[Salon] There Is Something Rotten in Washington Scott Ritter is harassed by FBI for calling for peace while Israel’s Lobby overthrows elections

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/08/phil-giraldi/there-is-something-rotten-in-washington/

There Is Something Rotten in Washington

Scott Ritter is harassed by FBI for calling for peace while Israel’s Lobby overthrows elections

Philip Giraldi    8/10/24

One thing you can say about the Administration of President Joe Biden is that nearly every week there is something new and exciting to discuss. Galloping dementia recently gifted us with Joe’s 11 minute abdication speech in which he announced that he would not be running for another term as president. He babbled about how he was taking the step in spite of his desire to continue. The president, who is 81 and recently best noted for his failing mental state causing him to fall down stairs, felt compelled to say that he believes that his record as president “merited a second term” but that “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.” He also claimed that “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” even though it is engaged in a military occupation and combat operations in Syria, bombing Yemen and conducting counterterrorism in Iraq as well as supporting logistically and with intelligence the large and growing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. He has pledged to Israel that he will “defend” it if attacked, presumably no matter what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assassinates or bombs to provoke a war against Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Joe ended up by celebrating the nomination of Kamala Harris as heir-designate to the Oval Office after disposing of the troublesome and assertive Donald Trump, who presumably is the one who will tear up the US Constitution and “destroy democracy” if given the chance to do so.

But that was two weeks ago. More recently the fun fair on the Potomac turned its guns on a major critic of the federal government’s policies, most notably exercising its proclivity to float a lot of lies to turn anyone who exercises his or her first amendment right to free speech into some kind of traitor who has to be silenced. Many would argue that if the Biden Administration has one major failure beyond losing control over the country’s southern border, it is failure to manage US Foreign Policy in such a fashion as to avoid initiating or expanding existing international conflicts so as to turn them into major wars. If one considers Ukraine and Gaza, both conflicts that could have easily been stopped or de-escalated if the State Department had stopped acting as a shill for Volodymyr Zelensky and Benjamin Netanyahu and had instead created disincentives to continuing the fighting, the case for US involvement as an antagonist is non-existent. The American people benefit in no way from either war and opinion polls make clear that there is considerable popular opposition to the carnage taking place along both fronts.

On August 7th, it was reported that Scott Ritter, who I consider a friend, had his house in New York State searched by FBI and police and twenty five boxes containing documents and electronic communications devices were reportedly taken away for examination in an “ongoing investigation.” Scott, a former Marine corps intelligence officer, has anti-war credentials that go way back to before the Iraq War when he, as a United Nations Weapon inspector, declared that Saddam Hussein had no “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). WMD fear was being promoted in Washington as the reason for attacking and disarming Iraq. Scott was pilloried both by the mainstream media and by the Pentagon’s and White House’s mostly Jewish neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Scooter Libby) who were busy fabricating deliberately misleading information and disseminating it to encourage the George W. Bush administration to start the war, which it obligingly did. Scott nevertheless has continued to be an effective gadfly over war and peace issues ever since that time.

Ritter had earlier had a run-in with the Biden regime in June 2024 when he was at the airport in New York City preparing to fly to Istanbul on his way to St. Petersburg to attend the prestigious international Economic Forum that that city hosts annually. A team of three FBI agents accosted him as he was about to board his plane and they confiscated his passport under orders from the State Department. They would neither give him a receipt for the document nor did they produce a warrant. No reason was given for the action, and Scott has since that time been unable to get his passport back.

The passport confiscation and now the house search appear to be connected with what is referred to as a Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 investigation. FARA came into being just before the outbreak of the Second World War, when it was feared that “agents” of the Italian and German governments were all too freely spreading their propaganda in the US. In particular, FARA mandates that the finances and relationships of the foreign affiliated organization be open to Department of the Justice inspection. It states that “any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or otherwise acts at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal.” Those who fail to disclose might be penalized by up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.

To be sure, the U.S. government has recently been aggressive in demanding FARA registration for other nations as well as for Americans working for foreign powers. There have been several prominent FARA cases in the news. Major Russian news agencies operating in the U.S. were compelled to register in 2017 because they were funded largely or in part by the Kremlin. Also, as part of their plea deals, the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn both conceded that they had failed to comply with FARA when working as consultants with foreign governments.

