04.22.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, Shoeshine at 8:27 am by George Smith
From a New Jersey business publication, more industry of fear p.r. on Soligenix, a company that has existed on bioterror defense spending for more than a decade, trying to exploit opportunity created by the crazy man:
Soligenix is actively working to develop vaccines for bioterrorism agents such as ricin, but funding the research remains a challenge, according to company president and CEO, Christopher J. Schaber.
“Every biodefense program needs to be sponsored by the government,??? said Schaber. “We don’t spend our own money on biodefense. The company could not take off with biodefense unless we secure a large procurement contract from the government, which are typically in the hundreds of millions of dollars …
Soligenix’s share price rose 20 percent this week after the ricin-laced letters to government officials were publicized.
Soligenix would make money if the government stockpiles the vaccine, but the research has to be funded and it has to get FDA approval before the company can procure a government contract.
“We’ve taken this very far with the support of the NIH (National Institutes of Health), but we really need to get a larger contract with more funding to allow us to move forward,??? Schaber said. “The government many times doesn’t move that quickly on these things, especially because a lot of people haven’t died.
In over ten years Soligenix has brought nothing to the US market.
Worth 100 mil to the biodefense rent-seeker?
Fun fact: Number of people made even mildly ill in government offices from handling ricin-tainted letters in the last twelve years: Zero.
Soligenix —
from the archives.
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04.20.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, Shoeshine at 12:51 pm by George Smith
Updated, just in: A kook, but not the ricin kook:
OXFORD, Miss. — Marshals Service: Suspect in ricin letters case has been released from jail in Miss.
Rent-seeking behavior is the abandonment of providing a good product or service to customers (or one of even slightly minor social benefit) for the sole pursuit of wealth through private sector/government collusion.
It is practiced by corporations as well as individuals. And it is rife in the national security megaplex.
An article on the science journal Nature’s website on the 18th is the very illustration of it.
Entitled, “US ricin attacks are more scary than harmful,” the added slug line informed “But researchers hope that the incidents will renew development of stalled vaccines.”
Paul Kevin Curtis, the ricin-tainted letter mailer, appears to be profoundly mentally ill. There was never any chance that his letters would reach their targets. Bruce Ivins, the anthraxer who worked within the heart of the US’s bioterror defense establishment saw to that.
And there was no way the crude castor powder with ricin in it ever posed a threat to the general public.
It was country’s very bad luck to have the mental illness of Paul Kevin Curtis fly right into the middle of the week of the Boston terror bombing hysteria.
From Nature:
The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has developed a vaccine called RVEc, which protected mice that were exposed to inhaled ricin.2 The vaccine has also been tested in human volunteers, who subsequently developed antibodies to the toxin. But further human testing is needed, and it is not clear whether the Department of Defense will continue to fund the vaccine’s development.
The other leading vaccine candidate, RiVax, is made by a company called Soligenix, based in Princeton, New Jersey. The vaccine was initially developed by Ellen Vitetta, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and batches made by her group have been tested in animals. Those batches have also been found to be safe in healthy human volunteers, in whom they stimulated the production of antibodies.
But Soligenix has not yet tested the safety and effectiveness of its own batches of RiVax. The company’s development efforts have slowed as a result of budget constraints at its funding agency, the NIAID, says Vitetta.
“It basically is not going anywhere,??? she says. “It’s disappointing and upsetting.??? After an event such as the latest ricin mailings, “everyone wants to know where the vaccines are. Somebody has to think this work is important enough to fund us and let us finish it.???
Soligenix’s work on the vaccine is currently funded by a US$9.4-million NIAID grant, but further testing in animals to prove the treatment’s effectiveness would cost between $20 million and $40 million, says Chris Schaber, the company’s president.
It is cynical behavior to use the work of an individual like Paul Kevin Curtis as an argument for the refinancing of bioterror defense business.
The conditions concerning ricin poison are not going to change. It will never be a weapon of mass destruction and therefore has little to no utility unless one can think of a rationalization to require all ongress, or the president, to be immunized with it.
Ricin-tainted letters are rare and one cannot generally predict who they will go to. Should the entire US postal service by immunized?
Rhetorical question, obviously.
Soligenix is a company that has been mentioned here from time to time. It is a bioterror defense nostrum firm that exists only because of Bruce Ivins and the war on terror. For over a decade it has been kept afloat by taxpayer money and never brought anything to the American people in return.
More recently its stock collapsed, the company eventually turning to an accounting maneuver to re-inflate it.
Practically speaking one might look at the anthrax mailer from Fort Detrick (USAMRIID) as the ultimate bioterror defense rent-seeker.
The FBI surmised that one of Ivins’ motivations in mailing anthrax was to create an incident that would save and stimulate his anthrax vaccine work. In this he certainly was successful. Fort Detrick, for example, where Bruce Ivins was employed was a hot place to work. Bruce Ivins, a very capable scientist, was no Paul Kevin Curtis.
So after the anthrax mailings the national bioterror defense industry boomed. It continued to expand through the entire presidency of George W. Bush. Indeed, those were its salad years.
However, today, spending on bioterror defense asks reasonable people to consider it in terms of morality and good citizenship.
