01.03.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 1:26 pm by George Smith
Since the war on terror the samizdat literature of America’s neo-Nazi/survivalist extreme right has meant collateral damage in surprising places.
From just before the holidays, an old tale from Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook (printed by the defunct American publisher of notoriously repugnant crap, Loompanics) built around a bit of fact about rosary peas, inconvenienced a tourist attraction in Cornwall, England, called the Eden Project. Bad publicity and embarrassment was the immediate symptom, as it always is with anything even remotely connected to America’s special brand of paranoid underground literature on how to strike your enemies down and overthrow the government.
From the Daily Mail newspaper:
An alert has gone out for the recall of thousands of beaded bracelets sold in tourist attractions after it emerged they are made from a highly toxic seed.
The Eden Project in Cornwall, which sold 2,800 in a year, is one of 36 retailers urging customers to return the red and black wrist charms.
They are made from the Jequirity bean – a deadly seed of the plant abrus precatorious which contains the toxin abrin, a controlled substance under the Terrorism Act.
Rosary peas have been around forever. And despite fear in the US and UK security apparati, they have inconveniently declined to kill anyone in the last decade. Even though they are routinely sold on eBay.
However, because of The Poisoner’s Handbook, rosary peas — and the small amount of abrin inside their very hard shell, have been treated like castor seeds.
In other words: Ahhhhh, danger!
The Daily Mail reported that the Eden Project had been selling the wristlets made of jequirity beans for a year. With no known intoxications.
Now, if readers turn to page 8 in The Poisoner’s Handbook:
The phytotoxin from precatory beans, also known as jequirity beans, is very similar to ricin and and the extraction process listed … may be used for both …
Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads …
If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can be easily modified to kill.
Obtain, if possible, some acupuncture needles or grind down regular needles as thin as possible while still being strong enough to puncture the jequirity bean coating. Wearing leather gloves, very carefully about a dozen minute holes in each bean on a rosary. When you are finished, spray the string of beads with DMSO … which will dissolve and carry the abrin, and allow to dry.
As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin; the worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse, etc.
These items make wonderful presents for the more religious target.
We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.
Marvelous stuff, that.
Keep in mind that the only stupid people here are those who believe anything in Hutchkinson’s book, having secured it or copies of its ‘information’ for edification and/or training. And over the years there have been hundreds, even tens of thousands of such people, many — surprisingly — in government and national security work.
As with ricin, which is listed next in this thin volume, one sees the obsession — carried into the neo-Nazi/survivalist far right — with the idiotic idea that dimethyl sulfoxide can make ricin, and by extension — abrin from rosary peas, into a contact poison.
Which is rubbish.
Hutchkinson’s book was turned into digital copy and distributed in anarchy files on underground bulletin board systems in the US. They were part of what was considered a forbidden lore. In that world, having access to it meant you were special and clever, when — in reality — just the opposite, you were a fucked-up anti-social dullard, was a more accurate assessment.
Later, these files were migrated to the Internet.
In this way Hutchkinson’s poison book, torn into fragments, traveled around the world. Eventually, its poison recipes also found their way into al Qaeda/jihadi documents, just in time for the War on Terror.
If you’re found with recipes from the book in the US, along with a few castor seeds or, perhaps, the makings of a silencer or pipe bomb, they’re part of the evidence that will send you to the pen.
In England, jihadi documents containing items bowdlerized from Hutchkinson’s notes are treated as things deemed likely to be of use in terrorism. As such, they’re considered seditious and, again, if you’re caught in the wrong circumstances or religion, enough to have you imprisoned.
“In Trinidad in the West Indies the brightly coloured seeds are strung into bracelets and worn around the wrist or ankle to ward off jumbies or evil spirits,” reads the Daily Mail newspaper.
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11.27.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 11:17 pm by George Smith
The title of this news items tells everything you need to know:
Oklahoma legislators want castor beans to be outlawed
Fast cut to the link and the first thing seen is the standard chubbish white guys in suits. Minor empirical proof the US began rewarding the useless and nasty decades ago.
The piece reads (it’s almost too intelligence insulting to believe):
Castor beans do not immediately leap to mind when one considers the state’s most serious problems.
And yet bills outlawing the production and transportation of castor beans were among the first filed in anticipation of next year’s legislative session.
Castor beans, being 50 percent or more oil, are the among the most promising biofuel crops.
They are also the source of one of nature’s deadliest poisons …
But state Sen. Mike Schulz, R-Altus, and Rep. Dale DeWitt, R-Braman, did not have terrorism or espionage in mind when they filed their castor bean bills this fall. They were concerned about a more direct threat – inadvertent contamination of the food supply.
“Prohibiting castor beans may not be something we want for the long-range,” DeWitt said. “But until we have more research into ways of lowering the ricin levels, we have to be very careful with it.”
Although castor plants are fairly common as ornamentals, their commercial production is virtually unknown in Oklahoma. With growing interest in them for biofuels, however, wheat growers and other crop producers became concerned about a burst of speculative cultivation spreading castor and ricin residue into fields, planting and harvesting equipment, storage bins and trucks and railroad cars used for transporting grain.
This is intellectual failure on so many levels it is difficult to know where to begin in explaining the stupidity of it.
At some time in the nation’s past — a few decades back — castor was a crop in the US. I have written about this before. None of it sticks. Journalists, politicians, and American alleged terror experts pay no attention to historical precedent or fact. If there are agricultural history and science books in libraries or old newspaper articles and stories to be consulted, they are all discounted and discarded for the apparent reason that people are now too lazy and crippled to be bothered to read them.
