Do not watch the video until you have read the Summary.
Purpose
This article is an illustration of perception management centring around one man, Scott Ritter.
It is not a defence of Ritter or the state. It is a direct contrast between state (legislative) actions and state-sanctioned output (media & Wikipedia), and Ritter’s own explanation.
Summary
As a direct, outspoken military analyst of the Ukrainian conflict, Ritter is not for public consumption and is kept clear of mainstream outlets.
He has been branded by Ukraine as a Russian propagandist or agent “likely recruited in Iraq in the 1990s” (no evidence provided) and placed on a "blacklist”1 that serves as a kill list. It has doxed its targets, including a 13-year-old girl who lives in Eastern Ukraine, and lists as “liquidated” those on the list who have died or been killed, including the Russian journalist, Darina Dugin who, with her father, were targeted for assassination.
I’ve been writing for some time now about the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation and their publication in mid-July of a “blacklist” containing the names of 72 intellectuals, journalists, activists and politicians from several countries who were labeled “Russian propagandists” by the Ukrainian government for having the audacity to speak critically, yet factually, about the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The publicity about congressionally-funded suppression of free speech appeared to be too much for those who are complicit in a frontal assault on the U.S. Constitution. The Center for Countering Disinformation’s “blacklist” was removed from the internet.
Victory, however, was short lived. Within days of the Center for Countering Disinformation’s “blacklist” being taken down, a list published by the Ukrainian “Myrotvorets” (Peacemaker’s) Center incorporated names that had been on the Center for Countering Disinformation “blacklist.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/31/scott-ritter-the-death-list/
Ritter’s wikipedia page has undergone deliberate changes over time that labels him as a “convicted sex offender” in the opening lines, whereas previous versions2 3that contained sections about case dismissal in 2001 and an incompletely explained conviction in 2010, or no mention of these issues in the opening lines.
In the past few days, Ritter fielded a direct question during a live stream on his conviction, to which he provided a specific answer. He explained that charges against him in 2010 were literally manufactured, there was no corroborating evidence that any crime had been committed, forensic analysis of his computer equipment that the authorities alleged were involved in the crime contained zero evidence of criminal activity, he possesses written proof of his claims, and that the Pennsylvania court blocked submission of all evidence that exonerated him. That court illegally unsealed court documents from a dismissed case in New York. In prison, despite being a “convicted sex offender” the entire prison population including the Warden read the case documentation and all agreed he should not have been convicted. His rehabilitation officer also agreed after having initially coerced him to admitting some form of guilt in order to secure release, which he refused to do. He is in constant appeal against his sentence.
Ritter characterises what happened to him as a concerted ad hominem attack of the highest order.
Now watch the above video of Ritter’s own explanation of his treatment the US legal system.
Question of Perception
What should be made of the ways in which information about Ritter is presented, compared to his own presentation? If what he says about his conviction is true, why doesn’t wikipedia go any way to reference anything other than mainstream media explanations that are quite carefully worded reports of what was alleged but not proven in his case? Why has wikipedia been recently and frequently changed?
Why was Ritter, a person who at the very least became a thorn in the side of the US Administration in the run up to the Iraq war, not considered to be a propagandist despite a long history of books, statements and work that are in keeping with his present stance on Ukraine that constantly references his own direct historical experience of military politics?
Why does the US administration seek to affect a US citizen’s first amendment rights to free speech via a foreign proxy’s unproven assertions that he is some form of Russian agent?
If he were a Russian agent, why hasn’t the US arrested, investigated and tried him as such? Will it?
Ritter states that the Pennsylvanian prosecutor said that it was not possible to pursue a conviction because there was no evidence of the alleged crime, and in response the judge allowed the prosecution to then “manufacture a case” and prevented Ritter from defending himself against it using exculpatory evidence. It, according to him, literally refused to admit evidence proving that he was innocent.
This happened in 2010. He served a multi-year sentence. His wife did not divorce him, despite what he is alleged by some sources to have done.
If his account is accurate and therefore this is the state’s treatment of him (including the generation of cases that were not supported by evidence) for what he did up to 2010 i.e. be outspoken about US military and foreign policy, is what is happening to him now via the Ukrainian label of “Russian propagandist” and listing on a kill list the evolution of unofficial and illegal US state sanction of citizens it deems disagreeable?
What is the difference between a US citizen outside the US being targeted for impending drone strike and a US citizen inside the US being subject to the treatment Ritter has received?
But who is telling the truth, who is right and how does all this make you feel? After all, Scott Ritter is just one man, talking about a distant war that doesn’t affect you, and stuff like this doesn’t happen much anyway.
