Scott Ritter’s Other War

On a February afternoon in 2009, Ryan Venneman, one of only five full-time police officers in tiny Barrett Township, Pa., decided to spend some time hunting for sexual predators online. Venneman entered a Yahoo chat room, where the minimum legal age is supposed be 18, and passed himself off as a teenager named Emily. Before long, he was contacted by a man who said he was 44 and called himself delmarm4fun — a reference to Delmar, N.Y., an Albany suburb about three hours from where Venneman was sitting in the Poconos.

“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.

“U know ur in a lot of trouble, don’t you,” Venneman typed.

“Huh?”

“I’m a undercover police officer. U need to call me A.S.A.P.”

“Nah,” delmarm4fun wrote. “Your not 15. Yahoo is for 18 and over. It’s all fantasy. No crime.”

“I have your phone number and I will be getting your IP address from Yahoo and your carrier,” Venneman wrote. “We can do this 2 ways call me and you can turn yourself in at a latter date or I’ll get a warrant for you and come pick you up.”

The perpetrator turned himself in almost immediately. Delmarm4fun, it turned out, was Scott Ritter, one of the most controversial figures in American foreign policy for the past decade and a half. It was Ritter, a former Marine major and United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, who quit the U.N. inspection team in 1998 and railed against Saddam Hussein’s government for misleading inspectors and scamming the international community. 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).

As the last American troops left Iraq, it’s fair to say that the war and the debate that surrounded it produced few real heroes; rather, it served as a kind of vortex of destruction that sucked in and defiled nearly everyone associated with it. 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, his life having slowly come undone in the years after the invasion. “It’s tragic,” Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker’s investigative reporter, said when we spoke this fall. Hersh grew close to Ritter in the late ’90s and appeared as a character witness at his trial in Pennsylvania last April. “He understands the Arab world in a way that few Westerners I know do. You have no idea how smart he is.”

Even after he was convicted on five felony counts and two misdemeanors last year, Ritter remained, as he always has, self-righteous and inclined toward seeing conspiracies. “I’m not humiliated,” he told me recently, when I suggested he should be. “It’s nobody else’s business. And anybody who seeks to make it their business, they should be humiliated. They should be ashamed. They should be embarrassed. What I did or what I didn’t do is nobody’s business but my own and my wife’s. And the fact that this had been dragged out into the public eye the way it has speaks volumes about our society.”

Those who came to Ritter’s defense around Iraq always argued that he was a courageous and patriotic American, unjustly defamed by opponents, while his critics portrayed him as unreliable and attention-starved — an “unstable” character, as Richard Perle, one of the administration’s war planners, once described him. The confounding thing about a figure as self-defeating and polarizing as Scott Ritter is that, with enough time, supporters and critics alike can come to feel they’ve been proved right.

“I’ll tell you why it doesn’t matter,” Ritter was saying. This was in October, a few weeks before he was to be sentenced for his crimes. I had asked him whether he thought he deserved some public acknowledgment that his warnings about Iraq and its supposed W.M.D.’s were correct. “Because today everybody knows I was right. I was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history. I was the only one who was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history.

“And yet,” Ritter went on, “the common reaction seems to be: ‘Well, that was then, this is now. Yeah, he was right back then, but how does that impact us today, 10 years later?’ ” He shook his head in disbelief. Ritter is an uncommonly articulate man, and when he gets going, the indignation flows in fully formed paragraphs. “What is the relevance of being right 10 years ago? I don’t know — talk about all the dead Americans. It’s relevant to their families, I would think. Talk about the tens of thousands of wounded Americans and the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis.”

We were sitting in a dark booth at the Recovery Room, a sports bar across the street from the Albany Medical Center. Ritter’s Georgian-born wife, Marina, whom he met as a weapons inspector in Russia in 1989, no longer allows reporters into their home, so Ritter and I had settled in here for the afternoon. Ritter, who was wearing a sweatshirt the size of a small tent, is a densely packed 6-foot-4. Talking to him about his various intrigues and scrapes with authority, I found it almost impossible to keep in mind any kind of linear narrative. 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 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.

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. “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.”

History will record, though, that Ritter was right, while those who showed him nothing but contempt were flat wrong. While he wasn’t the only one saying that the war’s pretense was false or that its aftermath could be calamitous, Ritter was almost certainly the most determined dissenter and the one with the most on-the-ground intelligence. And if his views on Hussein’s regime careened from one extreme to the other, at least he demonstrated a capacity to evolve in his thinking — something few policy makers or commentators showed themselves able to do at the time. No doubt his very existence continues to discomfit those who insisted on Hussein’s lethality, and whose explanation for why they were wrong — that the intelligence was fabricated, essentially — has always been undercut by the fact that Ritter was never taken in.

I asked him if the war in Iraq, which in a matter of weeks would effectively end, had turned out as he thought it would, or if it could have been worse. He considered the question.