For five years the country has been limping along with an economy that does not serve the majority of its citizens very well. Food stamp subsidies are at an all time high. Millions and millions of people are long-term unemployed or underemployed. The nation faces very serious problems it is not really attempting to solve.
However, crude powder containing ricin in the mail is not a serious national problem affecting the lives of hundreds of millions.
The vast majority of Americans have seen very little real benefit from the large sums in bioterror defense spending. This is probably not going to change.
In view of this, the use of Paul Kevin Curtis, an obviously nuts person, as a rationalization to spend money on a vaccine that no one will likely ever need takes on a taint of immorality. It is simply an attempted collusion between government and a small bit of the corporate national security business to get more of the taxpayer loot.
It is rent-seeking through use of the industry of fear.
You think this man is a reason to fund a ricin vaccine? Seriously?
Still time to get in on the last day of our second fundraiser, ever.
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04.18.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 2:14 pm by George Smith
The Congressional Research Service updated its review on ricin poison for quick reference. Steve Aftergood of the Secrecy blog has put it on-line here.
It is of generally good quality although the authors have a slight case of the disease of national hedging on how easy ricin is to make.
Yesterday, I put unequivocal evidence, from a domestic ricin case, of what a castor powder mixture contains on the web and stated flatly that ricin recipes on the internet fail to change it in any significant matter.
It has been reposted at GlobalSecurity.Org here along with a host of other very legitimate resources on the topic.
From the CRS report, Ricin: Technical Background and Potential Role in Terrorism:
The quality of [instructions for making ricin] varies. Some directions would produce only crude preparations while others would produce nearly pure ricin. Even the crude preparations have been considered deadly.
They all produce crude preparations, a mix of proteins and polypetides, including ricin, that comprise the 5 percent component of proteinaceous material in the castor seed.
Crude castor powder can be deadly, if eaten. Eating a castor seed, specifically — chewing it, can cause death or a bad incident.
But not always, as discussed here in January of last year:
The National Institute of Health furnishes a report on a single case of poisoning by castor bean in Oman, where a patient used one to mistakenly treat a cough.
Apparently, some old methods of “traditional??? medicine employ castor seeds. And the castor seed does not usually poison unless it is chewed, a factor pointed out by the journal article.
It reads:
“In various countries castor beans are the base of many traditional remedies. Our patient believed that they could treat his cough. Ingested castor beans are generally toxic only if ricin is released through mastication or maceration …”
And from the abstract, the outcome is summarized:
“Increasing the awareness of the population to the dangers of ricin would be a way to avoid the utilisation of castor seeds in traditional therapies. Here we are reporting a case of mild poisoning after ingestion of a single castor bean. The patient, who presented at Nizwa Hospital, Oman, fortunately recovered completely as the ingested dose was quite small.”
And many years ago it was not uncommon to find castor powder, of course containing ricin, used by gardeners in attempts to control pests.
Again, from this blog:
Castor seed powder was frequently used as fertilizer in this country. In the periodical called Timely Turf Topics, the publication of United States Golf Association Green Section, an issue from November 1942 reported that the country was using over 80,000 tons of castor seed mash as fertilizer annually. The Golf Association Green Section periodical was devoted to providing information to golf green managers on the maintenance of beautiful grass turf. During World War II, nitrates were diverted for the war effort, necessitating use of alternative fertilizers, of which castor seed mash was one.
In the November 1941 issue of Timely Turf Topics, the association grapples with the problem of controlling mole crickets in southern golf courses.
“It is reported that turf in some sections of Georgia and Florida has just experienced the worst infestation of mole crickets in a number of years,??? reads the issue. “Attempts to eradicate them from turf by the use of well-known poison bait as well as by treatments with arsenate of lead, ground tobacco stems and castor meal have not been successful in several localities this fall.???
The point to be made is that people once worked with large quantities of the grind of castor seeds in this country without dropping like flies.
Pure or nearly pure ricin can only be produced using the methods of protein chemistry. Of course, such procedures exist in the scientific literature. They have been beyond the capability of that demographic that messes with castor seeds.
Continuing with the CRS technical report on ricin:
“Many experts believe that ricin would be difficult to use as a weapon of mass destruction. Ricin needs to be injected, ingested, or inhaled by the victim to injure. Biological weapons experts estimate that 8 metric tons would be required to cover a 100 km2 area with enough toxin to kill 50% of the people. Thus, using ricin to cause mass casualties becomes logistically impractical even for a well-funded terrorist organization.
“Furthermore, some experts have stated that the required preparatory steps to use ricin as a mass casualty weapon also pose significant technical barriers that may preclude such use by non-state actors.”
This is certainly right. Eight metric tons of pure ricin, or even close to pure — like, say 50 percent, is not doable. Never has been. Eight tons of such a material is an absurd and incomprehensible amount.
Active proteins, which is what ricin is, are perishable, even more so when you do things to them that take them out of their natural circumstances.
The US military fiddled with ricin many decades ago. There is no compelling evidence it was successful.
The idea was to make a ricin bomb, a foolish undertaking on its face.
Proteins — bluntly, meat — react the same way to shearing, tearing, explosions, heat and fire just like the good stuff on the grill as raw hamburger. They are cooked.
