. For one of the few times that he has ever acknowledged, Ritter started to wonder if maybe he was wrong. The former United Nations weapons inspector had spent the previous seven months touring newsrooms and universities around the United States and the world to argue that Iraq was not a threat, and that it almost certainly did not possess meaningful quantities of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Unlike other pre-war commentators, Ritter had inspected Iraq's weapons sites himself and interviewed the country's scientists and government leaders. He began that tour, he says, because he was certain that the Bush administration was lying about Iraq's weapons potential, to justify what he sees as an illegal war. Yet, as soldiers plowed toward Baghdad last March, Ritter imagined Iraqi troops air-bursting a chemical warhead over their heads, killing Americans and proving Bush right. "Given the forcefulness of the Bush administration's assertions," Ritter wrote in his new book, which began arriving in stores last week, and repeated in a recent interview, "I had gnawing doubts." Today Ritter has rarely seemed more right. The former U.S. Marine, whose stature as an authority on Iraqi weapons was seemingly shattered before the war by various claims that he was a turncoat, a spy or a criminal, has begun a re-emergence of sorts, bolstered by the Bush administration's persisting failure to prove him wrong. A man widely dismissed as a traitor when he gave a speech in Baghdad to say the United States was "on the verge of making a historical mistake," is getting calls again from reporters and speech schedulers, as the search for Iraq's weapons stockpile plods on. "Everything I said in that speech in Baghdad has been shown to be dead-on accurate, and it will stay that way because that's what it was - the truth," said Ritter, 42, in a telephone interview from his home outside Albany, N.Y. "We staggered collectively into this war without scrutinizing the evidence, without being harshly critical of the case that the Bush administration was presenting, and now we're finding out - surprise, surprise - that it's all based on a lie. "A lot of people ask if I feel vindicated, but that question assumes this is about me. It's not. It's about the credibility of the United States. And that's one of the great tragedies of all this." If Ritter's image has not been fully restored by the latest events in Iraq, that might be because it has vacillated so wildly since he first emerged in the public eye in 1998, by resigning spectacularly as the United Nations' chief weapons inspector in Iraq. When he went before Congress that year to explain that the Clinton administration had corrupted his inspections team with spies and that Iraq posed an imminent threat if the inspections process was not cleaned up and strengthened, he was hailed as a fearless patriot. Paul D. Wolfowitz, then in academia and now one of the Bush administration's primary Pentagon strategists, called Ritter "a public servant of exceptional integrity and moral courage," and said he was honored to speak at the same hearing with him. That honeymoon with the hawks began to wither as soon as Clinton ordered four days of missile strikes against Baghdad in December of 1998, a reaction that Ritter considered unnecessarily harsh, illegal under international law and grossly out of proportion to the threat he believed Iraq to pose. "To me, that was just proof that the American administrations dating back to Bush the elder were never concerned with weapons of mass destruction or Iraq's military threat," Ritter said. "They just wanted to get Saddam Hussein." Ritter would be transformed in the ensuing years from the conservatives' darling into one of the most prominent anti-war critics in the country. "It's one thing for a tree-hugger from San Francisco to say there was no justification for war in Iraq. It's another thing for someone who was a Marine for 12 years, who fought a war in Iraq himself, who spent seven years in Iraq hunting for weapons of mass destruction and has followed the trail of evidence," he said. "I knew people wouldn't like it, but I knew people would listen." And he denies that his arguments have changed since 1998. He always believed that Iraq had substantially disarmed, but that an inspections regimen was necessary to suppress the 5 percent or 10 percent of its capability that remains. But the suggestion of a "flip-flop" has dogged his credibility ever since. "My view is that he is ... not a particularly credible figure on this subject," said Daniel Klaidman, Newsweek's Washington Bureau chief, in an interview with CNN before the war. "He's had this weird conversion from being very anti-Iraq, and all of a sudden he is the biggest ... anti-war guy out there." Ritter's deep association with Iraq began during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, when he served in the Marine Corps as an intelligence analyst who interpreted battle-damage reports. He resigned form the Corps not long after the war's conclusion and went to work for the commission of the U.N. Security Council that was established to monitor Iraq's disarmament. In July 1995, he became the chief inspector for UNSCOM, as the committee was called, and would retain that post until he resigned. In the summer of 1996, Ritter says, he was approached by employees of the CIA and asked to join the agency as an agent, and that he agreed to take a lie-detector test as part of the interview process. After the test, allegations surfaced that he was working for UNSCOM as an Israeli spy; he came to believe that the U.S. government had some furtive foreign policy goals that conflicted with his role as a U.N. inspector. Other claims have surfaced since his resignation from UNSCOM, including unsubstantiated reports that he was on Saddam Hussein's payroll. "It's the kind of game they play, to create the impression that you're tainted goods and then just leave it out there to follow you everywhere you go," Ritter said. "I mean, what was Saddam going to pay me for? To tell the truth?" The most recent flap caused perhaps the most damage, and came just days before he was to depart for a second meeting in Iraq - this time to promote a proposed peace solution. A New York newspaper reported that Ritter had been arrested in 2001 for allegedly trying to set up a meeting with a 16-year-old girl over the Internet. The misdemeanor case was adjourned in contemplation of dismissal, and the file sealed. But the FBI was reportedly contemplating another look at the case, which led to its public disclosure. The trip to Iraq was canceled. Ritter says that a court order prevents anyone involved from discussing the case, and has persistently refused to discuss it in any detail or even acknowledge the basic details. The charges and his reaction to them further alienated him from the mainstream media. His new book, Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America, chronicles his viewpoints about Iraq's weapons and how they have so far endured. It was published by Context Books, which specializes in controversial subjects that other publishers spurn. He continues to gives speeches when invited, lately to slightly larger audiences. And people familiar with his work and his history expect him to continue. "Scott is technically very knowledgeable and was a first-rate inspector. He's certainly qualified to make operational assessments about how inspections should be conducted and the effectiveness of those inspections," said Jay Davis a former UNSCOM inspector who was the founding director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency. "The only criticism I have of Scott's comments - not of Scott himself, but his comments - is that he has not had access to the primary intelligence used to assess Iraq's weapons capabilities since he ceased to be an inspector. He's no more qualified to comment on what has taken place since he left than you or I. "But I'll say this about him as well: He's smart enough to have known how some people were going to treat him during all this. You're a little naive if you make enemies inside the Beltway and think that they're not going to do whatever they can to make you regret it." Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun ### |
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