Julian Assange, anyone?
If this is yet another example of a repetitive state modus operandi against citizens who interrupt the state sanctioned narrative, what should citizens do about it?
I would argue, at the very least, that citizens should know about this stuff so that they can recognise repetitive modus operandi of their state.
Scott Ritter - context
Ritter’s military and intelligence background includes:
USMC Intelligence Officer
Set up and headed the United Nations’ Special Commission (intelligence and inspections operation) into Iraqi weapons
Served as Chief UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq
His own words4 on Op-Ed News provide some insight to his background, experience and sentiments growing up and then working throughout and beyond the Cold War, during which time he served in Russia, implementing nuclear disarmament under the “Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty signed by President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987”.
As UNSCOM Chief Weapons Inspector, Ritter had to establish an intelligence-based operation under the UN, which did not previously employ such methods, in order to assess Iraq’s capabilities and conformance with UN Security Council Resolutions. Eventually, he resigned in the run up to Operation Desert Fox in 1998. In his own words he has recently recounted that the US blocked successful inspections in order to preserve its pretext for invasive war.
This Associated Press archive footage from 2003 is of Ritter the day before then SecDef Colin Powell addressed the UN on Iraqi WMD. Ritter’s comments are direct and prescient.
2002
If Ritter is anything, he is quite well-documented in terms of his own opinions on his experiences throughout his professional career. He has authored 10 books5, practically all of which lay out his take on the inner workings of the US military, political and intelligence machinery in the pursuit of war-based agendas. Despite his military background, Ritter often presents a brutal realism around conventional and nuclear war to the point that it could be said that he is anti-war but not anti-defence when combined with effective diplomacy.
Latterly, Ritter has been an outspoken analyst on the Ukraine conflict. His military experience elevates him above the label of “pundit”.
Ritter’s backtest on Iraq
Ritter was right about Iraq. The UN and many others denounced the entire war as based on lies in the first place.
Ritter on Ukraine
Ritter’s interpretation of the Ukraine conflict spans:
the wider context of long-term NATO build-up (see Mearsheimer, Cohen et al);
the nature of the Ukrainian administration and political set up including its World War 2 historical involvement with the the persecution of Jews (Yevhen Konovalets, Symon Petliura, Roman Shukhevych and Stepan Bandera et al) and Nazi ideology in modern Ukraine;
its latter-day regime, including the present administration, its origins, corruption and connections to US and NATO.
By April 2022, Ritter had made the following assessments6:
Putin's war is indeed a "special military operation".
The operation has been run with scrupulous respect for rules of war:
Accounts of the Boucha massacre are questionable
Russia's early attack on Kiev was highly successful
The campaign in Donbass is unfolding according to plan
The Ukrainian army is a Nazi organization
In general, Ritter has maintained that Russia’s invasive military operation was avoidable based upon its historical warnings and understandable from Russia’s perspective, when one takes into account the actions of the Ukraine administration since the US coup in 2014. He has expressly, repeatedly pointed out that Russian force make up and deployment was never, ever intended to fully occupy Ukraine or even Kiev. Initially it was, as per Russia’s public objectives, to “demilitarise and denazify” the country and force Ukraine into negotiated neutrality, which nearly happened until the West changed Ukraine’s hymn sheet.
Ritter believes that Russia will “win” in Ukraine at obviously high cost for both sides, which was avoidable before and within the first three months of the conflict. It will complete its objectives in the face of Western objectives to extend this fully-blown proxy war to such lengths that Russia is bled dry. The West’s deliberate strategy to use Ukraine as its proxy will fail partly because NATO is ultimately dysfunctional and, despite the massive war investment ($53bn and counting from just the US), sufficient manpower and capability cannot be mobilized to defeat Russia, nuclear backstops notwithstanding. Ritter states that the conflict is in a distinct third phase and is likely to drag on and on through further phases. The UK Secretary for Defence, Ben Williams, stated to who he thought was a Ukrainian politician that the UK was taking actions in Spring 2022 that related to “the next phase” of the conflict.
In this present phase, Russian forces now face NATO and the US itself. The Ukrainian army and weapons inventory (mostly Soviet origin) has largely been destroyed and replaced with NATO forces and equipment such that the forces engaged in conflict around Kherson and Kharkiv were “quantitatively and qualitatively” not the same as employed by Ukraine up to that point.
As a distant analyst, Ritter is not necessarily right. He is direct, outspoken and critical of the overall conflict, and he has nailed his colours to the mast regarding Russia’s inevitable victory despite the West’s “game-changing” war investment, which Russia must adapt to and grind through. Ritter believes that it has done and will continue to do this, despite having made “mistakes”. In the context of the chaos of conflict, “mistakes” are both inevitable and actually something of a non-sequitur.