I wrote on the US Army’s ricin patent for GlobalSecurity in 2004. From it, the germane portion:
The authors of the patent only vaguely grasp that during purifications, proteins are degraded by rough-handling and heat. They admit that their preparations were damaged by exposure to steam (“…considerable detoxification results”) in the text of the patent, which would be natural to expect in the practice of protein chemistry. And they mill and grind their rough preparation, noting “… dry ball and hammer milling … produced considerable detoxification perhaps due to the generation of excess heat.”
Such results would, for example, provide evidence to a good scientist that making a ricin bomb or artillery shell might be counterintuitive, shearing forces from blast and vigorous heating generally being unavoidable in such things.
Again, Ricin: Technical Background and Potential Role in Terrorism is here.
In a somewhat related matter, the German news magazine Spiegel Online published an article entitled, Poisonous Instructions: FBI Has Recipe for Ricin on Website, a now typical case of trying to throw a scare into readers.
It reads:
Star, arrow, rune, figure eight — at first glance, it looks like nothing more than a series of hieroglyphics strung together on the website of the FBI, the federal investigating authority of the United States. But it’s an easy-to-follow recipe for the deadly poison ricin, handwritten in a code that even laymen can decipher.
The text was published in March 2011 on the pages of the Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU). There it served as an example of the work of the bureau’s decoding experts. Curiously enough, no secret is made of the document’s contents
For the rest of it the reader gets what everyone does on ricin. The combination of journalists wishing for eyeballs, a scary story of behavior that superficially looks incomprehensible, and the usual performing experts who state that the recipe is effective.
It’s an industry of fear, mutually beneficial to both parties.
Indeed, the FBI’s puzzle was solved on the web by an interested crypt-analyst blogger here on tax day.
The blogger correctly characterized the nature of the recipe:
The enciphered recipe is very crude, producing only a mash form that is not further purified for dangerous potential. Similar recipes in terrorist “cookbooks??? are “deemed incapable of achieving a good product for causing a large number of casualties by any exposure route, mainly because of the low content of toxin of the final extracts.???
Having originally posted the plain text of it, the blogger later redacted the material.
Nevertheless, DD blog saw a copy and it is one of the old ricin recipes. Specifically, it’s origin lies in Kurt Saxon’s The Poor Man’s James Bond, Vol III.
The former American Nazi Party member and self-publishing survivalist/author writes on the back of this book:
“It is bad to poison your fellow man, blow him up or even shoot him or otherwise disturb his tranquility. It is also uncouth to counterfeit your nation’s currency and it is tacky to destroy property as instructed in [the chapter] Arson and Electronics …
“But some people are just naturally crude … It is your responsibility, then, to be aware of the many ways bad people can be harmful …
“Also, in the event that our nation is invaded by Foreign Devils, it is up to you to destroy them with speed and vigor. Or — and perish the thought — if our Capitol should fall to the enemy within, I expect you to do your duty.
“It is right to share with your enemies, the knowledge in this wonderful book …???
Hat tip to Pine View Farm for the head’s up on the Spiegel piece.
Again, The Ricin Kook, today at GlobalSecurity.Org.
Like this blog, as well as Congressional Research Reports, it contains much thoughtful and expertly derived and delivered information, the product of years of careful study. And I have a Ph.D., even if you don’t like the nickname and are afraid it will bring ridicule if mentioned in polite company.
Twitter “The Ricin Kook” in tweets, spread it in e-mail to your friends, share and “like” it on Facebook, post it to Reddit or your blog. Help make is a useful addition to public information on the subject.
What can be the harm? Perhaps someone important will see it and I will be empowered to write a fine book on the subject.
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04.17.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks, WhiteManistan at 8:29 pm by George Smith
And you needed proof the last decade hadn’t psychologically destroyed significant parts of the United States?
Behold “bioterrorist” Paul Kevin Curtis, an absurd celebrity imitator, in the case of the picture, Hank Williams, Jr., who also sends hate mail to the president.
Can you say the magic word? I know you can. WhiteManistan. Again.
The wholly embarrassing and lousy truth of our latest homegrown eccentric shit magnet.
And — yes, yes by God — he is crazy.
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 11:07 am by George Smith
Protein stained analytical gel electrophoresis of a pure ricin standard versus pellet from ground castor seed, submitted in a recent US case.
Bigger.
The above scan shows why no one has made pure ricin from recipes found on the net during the entire span of the war on terror. And it puts to the lie the brain dead assertion, repeated much by the media in the last 24 hours, that ricin is easy to make.
The scan is an analytical SDS gel electrophoresis of soluble pellet samples taken from a castor seed. It was produced by a government-approved lab and part of the evidence in a US ricin case. It was sent to me last year as part of a consultation for a defense lawyer.
SDS polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis is a common and now old analytic tool used in protein chemistry.
Ricin is a protein.
With this procedure one can visualize proteins of interest as stained bands on a gel matrix. The above gel shows a pure ricin marker, or lab standard, in the second row from the left.
The next several lanes are taken up by the result of using the procedure on the powder from a castor seed. You will notice the big difference. The samples contain ricin and a lot of other things, at the top, bottom, in between and right next to the actual band for ricin.
Those are all contaminants consisting of other large proteins and mixes of polypeptides, some degraded, some not, in a small sample of castor powder, all a natural part of it.
