h/t Weeweed.  (Telegraph) The former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has been convicted of unlawful contact with a minor for exchanging explicit messages in an online chat room with someone he believed to be a 15-year-old girl. Ritter, 49, exchanged messages with a detective posing as an underage girl and masturbated, even after the undercover officer stressed during the chat that he was a minor, Pennsylvania prosecutors said.
A jury found Ritter guilty of a total of six counts including indecent exposure and criminal attempt to corrupt a minor. Ritter was one of the UN’s chief weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He resigned after accusing the United States and UN of failing to get tough with Saddam Hussein.  Later, he said that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction, and he became a vocal critic of the US-led invasion.
“The jury reached the right decision,” Michael Rakaczewski, the assistant district attorney, said after the verdict. “They saw the case for what it is and the defendant for what he is and what he did.”  Neither Ritter nor his attorney, Gary Kohlman, commented outside court.
Sentencing is for next month. Each of the five felony counts carries a maximum sentence of 7 years in prison, but Ritter is likely to get much less under sentencing guidelines.  Mr Kohlman acknowledged in his closing argument that jurors were likely to be “troubled and offended” by the graphic chat and video of Ritter that prosecutors played, but said they were required to put aside their personal distaste because “this is not a referendum on whether anybody in the courtroom approves of adult chat rooms”.
Ritter took the witness stand in his own defence Wednesday and said he believed the person he met in a Yahoo chat room on Feb. 7, 2009, was an adult acting out her own fantasy.  (full article)

According to published interviews, Ritter has twin daughters who are about 16. He met his second wife, Marina, a translator, while assigned as a counterintelligence officer in the former Soviet Union. They moved to upstate New York about 10 years ago.  “I came to Delmar … to put roots down, to raise a family and live a normal middle-class American life,” Ritter told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2002.

Human Events John Hayward puts it this way… Remember Scott Ritter […] As a fervent Bush critic with a military background, United Nations credentials, and (best of all) some history as a Republican, Ritter was extremely useful to the anti-war Left, which absolutely lionized him. “Few people were as right about the Iraq War as Scott Ritter was,” declared liberal writer Glenn Greenwald, adding that it was “difficult to imagine someone with greater credentials and credibility who ought to have been listened to on those issues.” At the Daily Kos, they called him “one of the few who called bulls**t on Bushco’s claims of WMDs in Iraq… A former Marine and former Republican, he’s not exactly a partisan player, he seems to be a guy who just doesn’t like being lied to.”
And then, suddenly, Scott Ritter disappeared. The Left stopped talking about him. The legacy media stopped running his articles. His media perch as the pre-eminent Bush critic crumbled to dust overnight.   Why? Because Scott Ritter is a convicted pedophile.
His offenses caught up with him in a Pennsylvania court on Friday, where a jury found him guilty on six counts of unlawful contact with a minor. He was taken down in an online sting operation, when he used a webcam to show himself having inappropriate contact with his own naked body to someone he thought was a 15-year-old girl. His sentencing will take place next month.
It’s a big story in the foreign press, but the U.S. media has been very subdued in reporting Ritter’s conviction. Like Cindy Sheehan, John Edwards, and other hard-Left superheroes, he stopped being interesting when he stopped being useful.  (full article)
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