“It could have been worse,” he said finally. “We could have won. We could have felt empowered to move on to Syria and Iran, and then we would have been totally screwed.

“But if we’re just going to get into the realm of reality,” Ritter went on, “how much worse do you want it? We’re bankrupt, morally and fiscally, because of this war. The United States is the laughingstock of the world.”

What really agonizes Ritter is that Americans seem to care about his forays into chat rooms, or about Michael Jackson’s doctor or the Kardashians’ wedding, but not about the moral crisis that Iraq unleashed on the land. They keep talking to Scott Ritter about justice for what he has done, and yet no one is paying for the larger crimes he believes were perpetrated against the society.

“Everybody who lied about the war got rewarded,” Ritter said. “Because they played the game. Tell the truth about the war, you don’t get rewarded.” He paused. “And then, you know, let’s be frank — you compound it with me shooting myself in the foot on personal, behavioral issues.” An awkward moment passed between us. “I’ll just ask the fundamental question,” Ritter said, looking at me squarely across the table. “My personal missteps — how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America seems to have no problem with that.”

In the years after he resigned as a weapons inspector in Iraq, after he changed his mind about the likelihood that Hussein was stockpiling weapons, Ritter briefly basked in the adulation of America’s liberal aristocracy. He was asked to speak at Hollywood fund-raisers; at one, he recalled, Barbra Streisand “sequestered” him for 40 minutes, and then Warren Beatty drove Ritter to his house for homemade chili and a 90-minute political discussion. Streisand, he said, later invited him and Marina to one of her retirement concerts, in New York, where the Ritters were ushered backstage for a private reunion.

But what Ritter really needed was a paying job. A much-maligned documentary about Iraq, which he made in 2000 with the dubious financial backing of an Iraqi businessman living in Detroit, failed miserably and plunged him into debt. His ambition was to land a fellowship for which he could write papers and fly off to conferences, or to get some steady gig as a TV commentator, or to dash across the globe on assignment for a glossy magazine. But the Council on Foreign Relations hired Richard Butler instead, and NBC stopped using him as a TV analyst, and Vanity Fair’s editors would only spring for lunch. He wasn’t so much an academic or a journalist as he was a peace activist, something for which think tanks and networks had little use.

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. . . .”

Except that it wasn’t slander, inasmuch as slander is, by definition, untrue. 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.”

It’s tempting to try to find some deeper connection between Ritter’s public crusade and his most private transgressions. Does he simply crave attention wherever he can get it? Does he need to feel admired? If there is a connection between Ritter the activist and Ritter the accused, though, it probably lies in the uncompromising, even heedless way in which he insists on his version of reality, and how he sees himself always as the victim of a system that is self-evidently corrupt. “I’m someone who believes the truth needs to be heard,” Ritter told me. “And if I’m empowered with the truth, I’m not going to shut up.”

Such stridency has repercussions. Taken in isolation, this latest case against Ritter — the one in Pennsylvania stemming from Ryan Venneman’s sting — is hardly the kind of thing that lands you on “America’s Most Wanted.” 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. There’s little question the man needs help, but such cases are routinely disposed of through plea bargains, and prosecutors in Ritter’s case were willing, initially, to let him escape with a single guilty plea, which may well have meant probation rather than jail. Especially given Ritter’s previous arrests in New York, this seems to have been a more-than-equitable resolution, and most accused sex offenders in the age of Megan’s Law would probably have jumped at it.

But Ritter has forcefully insisted all along that he did nothing wrong, beyond betraying Marina’s trust. “Why would I plead guilty to something I didn’t do?” he asked me, when I raised the issue of a plea arrangement. I suggested he might have done it to avoid going to jail.

“No,” he replied. “Wrong answer. Then I’m not a man. Then I’m not a human being.”

At trial, Ritter told the jury that he assumed Venneman was a housewife pretending to be 15, and that he had never for a moment believed he was talking to a minor, despite the fact that “Emily” repeatedly stated her age. When prosecutors were successful in moving to unseal his New York files and presented evidence from those arrests too, Ritter steadfastly maintained that he was aware, in both instances­, that he was talking to undercover cops. He knew his online activities needed to be stopped, Ritter said, so he arranged to meet the officers involved, playing along with the notion that they were teenage girls, so that he could get himself arrested and be forced to face his demons. This would have been a more persuasive defense, perhaps, had one of the arresting detectives not testified that Ritter, upon seeing the police lying in wait for him, tried to evade capture by slamming down the gas pedal and jumping a curb, T.J. Hooker-style.