The ricin recipes found on the internet do nothing but produce degreased castor powder. They do not selectively purify for ricin or, indeed, do anything that changes the basic composition of castor powder.
This is what experience in protein chemistry and biochemical preparations tells us. At least, that’s what it told me. Protein chemistry was a specialty, part of my doctoral training, and I supervised a lab course in protein preparations during the end of my span as a graduate student many years ago.
Journalists, on the other hand, have never listened to such reasoning for the last twelve years.
Relentlessly, they have built a received wisdom that ricin is easy to make. And that all one has to do is get a recipe from the internet, castor seeds, and start work.
However, during the war on terror purifying ricin has never been within the reach of those interested in it.
The only place that pure ricin has ever existed during this time is in analytical labs and research establishments funded by the US government to produce things like a ricin vaccine.
As a consequence, this junk knowledge — like many other junk knowledges — permeates US life so thoroughly it is now commonly seen in tv dramas and movies on terrorism plots and criminal endeavors.
Often they make good viewing. But they’re always all bullshit.
Castor powder, containing some ricin, does not lend itself to making a good weapon. However, castor powder can be a poison if enough of it is surreptitiously put into a serving of food.
Nevertheless, years of irresponsible journalism coupled, along with the say-so of selected “experts” in the homeland security and national security worlds, have created an environment in which it is easy to use the mention of ricin to strike fear.
And this environment is noted by others. In the US, castor bean fiddling is overwhelmingly the domain of crazy or angry white guys from the extreme right. They constitute the vast majority of arrests and convictions.
(From NBC News, a few minutes ago: “Federal agents on Wednesday arrested a suspect in the mailing of letters to President Barack Obama and a U.S. senator that initially tested positive for the poison ricin … The suspect was identified as Kenneth Curtis of Tupelo, Miss., federal officials told NBC News.” Cue the crazy/angry serial letter writer to Congress part. Points off for NBC trying to insinuate that castor powder in a letter could be a deadly inhalation hazard. No link. The latter is a new twist which shows the media and committees of reporters and editors will go through some contortions to keep the news potentially fearsome.)
Part of the castor seed interest in this demographic stems, too, from the origin of ricin recipes in the self-published Eighties literature of the neo-Nazi survivalist fringe in America.
“Popularized” in volumes like The Poor Man’s James Bond and The Poisoner’s Handbook, ricin recipes went viral, first being turned into digital documents, then spread around the world.
Others have also believed what they read in newspapers: call it America’s received wisdoms in the war on terror.
And in doing so, al Qaeda, as well as a couple of other minor players, have for years shown wishful interest in the same recipes and castor seed fiddling. But no one has been able to fashion a ricin weapon.
In America, when you’re arrested with castor seeds and a ricin recipe, you go to jail.
The other feature of ricin-tainted letter mailing shows the lack of expertise, in a laughable way, of those always involved.
Ricin isn’t a contact poison.
However, it does get the attention of all and a long stay in the custody of the state.
Ricin is a deadly poison and fairly easy to make, but it’s a crude and clumsy weapon, according to bioterror experts.
A letter sent to President Barack Obama tested positive for ricin, officials said Wednesday, and it was sent by the same person who mailed a letter that tested positive for the poison to Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker. — NBC News, today
“Bioterror experts” and NBC, thanks.
From yesterday.
From the inimitable Ricin Kooks archive.
Another case in point, from ABC News. In this instance, the chosen scientist repeats the easy-to-make recipes from the Internet meme, then comments on the consequences of the received wisdom he’s just passed on:
“[Clements] said ricin is relatively simple for a chemist to make in small amounts, considering crude instructions are available on the internet …
“Think weapon of mass disruption rather than weapon of mass destruction,” he said. “You don’t need to kill a lot of people to scare a population. In that case, you don’t need sophisticated delivery and dispersal systems, just a press and politicians more interested in spreading fear than information.”
The man also delivers comment on ricin weaponized as an inhaled weapon, which no one has ever done during the war on terror. Indeed,
the only things testing the toxicity of inhaled pure ricin are lab animals sacrificed during the now decade-long effort to develop a ricin vaccine.
Number of cases recovering purified ricin during the war on terror: 0
Number of deaths from ricin used in terror plots: 0
Number of men arrested in the US, for messing with castor seeds: about a dozen, one of them recently deceased.
From “The American way of bioterror — an A-Z of ricin crackpots,” published at the Register in 2008:
It takes a special kind of American to be fascinated by ricin, and last week the latest, Roger Von Bergendorff, was indicted in the District Court of Nevada. Bergendorff possibly qualifies for an award in failed Darwinism, being the only person in recent times to have seemingly accidentally poisoned himself with the protein toxin, but not quite effectively enough for the FBI to have nothing to do except attend his funeral.
The US government’s complaint against Bergendorff, filed on April 15 paints a common picture: loser dude on the fringes of society, indigent but with still enough money to have two unregistered guns with silencers, castor seeds, a standard collection of anarchist poisons literature and castor powder – or “crude” ricin as the FBI puts it.
