“Age?” delmarm4fun asked. “15.” “Aha,” came the response. “New York or Pa.?” A graphic flirtation ensued. At one point, delmarm4fun asked “Emily” again if she was 18. “No, I’m 15,” Venneman replied. “Aha,” delmarm4fun said again. “My bad.” “What’s wrong?” Venneman asked. “Didn’t realize you were 15. . . .” “So why u don’t like me,” Venneman typed, mimicking an adolescent’s mangled syntax. “I do, very much. LOL. Just don’t want any trouble.” After about an hour of this, according to logs later presented in court, the man Venneman was talking to masturbated in front of a webcam and announced he was off to take a shower. “U know ur in a lot of trouble, don’t you,” Venneman typed. “Huh?” “I’m a undercover police officer. U need to call me A.S.A.P.” “Nah,” delmarm4fun wrote. “Your not 15. Yahoo is for 18 and over. It’s all fantasy. No crime.” “I have your phone number and I will be getting your IP address from Yahoo and your carrier,” Venneman wrote. “We can do this 2 ways call me and you can turn yourself in at a latter date or I’ll get a warrant for you and come pick you up.” The perpetrator turned himself in almost immediately. Delmarm4fun, it turned out, was Scott Ritter, one of the most controversial figures in American foreign policy for the past decade and a half. It was Ritter, a former Marine major and United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, who quit the U.N. inspection team in 1998 and railed against Saddam Hussein’s government for misleading inspectors and scamming the international community. And it was Ritter who then did an about-face and emerged, during the long period that led to the war, as the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. In a bizarre moment in 2002, Ritter even made the long journey back to Baghdad to address the Iraqi Parliament as a private citizen, warning that his own country was about to make a “historical mistake” and urging the Iraqis to allow inspections to resume. For this, and for his relentless insistence that the presence of hidden W.M.D.’s was nothing but a political pretense for war, Ritter was dismissed and even mocked by much of the media establishment (including writers for this magazine and The New York Times). As the last American troops left Iraq, it’s fair to say that the war and the debate that surrounded it produced few real heroes; rather, it served as a kind of vortex of destruction that sucked in and defiled nearly everyone associated with it. In Ritter’s case, the public vindication to which he would seem entitled — and which he has never quite received — has now been replaced by a very public disgrace, his life having slowly come undone in the years after the invasion. “It’s tragic,” Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker’s investigative reporter, said when we spoke this fall. Hersh grew close to Ritter in the late ’90s and appeared as a character witness at his trial in Pennsylvania last April. “He understands the Arab world in a way that few Westerners I know do. You have no idea how smart he is.”
