Left, playing for the government in WMD theater, Joe Sims got over 100 charges dropped, now serving five months. Right, Scott Ritter contradicted US government WMD theater claims, all charges prosecuted, now serving five years.

The pattern is so old that it would be boring if not for the damage done. The FBI latches onto a loser who faces significant charges and gets them to work for the government, “infiltrating” a group to incite grand plans of domestic terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. Then, the FBI arrests those entrapped and pats themselves on the back in the subsequent press release informing us that the public never had been in danger because the bad guys were under surveillance the entire time. Detailed reading of the indictment almost always shows that the “perpetrators” were nothing close to real terrorists, had zero chance of producing a real weapon of mass destruction and never even would have made the attempt without the prodding of the FBI infiltrator.

Future historians likely will point to the Waffle House Four plot as the archetype of this pattern. These poor schmucks were hangers-on with a poorly organized “militia” in north Georgia who, without FBI intervention, would never have done anything more dangerous than sit around Waffle House grousing about the government. But the FBI had Joseph Harold Sims in their grasp and he offered to bring evidence against the group in return for reduced charges in the massive child sex case against him. In the end, these “terrorists” were arrested while in possession of a few castor beans. The deadly toxin ricin is made from castor beans, but the beans themselves are weapons of mass destruction in much the same way that a lump of uranium ore is a nuclear bomb.

In addition to ruining the lives of the entrapped “terrorists”, though, we now have evidence of just how depraved this process of WMD theater has become. The sentence for infiltrator Sims was announced Thursday, and the ridiculously light sentence he has received is jaw-dropping:

More than 100 sex-related charges have been dropped against an FBI informant in a case involving four Georgia militia members accused of plotting terrorist attacks.

As part of a plea deal reached Thursday in Anderson, Joseph Harold Sims will serve less than five months in prison for possession of child pornography. He pleaded guilty to 21 counts of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor. According to indictments, Sims had stored images on a computer showing minors engaging in sexual activity.

But the 47-year-old Iva man will not stand trial on charges of incest, indecent exposure and disseminating obscene material to a person under 18 years of age. He also had been charged with two counts of attempting or committing a lewd act on a child under 16 years of age and dozens of additional counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, court records show.

I guess they just couldn’t drop those child pornography charges since that is one of the most important areas for prosecution for the Department of Justice. But dropping over 100 charges? Really? And dropping the incest charges, along with lewd act on a minor charges? Only because he had been on the government’s side in WMD theater did Sims get all those charges dropped. And that five month sentence, well the judge had to know how ridiculous that is, so there were a few maneuvers involved in getting it that low:

At a hearing Thursday in the Anderson County Courthouse, Sims received a 10 year suspended sentence from Judge Alex Macaulay. He also was ordered to spend one year behind bars, with credit for 219 days of time served in jail, according to court records.

Boy, that ten year suspended sentence is really going to sting.

Compare Sims’ sentence with that of Scott Ritter, who played for the other team in a much earlier version of WMD theater. Ritter was the chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the UN, but he refused to play along with the manufactured story of Iraq possessing WMD’s and so he was drummed out of his position and hounded mercilessly until he broke down so far mentally that he began to pursue women and then apparently young girls on the internet so that they would watch him masturbate. Ritter’s sentence for those charges was considerably longer than Sims’:

“Hold your head up high,” Marina Ritter told her husband, Scott Ritter, as he stood to address the court Wednesday shortly before being sentenced to 18 to 66 months in state prison.

“I stand before you as a man,” said the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, convicted by a jury in April of illegally contacting what appeared to be a 15-year-old girl in an online adult chat room and then exposing himself on a webcam.

The “girl” Ritter contacted in February 2009 turned out to be a Barrett Township police officer posing undercover to catch sexual predators online. Ritter said he believed the person was an adult pretending to be a minor, possibly as some sort of sexual fantasy.

Deemed a sexually violent predator by the Pennsylvania Sexual Offender Assessment Board, Ritter, 50, of Delmar, N.Y., stood tall with his hands folded in front of him and paused to collect his thoughts before addressing the court.

Yup, that’s right. Ritter got five and a half years, not suspended, for actions that never involved physical contact, and yet he was deemed “sexually violent”. Oh, and Ritter passed a lie detector test on the issue of whether he had physical contact with a minor. Contrast that with Sims failing a lie detector test on one of the major issues with the Waffle  House defendants.

Clearly, if you are a sexually violent predator, after getting caught the Department of Justice will get your sentence mostly commuted and the worst charges dropped if you play for their side in an episode of WMD theater. On the other hand, if you dare to team up with those who cast doubt on US government claims in WMD theater, prepare to face charges that appear to over-reach the evidence and rest assured that you will face serious time for those charges.

USA! USA! USA!