Bergendorff told the FBI his production of ricin was an “exotic idea” …
The ricin perps of the past few years are not the Hollywood picture of evil. There is no Anton Chigurh – the psychopathic assassin who storms through Texas in the movie “No Country for Old Men” armed with a sniper rifle and a pneumatic hand-held piston for smashing skulls – among them. They’re a gallery of weirdoes, some of them dangerous in an inept manner, but generally more hazardous to themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re damaged goods, and one can say from experience that, contrary to Bergendorff’s hazy assertion, making ricin from castor seeds is not an “exotic idea” but a tiresome one. It’s common and banal, attractive only to lonely nuts, obsessed self-styled outdoorsmen, stupid as well as crazy gun collectors and incompetent criminals. Since 9/11, every complaint involving ricin has received national recognition, averaging a couple incidents a year. No fatalities have resulted …
A self-defeating and nihilistic interest exists in the poison, as if every red-blooded, disappointed and frustrated American kook has a defiant right to possess a recipe on their hard disk and a packet of castor seeds nearby, perhaps next to an unregistered handgun equipped with a silencer made out of a vegetable. This ensures a constant trickle of criminal apprehensions and prosecutions, a process the government handles efficiently, depositing ricin crackpots where they belong. Bergendorff, like everyone else before him, is headed for prison for an indefinite period, a just sentence when considering that, unintentionally or not, the ricin crackpot’s major contribution is to frighten the locals when the gendarmes and hazmat teams descend on the neighborhood …
More resources, by me during the war on terror, at GlobalSecurity.Org:
The Recipe for Ricin: Examining the legend
UK Ricin Ring Trial finds no terror.
More on the London ricin trial.
Playtime recipes for poisons: The actual recipes from the London ricin trial.
al Qaeda and alleged ricin bomb-making in Yemen — another study in faulty understanding.
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04.16.13
Posted in Ricin Kooks at 3:50 pm by George Smith
It took somewhat less than a half hour for the news media to start lighting up with the usual received wisdom/disinformation on ricin.
From the Washington Post:
Federal officials discovered Tuesday a poison-laced letter sent to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), uncovering the material at an off-site location where congressional mail has been screened since anthrax-laced letters were sent to Capitol Hill in 2001.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other senators exiting an FBI briefing on the Boston attacks, told reporters that the letter was tested at the facility and came up positive for ricin. Officials gave no indication why the letter was sent to Wicker, a low-profile senator in his second term.
In 2004, three Senate office buildings were closed after preliminary tests found ricin delivered through the mail system in the Senate majority leader’s office. At the time the AP wrote, “Twice as deadly as cobra venom, ricin, which is derived from the castor bean plant, is relatively easily made and can be inhaled, ingested or injected.??? But investigators later said the test may have picked up non-toxic byproducts of the castor bean plant used in paper production.
Purified ricin has never been accomplished by anyone known to be fiddling with castor seeds during the long years of the war on terror.
And no terror weapon has ever been made with it.
Castor mash, or powder, which contains ricin, is trivial to make. But all the recipes found on people who have ground (or thought about grinding castor seeds) does not purify ricin. And this can be seen in castor seed powder protein separations using gel electrophoretic methods. (A photo of which I may post one of these days if the rubbish level on the matter continues to rise.)
False positives have been known to occur with ricin tests.
Famously, the London ricin plot, written about extensively by me for GlobalSecurity.Org, involved an initial false positive, an impression that was not corrected for years.
And in another case to which I was privy, a false ricin positive was returned on a possession of a drug addict subsequently convicted in the US for — as the judge awkwardly put it — “[doing something] that was a substantial step toward the production of a biological toxin.”
That case is here and the defendant’s lawyer told me, years ago, that the ricin positive occurred on remainders of the man’s marijuana stash.
Naturally, you can’t find this useful information anywhere else. So you should pass my name around.
Updated, April 17.
Or refer people to the voluminous amount of material under the Ricin Kooks tab.
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04.15.13
Posted in Ricin Kooks, Rock 'n' Roll at 3:13 pm by George Smith
Not much comment after reading the news.
Consider this really shitty bit concerning the “title track” of the first new Iggy & the Stooges album with James Williamson in almost 40 years, reported in interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
(Could they pick a worse subject than the Georgia ricin beans gang?!):
The title track, [Ready to Die], was inspired by an incident at a Georgia Waffle House. “There were three old dudes there, about the age of the Stooges,” says Iggy. “There were all pensioners with John Deere caps and flannel shits and everything. They would sit around the Waffle House down there plotting to blow up government offices. The waitress who brought them their pancakes overheard it and called the Feds. I though it was so poignant, but also funny. They wanted some meaning in their life. I started writing, and even had a line about ‘get off my lawn!’ But it didn’t hold water when I went to record it because it was too much of a cheap shot at these people. We kept the chorus that goes ‘I’m shooting for the sky because I’m ready to die.’ It’s basically about how depressed and lonesome you get dealing with modern life.”
Iggy and Williamson get about everything wrong on the details, not that it matters much. But it’s still a shame. (Disclosure: I was consulted for one of the scheduled trials of two of them men involved, and by newspapers that covered it.)
Poignant and funny are not words I’ve ever used to describe these types of, unfortunately, not uncommon things. And I would have never figured old extremists caught in a domestic terror beef as subject material for a Stooges tune.
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04.11.13
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 10:12 am by George Smith
One of the old American ricin kooks occasionally mentioned on this blog during the war on terror years was found dead this week.