Ritter’s analysis is not “for public consumption” and he is allowed nowhere near any mainstream outlet.
Excerpt from https://ac.news/the-ukrainian-death-list-scott-ritter/
Today, I’m a 61-year-old writer living in the suburbs of Albany, New York…due to recent circumstances, I once again find myself inspecting my vehicle before getting inside, keeping a watchful eye out for strange vehicles driving down my street and conducting counter-surveillance maneuvers while driving.
…my name has been added to a Ukrainian “kill list.” Think I’m getting too wound up? Ask the family of Daria Dugina, the 29-year-old daughter of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. Both she and her father were on the same list. Both were targeted for death by an assassin dispatched by the Ukrainian security services. Only a last-second change of plans, which put Alexander Dugin behind the wheel of a different car, kept him from being killed in the blast that took the life of his daughter.
I’ve been writing for some time now about the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation and their publication in mid-July of a “blacklist” containing the names of 72 intellectuals, journalists, activists and politicians from several countries who were labeled “Russian propagandists” by the Ukrainian government for having the audacity to speak critically, yet factually, about the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
I took umbrage over this list for several reasons, first and foremost that the salaries of the Ukrainians who compiled this list appeared to be paid by the U.S. taxpayer using funds appropriated by Congress for that very purpose. The idea of Congress passing a law which empowered the Ukrainian government to do something — suppress the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and a free press — that Congress was Constitutionally prohibited from doing angered me.
So, too, did the fact that the Center for Countering Disinformation announced the existence of this “blacklist” at a function organized by a U.S.-funded NGO and attended by State Department officials who sat mute while their Ukrainian colleagues labeled the persons on this list “information terrorists” who deserved to be arrested and prosecuted as “war criminals.”
At the time, I cautioned that the use of such inflammatory language meant that the “blacklist” could be turned into a “kill list” simply by having a fanatic decide to take justice into his or her own hands. Given that the U.S. government funded the creation of this list, organized the meeting where it was presented to the world and gave an implicit stamp of approval to the list and its accompanying labeling through the attendance of U.S. government officials, these fanatics don’t have to be foreign sourced. Plenty of people in the U.S. adhere to the same hate-filled ideology that exists in Ukraine today and which gave birth to the “blacklist.”
As a child of the Cold War, I grew up only knowing the Soviet Union as our enemy. The year that I was born, 1961, saw the Berlin Wall go up… The Cuban Missile Crisis had my parents wondering if there would be a tomorrow (we lived in central Florida at the time.) My father was an Air Force officer. In 1964, he was deployed to Turkey, where he maintained F-100 Suer Sabre fighter bombers standing strip alert outside Izmir, armed with nuclear weapons.
In 1965-66, he was sent to Vietnam to fight the communists. In 1969, he was sent to South Korea to be prepared to do the same. In 1975, he took our family to Turkey, where I was surrounded by the reality of the Cold War - secret US listening posts in Sinop that spied on Soviet communications, a secret seismic station that monitored Soviet nuclear tests, and secret bunkers armed with nuclear weapons that would be loaded onto Turkish fighters in case of a war with the Soviet Union.
In 1977, we moved to West Germany, where the Soviet threat was a daily reality. I traveled to occupied Berlin three times, by road, rail, and plane. Each time put me, temporarily at least, at the mercy of the Soviet soldiers surrounding Berlin.
I joined the Army in 1979 for the express purpose of being sent to the front lines so I could fight the Soviets as soon as they crossed the border. Later, as a Marine officer, I trained to fight the Soviet Army using the newly minted precepts of maneuver warfare. My career ambition, as an intelligence officer, was to be assigned to the Military Liaison Mission, in Potsdam, East Germany, where I would be given a de facto license to spy on the Soviet Group of Forces in Germany. Instead, I was one of the first persons assigned to the newly created On-Site Inspection Agency, set up to implement the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty signed by President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987.
I was stationed in the town of Votkinsk - west of the Ural mountains - outside of a missile assembly plant, where I monitored the SS-25 road-mobile intercontinental missiles exiting the factory to verify that they were not, in fact, SS-20 intermediate-range missiles banned by the treaty. Life in Votkinsk provided me with a PhD in Soviet reality. I learned to love the language, culture, and traditions of my sworn enemy, making them less so in the process. The treaty was based upon the principle of reciprocity, which meant how we treated the Soviet inspectors based outside the Hercules solid rocket motor production plant in Magna, Utah, impacted how the Soviets treated us in Votkinsk, and vice versa. The treaty cut both ways, and at the end of the day this kind of equality under the law, so to speak, made us equals in the eyes of the other.