While the Department of Justice is now going after Scott Ritter using FARA presumably because he is an effective critic of Joe Biden’s wars, there are some indications that other elements in the US government security apparatus are going after others who have dared to oppose what the White House and Congress have been up to. On August 6th, while Democratic nominee Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion, and the rule of law” to cheers in Philadelphia, Hawaii’s former Congresswoman and National Guard officer Tulsi Gabbard described how she was being tracked by teams of government agents in surveilling her and her husband whenever she travels by air. Whistleblowing Air Marshals leaked how Gabbard had been singled out as a “domestic terror threat” under the so-called “Quiet Skies” program. Her boarding passes bear the SSSS notation which makes her subject to additional security searches and questioning. Her probable crime is opposing the war in Ukraine or, possibly, having recently published a book entitled “For Love of Country: Leave the Democratic Party Behind.”

While Attorney General Merrick Garland is active in pursuing individual Americans for possible FARA and “domestic terrorism” violations, he is strangely but predictably reluctant to go after the most corrupt foreign government’s US-domestic lobby which dwarfs all others in terms of illicit cash flow and political impact. It is a foreign government that receives billions of dollars a year in “aid” and other benefits from the United States taxpayer. Consider beyond that, the possibility that that government might take part of the money it receives and secretly recycle it to groups of American citizens in the United States that exist to maintain and increase that money flow while also otherwise serving other interests of the recipient country. That would mean that the United States is itself subsidizing the lobbies and groups that are inevitably working against its own interests. And it also means that those lobbyists though US citizens are acting as foreign agents, covertly giving priority to their attachment to a foreign country instead of to the nation in which they live.

I am, of course, referring to Israel. It does not require a brilliant observer to note how Israel and its allies inside the U.S. have become very skilled at milking the government in the United States at all levels for every bit of financial aid, trade concessions, military hardware and political cover that is possible to obtain. The flow of dollars, goods, and protection is never actually debated in any serious way and is often, in fact, negotiated directly by Congress or state legislatures directly with the Israeli lobbyists. This corruption and manipulation of the US governmental system by people who are basically foreign agents is something like a criminal enterprise and one can only imagine the screams of outrage coming from the New York Times if there were a similar arrangement with any other country.

Recent revelations suggest that Israel’s cheating involves subsidies that are paid covertly by Israeli government agencies to groups in the United States which in turn took direction from the Jewish state, often inter alia damaging genuine American interests. The Israeli Lobby also has been long noted for its interference in American elections, including spending large sums of money to oust politicians who complain about the Jewish state and its behavior. Progressive Congresswoman Cori Bush, a critic of Israel, was recently ousted after her opponent received $8 million and earlier this year Jamaal Bowman lost after a record $15 million went to support another “friendly to Israel” candidate.

Many of the groups receiving Israeli money failed to disclose the payments, which is a felony. At the same time, even the casual observer of government in Washington would inevitably note how Israel’s various friends and proxies, uniquely, have been de facto exempt from any regulation by the US government. The last serious attempt to register a major lobbying entity was made by John F. Kennedy, who sought to have the predecessor organization to today’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) comply with FARA. Kennedy was killed before he could complete the process and some have linked his death to efforts to register the Israel lobby elements while also blocking Israeli attempts to illegally and secretly develop nuclear weapons.

If one is requiring all the Israeli proxies that together make up the Israel Lobby to register under FARA, you might start with AIPAC, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) but there will be many, many more before the work is done. And there is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which also has received funding and material aid directly from Israel. The fundamentalist Christian head cases that place Israel’s interests ahead of those of their own country finally need to have their bell rung.

One might well suggest that the Biden Administration stop harassing ordinary Americans who are exercising their free speech right to critique unnecessary wars and instead go after the Israel Lobby, which is a major contributing factor to why those wars are taking place at all. It would also be nice to end the hypocrisy that surrounds anything having to do with Israel in Washington. The country is no democracy, no ally, and it is a major league war criminal with possibly hundreds of thousands of dead Palestinians as evidence of its genocidal inclinations. Several hundred Congressmen cheering war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu do not change that. Apart from anything else, that the United States is involved in sustaining and providing cover for the slaughter of thousands of innocents while also pursuing its own citizens who are saying “Thou shalt not!” is an abomination.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.