An AP story explains:
NORTH PLATTE, Neb. (AP) — A body found nearly a year ago in western Nebraska was that of a Wisconsin fugitive who’d been convicted of trying to produce a biological weapon, authorities say.
DNA samples and other evidence led investigators to conclude that the remains were those of 64-year-old Denys Ray Hughes, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Thursday. Hughes was being transferred by bus from a Colorado prison to a halfway house in Milwaukee when he disappeared in May 2011; authorities believe he got off the bus somewhere in Nebraska.
The body was found April 20, 2012, on private land on the southern side of North Platte, along the South Platte River. Medical investigators said tests on the body showed the man probably died between November 2011 and February 2012. The cause of death was unclear, though Hughes had a handful of health problems.
Hughes, adds the newspaper, had a heart condition and was diabetic.
From the old DD blog entry entitled The Jailbird Bookshelf:
The evidence list from US vs. Hughes is illuminating in that it shows the standard books discussed previously in “From the Poisoners Handbook to the Botox Shoe of Death??? here.
From Hughes’ “library:??? “The Weaponeer,??? a Saxon pamphlet with a ricin recipe, “The Poor Man’s James Bond, Vol. 3“, also containing a ricin recipe, “The Poor Man’s James Bond, Vol.2,??? Festering Publication’s “Silent Death,??? containing yet another ricin recipe, “Deadly Brew,??? “Deadly Substances,??? and an assortment of what Dick Destiny blog calls really bad science books — cf., “Grandad’s Wonderful Book of Chemistry??? — for idiots or young boys.
Accompanying the books in evidence were a mortar and pestle, bottles of castor seeds, castor beans in a package, castor beans in a bin, and Red Devil lye — which is another reagent dumbly recommended by survivalist literature as useful in purifying ricin. Lye, or sodium hydroxide, is a strong base. Strong bases destroy proteins, like ricin, but for decades the literature of the domestic terrorist has cited it in their ricin recipes and it has become a marker of intent in federal cases where the US is going for a conviction on making or attempting to make a biological or chemical weapon.
Another incriminating marker is dimethyl sulfoxide, also attributed in the Hughes case. Ricin is not a contact poison but because the domestic terrorist-in-training takes seriously material like Hutchkinson’s “The Poisoner’s Handbook,??? which insists it would be handy to combine dimethyl sulfoxide with ricin in plans to poison the Pope or a government employee through the skin, it has been adopted as key part of their chemical armory.
The federal case against Hughes appeared to be an easy one, based simply on showing the jury the man’s books, chemicals, equipment for bomb-making — and one pipe bomb.
For example, it cannot help a defendant to have the jury shown any of Saxon’s books. They tend to include drawings, like Dick Destiny blog’s similar rendition (to the left), on how to attack someone with poison or explosives …
A copy of the original complaint against Hughes from last year describes ATF/FBI flypaper –gunpowder, fuses, road flares, instructions on how to build a bunker, an assortment of guns, silencers and pipe-bomb-building materials.
“Hughes was prosecuted in Phoenix and convicted of trying to produce a biological weapon and for possessing a pipe bomb and illegal gun silencers,” reads the AP report. He received a sentence of 87 months.
During the last twelve years all domestic arrests of people involved in fiddling with castor seeds has been a white man thing. No terror plots have gone forward.
And everyone arrested with the misbegotten recipes for making ricin and castor seeds has been convicted and given to the pleasure of state hospitality. No exceptions.
Castor seed fiddling always ends badly.
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03.11.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks, Shoeshine, WhiteManistan at 3:14 pm by George Smith
A bit over a week ago the mainstream newsmedia covered the release of a new report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one documenting an explosive rise in domestic extremist groups. One of the initiators is the presidency of Barack Obama and the persistent belief — now going on five years — that he is going to take away the guns.
Summarizing the gist, from the Guardian:
The number of anti-government, far-right extremist groups has soared to record levels since 2008 and they are becoming increasingly militant, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It says the number of groups in the “Patriot” movement stood at 1,360 in 2012, up from 149 in 2008 when Barack Obama was first elected president, an increase of 813%. The report said the rise was driven by opposition to Obama and the “sputtering rage” over federal attempts at gun control …
“We are seeing a real and rising threat of domestic terrorism as the number of far-right anti-government groups continues to grow at an astounding pace,” said Mark Potok, SPLC senior fellow and author of the report. “It is critically important that the country take this threat seriously. The potential for deadly violence is real, and clearly rising.”
Potok said that the demographic factors driving the rise in such groups began before Obama became president – the census bureau predicts that whites will become a minority group in the US by 2043 – but have been fuelled by the changes in America he represents. The growth in extremism has been helped by the “successful exploitation over illegal immigration” and by anger over the gun control debate, he said.
Law enforcement officials have uncovered numerous terrorism conspiracies born in the militia subculture, including plots to spread poisonous ricin powder, to attack federal installations, and to murder federal judges and other government officials …
Two months ago West Point issued a similar report mapping the growth of right wing violence from the Clinton administration to the present.
While I didn’t comment on it at the time, the report, entitled Challengers from the Sideline: Understanding America’s Violent Far Right, analyzed right wing domestic terrorism for contributing factors. The strongest correlator was the number of seats held in the House of Representatives by Republicans.
