Scott Ritter Says, State Department Seizure of My Passport Aimed at BRICS, Fight for Peace
June 4—Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who on June 3 was taken off his scheduled flight to Istanbul, en route to St. Petersburg, Russia, by Customs and Border Patrol agents, on orders of the State Department who seized his passport without explanation, called a special broadcast of his “Ask the Inspector with Scott Ritter,” Episode 65 to inform his tens of thousands of supporters of the strategic import of the outrage. Ritter made immediately clear that the attempt to silence him will backfire, as he seized the opportunity of the injustice to brief his audience of the importance of BRICS and of the State Department’s complicity in setting up opponents of war to be hit.
(Mistaken reports were circulated yesterday that Judge Andrew Napolitano was also removed from the airplane along with Ritter. That has turned out not to be true: Napolitano was on a different flight and canceled his trip for different reasons.)
He announced the special broadcast on his site: “The seizure of Scott Ritter’s passport is just the latest tactic employed by the U.S. State Department designed to muzzle him about Russia. The State Department organized and funded the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, which has labeled him an ‘information terrorist,’ and remains silent while he and other U.S. citizens are marked for death by Ukrainian intelligence.”
Ritter reported that he had been scheduled to speak at the June 5-8 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) and at the Moscow Conference on International Security in August, as part of a longer trip whose purpose was to help stop a war, possibly a nuclear war. The State Department is targeting the BRICS, he exclaimed. He explained that he was one of several Americans invited to participate in SPIEF, which, with its thousands of participants, will be a precursor, a “launching pad,” for the BRICS conferences taking place this year in Russia. He was going to speak against “the rules-based order” and speak of the transition to a multipolar world through the BRICS. The State Department is desperate to stop that, he said. The U.S. and NATO are “losing the whole world—everyone wants to join the BRICS!” The only thing the U.S. offers nations is “to lick the feet of the G7,” and who wants to do that?
Ritter located the decision to stop his trip as an extension of the U.S. State Department’s financing of the Zelenskyy regime’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which issues “kill lists” against opponents inside and outside of Ukraine. He was a number over and over again on the CCD’s list, he said, and is also on the Ukrainian kill list, Myrotvorets. Diane Sare, Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Schiller Institute, Ray McGovern, and others are also on them. Ritter was specific: The accusation that those on the lists are Russian “information terrorists” who should be treated the same as any other “terrorists,” is a serious threat. Ritter noted that the U.S. regularly assassinates “terrorists,” and named several Russians and Ukrainians who had been assassinated by Ukrainian government operatives after being placed on the lists. He said he had challenged the State Department to a debate, “but they don’t want to debate—they want to kill you,” for using freedom of speech.
Ritter asserted that he will continue to do whatever necessary to carry out his plans to visit Russia with a message from the American people to the Russian people that we can have peace instead of war.
He did just that on the June 4 podcast "Judging Freedom," with Judge Napolitano: “The command centers that Russia uses were conceptualized and constructed during the Soviet Union, when Ukraine was part of the Union, and, from a Russian perspective, they were deep in the Russian rear, protected. But if Ukraine now is carved out and made part of NATO, and you insert American missiles there, all of these places that were thought to be safe in the rear are now reachable. And if America allows Ukraine to use ATACMS missiles to strike these facilities, Russia will nuke NATO! Not Ukraine—NATO!… The Ukrainians are complaining that the United States will only allow them to use the HIMARS, that they won’t be allowed to use the ATACMS to strike Russia yet. But, just so everybody in your audience understands, we are one ATACMS launch away from everybody dying. We are one ATACMS launch away from everybody dying. The Russians aren’t playing games here.”