woo hoo! Scott Ritter on C-Span

Recalling all of the pre-war Lies!


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:popcorn:

It's not Friday, that's for sure! :)

is it worth watching the repeat?

I'm so glad I watched this morning. Ritter was able to completely shut down the expected Bush apologists. He was very specific. He knew all the background, history, dates, places, the players. His callers resorted to ugly gossip; they didn't want to discuss the real issues. Or, they couldn't. Talk-radio does not prepare wingnuts for discussion. They have to resort to throwing mud.
But Ritter was impressive in laying out the big picture.
His main point was the politicalization of intelligence. In George H.'s administration, Clinton's, and now Dubya's.
The decision had been made for regime change. The WMD claims were smokescreen. And the CIA and the media failed to speak up for the truth.

He's an informed republican. :D When is the repeat? Is there any video out of this yet?

Undecideds overboard years ago. He could have been a potent voice.

again :eyes:

peace

:ROTFLMAO:

But they're still there and they vote.

Whether their votes get counted is another matter.

and your assertion that moderates don't consider him credible.

Maybe you can explain exactly how that works? I remember the administration trying to discredit him, but I also remember nearly everything he said or predicted proved true, in spite of the Bushco propaganda machine.

maybe you remember differently? can you explain/

Had little to do with his core expertise as a weapons proliferation expert.

He was tainted by (and I admit I don't have the details handy) charges of improper conduct with an underage woman and suspicious funding sources for a movie he made.

I don't believe these have been debunked, and they are just the sort of thing that turns centrist voters off.

Which is my point. True or not, he's been smeared, and a significant part of the electorate that we'd like to have listening to him won't anymore.

no wonder Karl Rove likes to use them.

the "underage women" thing was a false baseless charge against Ritter on the eve of Shock and Awe, to shut him up and discredit him. The judge threw it out of court for the charges having no merit.

I don't know about the movie.


but I gotta say, if "centrists" are so easily swayed by propaganda and smears, not sure why they want us to adopt their point of view.

Centrist to mean "not very political."

That is, people who don't follow politics very closely, and yet do vote. Who take what they see during an election season, make a decision based on their evaluation of the validity of the claims presented, and then show up in voting booths.

Who are on the verge of saying "a pox on both their houses" and either not voting at all or voting based entirely on local issues.

And who are exposed to the smears but not the (substantially quieter) debunking.

These are reasonable, although not-very-involved, people. We need them, and since they are reasonable, they can be reached by reason.

And no, I'm not talking about the "undecideds" who show up on the news programs 48 hours before a national election and say they're still making up their minds. They're hopeless.

how do you make a film for only $50,000???

Well, Ritter did. And his backer was an American citizen--of Iraqi descent--who wanted the truth about Saddam's US connections to come out.

The freepers got a lot of mileage out of twisting that fact into lies and gobbledegook. I guess you believed them.

If you cant see that you must be a republican

Spelled R-O-V-E.

he was exhonerated completely of what they used to try and discredit him with.

Yeah, that's what happened...:rofl:

And he didn't lose any credibility with me. In fact, C-SPAN takes calls from "others" and everyone except the crazy Bushbots were thanking him for his voice and for taking a stand against the Bush administration. I guess I don't understand your point.

On Edit: Can you show me the evidence that he lost credibility with centrists? That may help me understand where you're coming from.

My google searches for "ritter +underage" produce hundreds of listings, almost none of which deal with any exoneration in the case (I only found one reference to the case being dropped and sealed). Searches for "Scott Ritter" produce just about as many references to the 'underage' issue as they do about his positions on weapons proliferation.

From this (and reading many of the entries) I conclude that his credibility has suffered broadly. Admittedly, the fact that his position on the inherent danger from Saddam Hussein evolved over the years makes him less credible to the "it must be writ in stone" crowd, but those are not the "centrists" to whom I was referring.

We all know that Americans are a little crazy (compared to much of the rest of the world) when it comes to sexual peccadillos, so that an illicit blow-job is apparently regarded as an impeachable offense where war crimes aren't.

And I haven't dug up references to the funding of his (I think it was 2003) movie, but I'm sure I heard about it at the time.

Scott is going on about the OSP/Doug Feith trying to make the al-qaida/saddam link.

,...democratic principles.

The American people deserve to be told the truth about the actual policy(ies) being pursued and deserve to be allowed to participate in the decision of whether we want to engage in regime change on behalf of corporacrats as a global empire/colony.