Simply, right wing violence escalates when their are more GOP Reps. The report reasoned this might be because those perpetrating right wing violence feel supported ideologically by Republicans in that body.
The other possibility, of course, is that the rhetoric emitted by the Republican Party in control of the House creates an environment in which some people feel empowered, or moved, to violence against the government.
The other contributing factor was legislation, specifically that having to do with gun control. The Brady Bill, or Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, signed into law in 1993 during the Clinton administrations, caused a spurt in militia growth and related right wing violence in that period. Two years later Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in the most lethal act of right wing domestic terrorism in this country’s history.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok told news reporters he “expected extremism to rise, as anger over gun control had become a ‘grassroots rebellion.’. He said that 20 states are considering laws that would aim to nullify federal gun control measures and 500 sheriffs mainly in western US, who say they will not enforce any such measures.”
The ricin plot, which I covered here as the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang, involved four old men who discussed plans to bomb federal buildings and disperse the poison, was a non-starter but rife with the type of language emitted by the insurrectionist right.
Two of the men pleaded guilty. Two remain to be tried on making a weapon of mass destruction. A bucket of castor beans in a shed was recovered by the US government as evidence, along with one of the old internet ricin recipes, uploaded into cyberspace now well over 20 years ago by a bored teenager.
Disclosure: I was consulted on the nature of the recipe because I’m the person who wrote most authoritatively on the subject during the war on terror years. This is when the newsmedia routinely spread the canard that ricin was easy to make simply by downloading instruction from the Internet, a stupid belief that persists to this day.
The recipe doesn’t make ricin. It makes degreased castor powder from castor seeds which contains some ricin, some or all of which may be degraded depending on the instructions actually followed.
No people have died as a result of attacks using ricin in the entire war on terror. And while al Qaeda has periodically evinced interest in using ricin, it has never done so. In fact, more white right-wing Americans have been arrested and jailed on wanting-to-make-ricin beefs than any other nationality. More specifically, it’s almost exclusively a WhiteManistan thing, where it originated a long time ago.
The Georgia case also illustrates the FBI does have a dragnet out for right wing terror plots, one that makes use of informants recruited to infiltrate potential domestic terror cells.
In slightly related news, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity issued a report about a week ago and almost nobody paid a lick of attention.
This is notable for the fact that the Center was regularly in the news with reports and predictions that catastrophic bioterrorism was imminent and easy to carry out during the salad days of the war on terror.
This was because the UPMC Center for Biosecurity was the house that Tara O’Toole built. When O’Toole left to take a position in the Department of Homeland Security, all the zing and mojo went with her.
In addition, its sugardaddy, Congressman Jack Murtha, died.
As you’ve guessed, or knew, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity existed only to dispense shoeshine on the threat of bioterrorism.
Its most recent report, entitled When Good Food Goes Bad, was covered only by Food Safety News.
From Food Safety News:
From its headquarters on Baltimore harbor, the 15-year-old Center for Biosecurity of UPMC looks out on the historic Coast Guard Cutter Taney, the last ship afloat to have immediately fought back when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.
The way the Taney instantly turned its guns on the enemy is just the sort of reaction the U.S. needs to mount whenever and wherever there is an outbreak of foodborne illness, according to the Center’s new report “When good food goes bad??? …
The Biosecurity Center’s interest in foodborne illness outbreaks apparently stems from the 2010 “credible threat??? by Al-Qaeda terrorists to poison salad bars and buffets at hotels and restaurants over a single weekend, using ricin and cyanide. “U.S. officials cautioned that even in small amounts of these chemicals in food could cause serious harm,??? says the report.
That plot was not executed, but highlighted the problem. “Initially, it will be very difficult to distinguish deliberate contamination of the food supply from a naturally occurring outbreak,??? it says.
The Center for Biosecurity researchers who probably have never actually seen any real documents from terror cases on food plots using ricin (and cyanide) have only one citation for this in their report, a brief piece issued by CBS News back in 2010.
“Manuals and videos on jihadist websites explain how to easy it is to make both poisons,” informed CBS.
Perhaps they have also missed the facts that al Qaeda has been smashed and that, I’ll repeat, more white American men have been convicted for fiddling with castor beans than any other nationality.
And that no ricin plots in America have ever gone forward. In any case, the report is classic shoeshine work, stuff of no value to most Americans unless they’re in the homeland security business.
Most recently, the al Qaeda comic book Inspire, now at issue number ten, recommended jihadists start causing “road accidents” and setting fire to cars.
“We all agree the Kuffar chose the wrong path,” it reads. “Now it’s time for their vehicles to also leave the right path. Demolition Derby Style.
“The best timing for a ‘Causing Road Accident’ operation is during night hours, especially on Sunday night. Most of the Kuffar will be either drinking or showing off their driving talents to their friends. In addition to the poor visibility due to the scarcity of light (hmmm, hasn’t ever been to LA at night, obviously). Thus it is hard for your ambush tools to be noticed.”
Ingenious. What could they work out next? Perhaps urinating in ice machines at hotels and motels?
Last year, Inspire recommended setting forest fires. And six months earlier, running people over with a pickup truck armed with a snow plow.
They all worked well.
Anyway, the Center for Biosecurity report recommended the US government strengthen food surveillance.