I grew up fearing the Soviet Union. After two years of near continuous contact with the citizens and factory workers of Votkinsk, this fear was replaced by the kind of respect that can only be had by truly getting to know someone the good, the bad, the ugly, but mainly the good. The accumulation of knowledge helped sweep away the ignorance-based fear that had dominated my world-view prior to my assignment in Votkinsk.
I left that job in the summer of 1990 armed with the knowledge that the nation I once viewed as my mortal enemy had become, if not a trusted friend, then a reliable colleague, especially when it came to issues of mutual concern. I fought in Desert Storm as part of an international coalition made possible only because the Soviet Union opted not to continue the Cold War practice of vetoing anything that could be perceived as giving the US a geopolitical advantage.
After the war, as a UN inspector charged with overseeing the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, I worked closely with Soviet diplomats and military officers to fulfill the mandate given us by the Security Council. In December 1991 I was working closely with one Soviet arms-control specialist on preparing plans for long-term monitoring of Iraq's industrial capability to produce WMD, while traveling to Iraq with another Soviet, a senior Colonel who was an expert in SCUD missiles, to uncover aspects of Iraq's past missile activities that they were, at the time, hiding from the inspectors. For me, the weapons inspection experience with the UN was a continuation of the work I had begun with the Soviets in Votkinsk a few years back, where we cooperated with one another in an effort to achieve an outcome that was mutually beneficial.
Scorpion King: America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump (Paperback), Clarity Press, 2020; 2nd revised edition, ISBN 1949762181
Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to War (Paperback), Clarity Press, 2017, ISBN 0997896507
Dangerous Ground: America's Failed Arms Control Policy, from FDR to Obama (Hardcover), 2009 ISBN 1568583990
Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement, Nation Books, 2007, ISBN 1-56858-328-1
Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change (Hardcover), Nation Books, 2006, ISBN 1-56025-936-1
Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (Hardcover), Foreword by Seymour Hersh, Nation Books, 2006, ISBN 1-56025-852-7
Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America Context Books, 2003, ISBN 1-893956-47-4
War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know (with William Rivers Pitt). Context Books, 2002, ISBN 1-893956-38-5
Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem — Once and For All (Hardcover) Simon & Schuster, 1999, ISBN 0-684-86485-1; (paperback) Diane Pub Co, 2004, ISBN 0-7567-7659-7
Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union Barnes and Noble, 2022
Putin's war is indeed a "special military operation": It was never the Russian president's intention to conquer all of Ukraine. Instead, as he stated on the day beginning his Ukrainian foray: "The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation. It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory. We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force."
In other words, Putin's purpose in Ukraine is threefold:
a) To protect Donetsk and Luhansk from what he sees as genocide perpetrated there by the Ukrainian Nazi Azov regiment largely responsible for Kiev's aggression in Donbass since 2014
b) To bring to justice those who directed the massacres
c) And denazify and destroy the Ukrainian army in the process.
Those goals are clearly limited. The Russian president completely denies an intention or ability to occupy Ukraine.
2. The operation has been run with scrupulous respect for rules of war: According to Ritter, the Russian army "came in soft" to Ukraine. As distinguished from U.S. tactics in Iraq, there was no "Shock and Awe" - no preliminary levelling of entire cities such as Mosul and Fallujah. Instead, in the words of U.S. Colonel Doug Macgregor, "The first five days, I think frankly, the Russian forces were too gentle. They've since corrected that." Moreover, on Ritter's analysis, civilian targets have been carefully avoided. However, he points out that if Ukrainians use civilians as shields by, for instance, locating tanks next to hospitals or schools, those buildings become military targets. As for "mass graves," bodies have been identified and given separate temporary marked graves near established cemeteries. In summary, according to Ritter, the rules of war have in general been followed scrupulously by the Russian army which is run by "highly professional" officers.
3. Accounts of the Boucha massacre are questionable: Here, Ritter uses his experience as a weapons inspector to underline the inconsistencies in the widespread mainstream accounts of the execution-style killings in Boucha. According to the MSM, Russian forces were shockingly brutal in leaving behind many Boucha civilians shot in the back of their heads with their hands tied behind their backs. Such accounts, Ritter contends, are suspicious. Questions are raised, he notes, by the fact that the executed civilians often had white or green ribbons displayed around their arms. White, he says, was an indication of neutrality in the war; green showed support of the Russians. As well, in some photos, empty green boxes appeared near the victims. Such boxes were used by Russian soldiers to supply food to civilians in occupied neighborhoods. Ritter's conclusion: the victims in Boucha were likely executed as collaborators by the Ukrainian police force.
