Scott Ritter and Tokyo Rose

Yes, that Scott Ritter, (fomer US Marine and former UN weapons inspector). Michelle Malkin, Reporterette and Blackfive all note Mr. Ritter's new gig, writing for Al Jazeera (his byline calls him an 'independent consultant', making me wish I weren't one.) FOX has also picked up the story: "A Critic's Defeatist Rhetoric". Here's a link to the column. Warning: readers with high blood pressure would be well advised to skip this bit:

"By any standard, the ongoing American occupation of Iraq is a disaster... history has shown that the tools of remote ambush... have always been used by freedom fighters when confronting an illegitimate foreign occupier... History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government... It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members... we perverted the notion of liberation by removing Saddam and his cronies from his palaces..."

It's not even worth fisking. Too easy. He goes on, making unsubstantiated claims of American malfeasance that would make Eason Jordan and Michael Moore blush. And in the category of redefining irony, this little trailer: "The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position or have the endorsement of Aljazeera." I'll bet.

All of which motivated me to go back and look at 'Tokyo Rose' - a name applied by U.S. GI's to two different women hired to broadcast Japanese Imperial propaganda on the so-called 'Zero Hour' radio program in WWII, with the aim of demoralizing U.S. troops fighting in the Pacific. One of those women, Iva D'Aquino (born Ikuko Toguri) is an American citizen born in Los Angeles and reportedly still living near Chicago. (She would be 89 this year.) After the war, she was returned to the U.S., convicted of treason, fined $100,000 (big money back then), and served seven years in prison (1949-1956). She was pardoned by Gerald Ford in 1977. This site gives a more ambiguous, nuanced account of her activities and motivations, including eerie actual recordings of some of her original broadcasts.

But this begs the question: how close is this precedent to what Ritter is doing now? I'll submit that, whatever his motivations, and however loud (and commonplace) his protests against U.S. policy, Ritter stepped over a line when, as a former U.S. soldier, he started working for Al Jazeera. All but two things separate his actions from those of Tokyo Rose: 1) a formal declaration of war by the U.S. against Islamofascist terror networks and their supporters, and 2) a formal link between Al Jazeera and those entities. Neither may be forthcoming, but I wouldn't be surprised. His former position and his forum make this qualitatively different from the random yahoos I occasionally hear chanting this stuff in Harvard Square.

SIDE NOTE: Someone calling him/her self 'freedomplow' notes on Little Green Footballs that according to the Volcker report, and covered in the New York Times, Mr. Ritter was also mixed up in the UN Oil For Food program scandal, albeit one removed. Does it get any richer?

"...cited in an October report on the [UN Oil for Food] program... Shakir al-Khafaji of West Bloomfield, Mich... financed a film about Iraq made by Scott Ritter, the former arms inspector who opposed the American invasion in 2003."