“Fewer food safety inspections and an increased risk to consumers will result from the lack of a new 2013 budget from Congress and the upcoming across-the-board spending cuts, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said …” reads a recent news piece, also at CBS.
It should be noted that, so far, the sequester is happening but al Qaeda is not.
“[Hamburg] said most of the effects wouldn’t be felt for a while, and the agency won’t have to furlough workers … Still, she said, ‘We’re going to be struggling with how to really grapple with the cuts of sequestration … clearly we will be able to provide less of the oversight functions and we won’t be able to broaden our reach to new facilities either, so inevitably that increases risk.’ ”
New category, Shoeshine. The growing parts of the American economy are devoted to it, armies of upper middle class lickspittles employed as process workers and analysts in it. It had to happen.
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02.22.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 10:34 am by George Smith
Early in the week I received an e-mail query about the old Mujahideen Poisons Handbook. Many readers will remember it as a .pdf pamphlet that figured prominently the US government’s and media’s received wisdoms passed out on al Qaeda and its capabilities with regards to weapons of mass destruction.
A historian was asking where to find a clean copy because she was writing a book about “popular manuals and their challenges to free speech. She explained this went back into the 19th century.
Loompanics, an American publisher based in Port Townsend, Washington, specialized in fringe books on mayhem and other unsavory topics. It was part of this literature in the United States, although its heyday ran only from the mid-Seventies to the early Nineties.
When the digital networks began to arrive in the early Nineties bits of the detritus from Loompanics and other fringe US publishers were copied into cyberspace, usually by young men, and distributed out of their bedroom-based bulletin board systems.
This copied samizdat electronic literature went around the world.
Paradoxically, this phenomenon and the rise of the web put Loompanics out of business. Which wasn’t a bad thing considering the collateral cost in ruined lives possession of the works of Loompanics and other similar publishers has caused as a result of the war on terror.
Free speech guarantees the right to publish odious materials of little social value. But there can be severe random and unintended costs associated with it.
The war on terror produced such things and continues to do so.
Specifically, with regards to Loompanics, the brief e-mail discussion
dealt with the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook.
I refuted it often around the middle of the decade, most famously when it showed up in a Sunday feature at the Washington Post on “e-Qaeda” and how the terror organization was using the web to train its minions.
The graphic above is the Post’s. It was utter trash on the making of “betaluminium poison,” presented as a real potential menace, evidence of a real capability where none existed.
‘”[Contrary] to the Post story line, the cited library materials suggest a startling lack of technical competence,” wrote Steve Aftergood in his Secrecy News Bulletin. “Unfortunately, the Post did not critically examine the materials that it presented.”
Specifically, the bit on “betaluminium” was a garbled excerpt on botulism from a Loompanics book, Maxwell Hutchkinson’s (a pseudonym) The Poisoner’s Handbook. (On which I’ve regrettably written quite a bit.)
Most of the information in both the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook and Hutchkinson’s Poisoner’s Handbook is laughable in terms of accurate chemistry and biology. However, over the decade, many counter-terror and police forces never got that.
And you couldn’t tell them.
Perhaps it was too inconvenient to the time and their purposes to admit to such things. Or maybe their analyses were just always done by “experts” who were really incompetent.
Both pamphlets were apparently written/composed/put together by people who seemed to have very little idea about chemical or biological terrorism, or poisoning, but wished to create appearances that they did. They wrote as if they had performed procedures that simply do not adhere to reality.
Nevertheless, these writings became documents that put you away, ruining a life and reputation once news is published and convictions handed down.
In England they became seditious materials, a crime to possess because they fell into the category of things deemed likely to be of material use to terrorists.
In the United States, possession of recipes or related materials copied from them and other similar publications are always presented as evidence of intent to commit acts of terrorism in domestic trials.
I’ve been consulted in three such trials on these publications and recipes, two in England years ago. And more recently, one which is set to run soon in Georgia.
The Washington Post’s story, published in 2005 and written by Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, was not the only mainstream news organization that disseminated ridiculous claims on the nature of these types of documents and what they allegedly showed al Qaeda could do. Many did it, far too many.
But the Post’s article, by dint of the importance of the newspaper, puts it in the forefront in terms of the damage it did to public information and perception on these things.
During the war on terror, al Qaeda never possessed the capability to make weapons of mass destruction. The best it could manage was apparently videotaping, very early on, the cruel killing of a puppy with cyanide in a room used as a gas chamber.
However, the government and very-important-person thinking on the matter was just the opposite.
They were very wrong. And if they continue to think such things, they still are. The Post’s reporters and editors, and too many others to count in the mainstream media, got it all wrong.
In 2005, Steve Coll won the Pulitzer for his book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Today he is the president of the New America Foundation, “a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States.”
The belief that weapons of mass destruction can be simply made from recipes included in the publications of the American fringe, migrated to the desperate places of the world, is now irreversibly embedded in our culture.
I see it almost every week, from ex-anti-virus king John McAfee’s ridiculous stories about Hezbollah using Belize and Nicaragua to ship massive amounts of ricin powder into the United States to a new television movie in England called Complicit, a drama dealing with a “jihadist plot to smuggle ricin … from Egypt to the UK with a view to killing thousands …”
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