4. Russia's early attack on Kiev was highly successful. According to Ritter, the early assault on Kiev and other western cities were "feints" - deceptive military maneuvers that are standard parts of what military textbooks call "shaping the battlefield." The deception's intention was to fix in place Ukrainian defenders, so that they would be rendered unable to come to the aid of eastern comrades in Mariupol and the Donbass - Russia's real targets as havens for the Nazi Azov Battalion. No responsible military leadership (and the Russian generals, he says, are consummate professionals) would ever attack any city (much less a huge one like Kiev) with less than a ratio of 3 attackers for every 1 defender. In Kiev, the Russians attacked with far less -- only 40,00 troops in total. They therefore had no intention of taking Kiev early on. They were shaping the battlefield. The marvel is that they succeeded in getting Ukrainian defenders to buy their feints.
5. The campaign in Donbass is unfolding according to plan. Putin's words are that the battle in Donbass is very "literate." He means it's being waged by the book - intentionally slowly and deliberately according to classic military strategy in order to lessen Russian casualties. Two pincers (one from the north and one from the south) have about 60,000-100,000 Ukrainian troops trapped in a military "cauldron." Gradually (not allowing themselves to be hurried by outside expectations, criticism, and misinterpretation), the Russians are moving sector by sector towards their surrounded prey that has nowhere to go. Ukrainian options are to surrender, be killed, or attempt a breakout that will cost them at least 20,000-30,000 dead.
6. The Ukrainian army is a Nazi organization: Ritter supports this position as follows: He asks, would you say that the U.S. Army is racist? Of course not, he answers. But what if there were in the U.S. south a highly organized KKK regiment? And what if the U.S. Army incorporated that regiment as such into its ranks and distributed its officers throughout the army hierarchy? And what if it used that regiment as the leading edge of its military operations? Would you then consider the army racist? Yes, Ritter concludes. But, he says, (mutatis mutandis) that's precisely what's happened in the Ukrainian armed forces. A large Nazi regiment has been incorporated as such into its ranks with Nazi officer distributed throughout. And the Ukrainian government has those forces leading the attack on the Donbass region - which has taken 14,000 lives since 2014. That renders, he concludes, the Ukrainian army and its sponsoring government Nazi.Excerpt from https://ac.news/the-ukrainian-death-list-scott-ritter/
Today, I’m a 61-year-old writer living in the suburbs of Albany, New York…due to recent circumstances, I once again find myself inspecting my vehicle before getting inside, keeping a watchful eye out for strange vehicles driving down my street and conducting counter-surveillance maneuvers while driving.
…my name has been added to a Ukrainian “kill list.” Think I’m getting too wound up? Ask the family of Daria Dugina, the 29-year-old daughter of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. Both she and her father were on the same list. Both were targeted for death by an assassin dispatched by the Ukrainian security services. Only a last-second change of plans, which put Alexander Dugin behind the wheel of a different car, kept him from being killed in the blast that took the life of his daughter.
I’ve been writing for some time now about the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation and their publication in mid-July of a “blacklist” containing the names of 72 intellectuals, journalists, activists and politicians from several countries who were labeled “Russian propagandists” by the Ukrainian government for having the audacity to speak critically, yet factually, about the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
I took umbrage over this list for several reasons, first and foremost that the salaries of the Ukrainians who compiled this list appeared to be paid by the U.S. taxpayer using funds appropriated by Congress for that very purpose. The idea of Congress passing a law which empowered the Ukrainian government to do something — suppress the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and a free press — that Congress was Constitutionally prohibited from doing angered me.
So, too, did the fact that the Center for Countering Disinformation announced the existence of this “blacklist” at a function organized by a U.S.-funded NGO and attended by State Department officials who sat mute while their Ukrainian colleagues labeled the persons on this list “information terrorists” who deserved to be arrested and prosecuted as “war criminals.”
At the time, I cautioned that the use of such inflammatory language meant that the “blacklist” could be turned into a “kill list” simply by having a fanatic decide to take justice into his or her own hands. Given that the U.S. government funded the creation of this list, organized the meeting where it was presented to the world and gave an implicit stamp of approval to the list and its accompanying labeling through the attendance of U.S. government officials, these fanatics don’t have to be foreign sourced. Plenty of people in the U.S. adhere to the same hate-filled ideology that exists in Ukraine today and which gave birth to the “blacklist.”
Scott Ritter - Management of Perception