FBI agents and State Police on Wednesday descended on the home of Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector who in June had his passport seized by the U.S. Department of State as he attempted to fly to Russia for a conference.

Shortly before noon, marked State Police vehicles and unmarked law enforcement cars lined up near Ritter’s Dover Drive home. Just before 5 p.m., authorities carried more than two dozen boxes out of the house.

On Wednesday the upstate New York home of Scott Ritter was raided by the FBI and state police. The FBI has since confirmed in a statement that this is part of an ongoing federal investigation into Ritter.

Agents were seen entering his house in Delmar, NY in widely shared photographs and local media footage in the afternoon. It was unclear if Ritter was at home at the time and the allegations at the center of the investigation remain unknown.

The Senate voted Wednesday to repeal authorizations for the use of military force against Iraq, a significant moment as lawmakers aim to reassert authority in military intervention abroad.

The legislation now goes to the US House of Representatives for a vote. Speaker Kevin McCarthy has signaled support for it and said it would likely be brought to the floor. With bipartisan support for the repeal, the measure appears to have a good chance of passing the chambers, though it’s still unclear if lawmakers will try to amend it.

I loathe Vladimir Putin. I used to think he offered one good thing, despite his domestic tyranny. I used to think he was a defender of the idea of national sovereignty, an opinion that became actually ludicrous the day he invaded Ukraine. I confess this error, because, when dozens of others are not confessing or regretting their role in cheering on the Iraq war, we conservatives have a duty to behave better.

Twenty years after the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, one of the war's chief architects says the Bush administration's biggest error was not making the conflict an even bloodier, costlier catastrophe.

"A lot of good has come out of that war.”

“Was it a good thing, was it a bad thing? It’s very hard to say.”

“It was worth it.”

Imagine if you heard or read any of this in a major US media outlet about the Russian war on Ukraine. You won’t. Yet these are all real phrases that have been uttered in just the past week — only about a different war, drawing a very different response.

The invasion of March 2003 was a catastrophe for Iraq and its people.

More proof of that, measured in broken lives, was at a suspected site of a mass grave in the desert outside Sinjar, not far from the border with Syria.

Twenty years ago, the United States went to war in Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Except for an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads, those weapons weren’t there—Saddam had shut down his efforts to build a nuclear bomb as well as his biological-warfare program. Instead, he thwarted and resisted international weapons inspectors in order to bluff the world into believing that he still possessed capabilities for mass killing. Saddam’s best-hidden secret was his (at least temporary) weakness.