Ritter’s refusal to surrender to the system, to even admit there could be any reasonable interpretation of the facts other than his own, seemed to enrage the prosecutor and the judge in Monroe County. “I think his arrogance and his refusal to admit any wrongdoing definitely hurt him at trial,” the prosecutor, Michael Rakaczewski, told me recently, likening Ritter to an alcoholic or a drug addict. “If that person is in denial about the root issue of the problem or the extent of the problem, I don’t see how that person can get effective treatment. They’re still liable to reoffend.”

And so you could say that the very attribute that made Scott Ritter appear somehow clairvoyant on Iraq — his refusal to accede to everyone else’s sense of reality — is the same one that has led him, now, to ruin. He lost his only steady job in years, writing analyses on world events for a private energy firm, when the charges became public. After years of picnics and camaraderie, his fellow firefighters removed him from active duty before he could even be tried in court. “These guys knew me better than any of my military friends knew me,” Ritter told me. “To have them turn on me that quickly, that quickly” — he snapped his fingers — “yeah, it was one of the most profound disappointments I have experienced.”

Beset now by six-figure legal bills, Ritter told me he wasn’t sure how he and Marina were going to keep their house or pay their daughters’ college tuition if he went away to jail. I asked him if the prospect of being incarcerated frightened him.

“Jail doesn’t scare me,” Ritter said. “Not being there for my family scares me. Jail is something guilty people fear. I’m not guilty.”

In the days leading up to Ritter’s sentencing in the last week of October, a significant development suddenly brought him new hope. Responding to an appeal from Ritter’s lawyers, a panel of appellate judges in New York ruled unanimously that the files from his 2001 arrest should never have been unsealed and used in his trial. This presented a legal quandary between two neighboring states; the records from Ritter’s arrests in New York were now under seal once again, but in the meantime they had been instrumental in convicting Ritter in Pennsylvania. His lawyers — Gary Kohlman, a white-collar trial lawyer in Washington, and Todd Henry, a Philadelphia-based specialist in sex crimes — filed a motion asking the judge in Pennsylvania to throw out the conviction.

On the morning of Ritter’s scheduled sentencing, he and Marina and the lawyers arrived back at the courthouse in Stroudsburg, Pa., and proceeded into a drab basement room to hear the ruling on their motion. Kohlman argued his case for vacating the verdict, but the judge, Jennifer Harlacher Sibum, was clearly unmoved, as she had been by most of Ritter’s arguments during the trial. She acknowledged that the legal issues raised by the simultaneous decisions in two separate states were unusual (“I don’t know that it’s ever been confronted in Pennsylvania,” she said at one point), but decided to proceed with sentencing anyway.

Ritter was seated at the defense table, about four feet in front of me, wearing a dark gray suit with a white shirt and a red tie. He sat expressionless, locking and unlocking his fingers and occasionally pressing them against his closed eyes. Behind me, in the second and last row of benches for spectators, sat a few of Ritter’s old military buddies from his days as a weapons inspector, and next to them a gaunt-faced Marina.

After hearing testimony from dueling psychologists, Judge Sibum decided that Ritter met the state standard for being classified as a violent predator — despite having never displayed a sexually violent tendency. This meant that he would have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Then it was the defendant’s turn to address the court and ask for leniency. Ritter rose from his chair and took a long moment to compose himself, the uncomfortable silence broken only by Marina’s voice. “Hold your head up high, Scott,” she called out.

This was Ritter’s chance to plea for mercy and demonstrate remorse. “I stand before you about as chastened as an adult man can be,” Ritter told the judge in a commanding voice. “As a husband, as a father, I had no business doing what I was doing.” I heard a woman’s anguished sniffling behind me.

But even in his determination to show humility, Ritter couldn’t help flashing defiance. “It should never have been made public,” he loudly told the court, motioning back toward Marina. “It’s between me and my wife.” You could see, in the hardening of Judge Sibum’s eyes, how his adamancy exasperated her. Richard Butler and Norman Schwarzkopf would no doubt have sympathized.

“I have paid a horrible price,” Ritter went on. “No one to blame, only myself. I went from being someone who stood tall in my community, who assisted my community, to someone who’s been cast aside.”

Then it was the judge’s turn. “I do acknowledge that Mr. Ritter has had tremendous service and has made many contributions to his community and this country,” Siburn said. She added, however, that “he has made excuses for his conduct in this case,” specifically noting what he had just said about the whole thing being a matter for him and his wife. “It supports the conclusion,” she said, “that Mr. Ritter fails to take responsibility. He believes he was entrapped.”

She read off the seven counts and their corresponding prison terms. They amounted to a minimum of 18 months and a maximum of five and a half years in a state facility. Kohlman immediately urged the judge to set some kind of bail, pending appeal, but she shook her head and ordered the three sheriffs standing nearby to take Ritter into custody. There was the sound of handcuffs clicking, followed by another sob from the back of the room. Ritter looked impassively at Marina and nodded once as the sheriffs turned him around and marched him down a short hallway and through a locked door, silenced at last.