“I’m not a foreign agent but a journalist. What the US government did yesterday was a frontal assault on a free press. That the Russian government and I have coinciding views on critical issues of the day might reflect that we’re both on the right side of history as opposed to me being an agent of the Russian government. In fact, it does reflect that we’re both on the right side of history.”
Scott Ritter, August 8 2024
The upstate New York home of Scott Ritter was raided by US authorities on Wednesday, August 7th. Their stated grounds were a prima facie violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Hence Scott’s statement as replicated above.
This is the second time in under three months the former UN Weapons Inspector, who refused to endorse the Washington-London lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction – a lie which led to the deaths of millions of Iraqi civilians, consigned the country and wider region to sectarian terror, transferred its state sectors including oil 1 to private hands and was conceived as the first of seven regime change operations in the middle east 2 – has been targeted by the US government. In June he was arrested at JFK airport by Border & Customs officials acting at the behest of the State Department. They seized his passport and so prevented him from flying to St Petersburg to address the RT-hosted economic forum.
Scott features often on this site with closely argued critiques, military no less than moral, of the absurd but deafeningly drilled in narrative that Russia’s Ukraine SMO of February 24 2022 was unprovoked. 3 Since the facts – see the bullet list in my June 10 post – overwhelmingly support Scott’s version (and that of many others in a position to offer informed views) the governments of the US-led West, aided by media systemically unable to speak truth to power when truth seriously threatens power, are using every channel of narrative control – a propaganda blitz of wall-to-wall repetition and the ridiculing, marginalising and intimidating of all who oppose such evidence-defiant yet widely accepted nonsense – to drive it home. 4
Of course Russia was provoked! Why else would media have to keep telling us the Ukraine invasion was unprovoked?
Noam Chomsky
It’s hard to see, given these things on the one hand, Washington’s form (ask Julian Assange!) on the other, the FBI raid as other than a crude attempt to intimidate Scott; an assault on freedom of speech and press freedom. Thanks to wall to wall demonising of the RF president, those who articulate an understanding of the Ukraine conflict which chimes with that of the Kremlin are vilified in social and liberal media as, ipso facto, Russian agents. 5 It is wholly predictable, then, that such ‘reasoning’ would be embraced with conscious cynicism or self-serving credulity on Capitol Hill.
Corporate mainstream media clearly tipped off in advance – since such intimidation seeks to put likeminded others on notice – were there to film the raid. In so doing they revealed Scott Ritter’s address to his many enemies. As he wryly notes, “my government has just doxxed me”.
Here’s a 33 second clip of the Wednesday event …
… and here in his own words is Scott Ritter’s brief account and assessment …
… oh dear. Further coverage from WSWS and Caitlin Johnstone …
* * *
- Yes, it had everything to do with oil …
- Brigadier-General Wesley Clark wrote, shortly after 9/11:
In the Pentagon in November 2001, a senior military staff officer had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was to be part of a five-year plan against seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.
To this we can add the remarks of France’s former foreign minister, Roland Dumas, that London was preparing for war in Syria two years before the Daraa protests of 2011 and the accompanying propaganda blitz which saw most Westerners, including Marxists who should have known better, buying hook, line and sinker the Evil Assad narrative. The reason Dumas advanced was the “anti-Israeli” stance of Damascus but there’s more. We can add its preference for a pipeline bringing oil to Europe going north to Russian gain and Saudi/Emirate loss. And that with Iraq and Libya regime-changed, Syria would be the last Ba’athism (“Arab socialism”) in a Middle East of vital geostrategic significance to Western imperialism.
- Mr Ritter has been equally damning, again from both a military and moral perspective, of Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza.
- The human tendency to prioritise narrative over facts has on balance served us well for tens of millennia. Those narratives did, after all, have to square (however quaintly to the modern mind) with observable facts. But in a world shrunk by electronics and ruled by tiny elites, many facts are ‘observable’ only through media answerable not to truth but, on matters of vital importance, those elites. Now our elevation of tribe-unifying narrative carries great danger. When Ken Livingstone said Hitler had backed Zionism, he advanced a claim which could be upheld or refuted by appeals to evidence. Likewise Nigel Farage’s claim that Russia – whose leader he detests by the way – had indeed been provoked into invading the Ukraine. Neither happened. Both claims were drowned out by propaganda blitz on the men making them. It helped that, for different reasons in different circles and aided by different media, the pair made easy targets.
- There was a time, which ended long before the Ukraine conflict, when I still engaged with FB and Guardian commenters. Often called a “Putin-bot”, I was once asked about today’s weather in Moscow. Ever get the feeling you just might have overestimated homo sapiens sapiens?
Scott Ritter, who I admire and respect greatly, certainly doesn’t take what’s done to him lying down. He’s right that “lawyering up” and saying nothing is viewed by some as a sign of guilt. He’s made of strong stuff.
About narrative control, I find it deeply frustrating that so many are willing dupes. I rarely express views re Gaza or Ukraine in company, because of the funny looks I get when I’ve stated verifiable facts. I used to be taken in by propaganda, I admit, but with the existence of independent media, I feel there’s no excuse to fall for the lies, as you say of mainstream media incapable of holding power to account on issues vital to power.
There’s an as always excellent piece on Scheerpost today from Patrick Lawrence, which in a long article, observes that Israel can no longer fool certainly most Americans about it’s nature. As Jonathan Cook said a few days ago, Israel was born in sin, and continues to this day in sin.
I’d like to think, certainly in the US, a tipping point will be reached where the bought and paid for politicians will pay a price for their repugnant support for the terrorist state of Israel. Let’s live in hope.
Two insights I find useful, even if I don’t always man up and apply them. One is that we gain better understandings of the world by studying cause and effect than by looking to an assumed innate fairness for comfort. The other comes from The Godfather:
I have been concerned for Scott for some time – that he would end up being entangled in FARA. He can and does argue that payment from RT and Sputnic and gratis travel and visit itineraries does not make him a paid agent of the Russian State but that might be a distinction lost on US prosecutors. His attendance as guest of honour at a Russian military parade is more difficult to defend and has the potential to be spun as very bad optics. He is in a very different league to the useful idiot status of Arthur Ransome – but I suspect he will be easily painted as a traitor and a threat to US morale as it faces the unravelling of its empire. Not sure what the consequences will be for him – but I remain concerned.
Me too. Scott is principled, courageous and highly intelligent – but prone I think to errors of judgment. Let’s hope this isn’t one of them.
The question is raised here – it pretty much raises itself – why don’t AIPAC, and the senators and congressfolk who fear and are fed by it, fall foul of FARA? See this discussion.