As an agricultural resource castor posed no real problem. It does not in those places around the world where it still is a crop. And castor mills in the United States were not poison dumps. People were not felled by wandering castor seeds in their morning cereal.
Castrol, a famous name in lubricant manufacturing and motorcycle racing, was not known for directly or indirectly killing anyone.
It is no longer a surprise to find that people around the world find Americans to be dangerously incompetent. Ignorance and the reward of it are now commonly seen at malevolent levels in this country.
Here’s a brief news item, republished here at DD blog, on the old timey production and milling of castor in the United States (the excerpt is from an article published in the newspaper of Plainview, TX in 2010):
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,??? Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.???
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
Bayonne, N.J.-based Baker Castor Oil Company already was a major importer and processor when it embarked on a plant breeding program in the late 1950s centered in Plainview in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Baker needed a dependable domestic supply of castor beans since the government was building up its strategic reserve,??? Anderson explained. “Baker at the time was having to primarily rely on what was being harvested by hand in Brazil and India from plants growing wild.???
Not only were there concerns about production and price volatility, the imported oil had a tendency to turn rancid during transport, Anderson said. A domestic source would reduce transportation costs while substantially improving quality. And, Plainview was a logical choice since the harvested crop could be shipped to crushing facilities on both East and West Coasts.
Amazing. Harvested castor seeds were crushed daily. And nobody died!
Obviously, in Oklahoma you can be … I don’t even wanna get into it.
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11.17.11
Posted in Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 8:36 am by George Smith
There’s not a defense lawyer in the US capable of arguing a client/defendant out of jail when ricin and accusations of terrorism planning are the central matters.
Never been done. Everyone has eventually gone to prison. And those in jail generally always stay there until trial.
Judges are not swayed once the word “ricin” is uttered. Juries pay no attention to arguments about the relative harmlessness of a handful of castor seeds.
From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Citing concerns that the four North Georgia men accused in a plot to bomb federal buildings and disperse the toxin ricin may still intend to harm federal authorities, U.S. Magistrate Court Judge Susan Cole denied bond to the defendants late Wednesday.
If she released them on bond, “I think there is a concern they would not be prevented access to instruments of harm,” Cole said. She also echoed prosecutors’ contention that their arrests are likely to have heightened the “ill-will” the men feel toward the government.
Defense attorneys for each of the men intend to appeal Cole’s decision, they said.
“It’s very disappointing. I thought we presented a good case and I don’t believe he’s a danger to the community,??? said Jeff Ertel, who is representing Thomas.
In a hearing that stretched over the course of three days, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBurney said the men — two of whom are veterans of the U.S. military — may “love their country,??? but had demonstrated a “hatred??? of their government.
Defense attorneys argued that owning weapons or castor beans –- the key ingredient in ricin -– is not illegal.
Dan Summer, who is representing Crump, said recordings of his client speaking about how to make ricin depict an “aspirational” goal, not something Crump intended to do or was even capable of doing.
“It’s almost like an old man in the throes of the very early stages of senility,” he said.
Barry Lombardo, Adams’ attorney, said his client — who worked in horticulture for the U.S. Department of Agriculture — owned castor bean bushes for the same reasons many Georgians do: for mole control.
But McBurney said the men had taken concrete steps that crossed the line into illegality: purchasing a silencer, explosives activated by a cell phone, and the ingredients for making ricin.
“We’ve moved beyond the hypothetical to reality,??? he said.
During the hearing several family members and friends of the defendants were called to testify, helping paint a fuller portrait of the men at the center of the domestic terrorism case.
Adams’ daughter Melissa said her father is active in masonic organizations and has helped raise money for sick children through the Shriners. Crump’s twin daughters testified that their father, a retired electrician, often donated his services to people in need. Roberts’ wife Margaret said the couple is active in animal rescue and are currently caring for dozens of cats and dogs. And Thomas’ family described him as a peace-loving man who, with 30 years in the U.S. Navy, was dedicated to serving his country.
Both Thomas’ wife Charlotte and son Paul said last week that the 52 weapons found in his home were part of a gun collection. Federal authorities also seized about 30,000 rounds of ammunition, including ammunition compatible with silencers, in the raid.
There is regular discussion of use of castor seeds in “mole control.”
There is no evidence that it actually works.
However, castor seeds have been considered in pest control for many years.
From this blog, a couple years ago:
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. Castor beans were considered a renewable resource, used as a source of lubricant and fertilizer. Even golf course gardeners worked with castor mash, noting that it wasn’t so hot as an insecticide, being ineffective against mole crickets.
The working wisdom, embedded during the last ten years, and repeated regularly in the newsmedia is that it is elementary to purify ricin from castor seeds.
It’s not. But from a legal standpoint in the US, this makes no difference. No one is capable of making a legal argument that would change things.
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11.10.11
Posted in Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 9:48 am by George Smith
I’ve commented on the durability of the poison recipes from the neo-Nazi survivalist extremist right in the United States.
Starting in books, the recipe is now on handwritten papers copied from digital copies, passed down through the years.
And they all serve as tickets to prison and personal ruin in a certain very unique and queer American demographic.
The ricin recipe is self-destructive flypaper for militia members, “sovereign citizens,” agonizingly excessive ammo and gun hoarders, raging anti-Semites, alleged defenders of the sanctity of the Constitution, Gadsden flag fliers, gold and silver bugs, pro-lifers and tax resisters.
As must-have lore, the Saxon ricin recipe and its derivatives have seemingly penetrated into every nook and cranny of the violent white power far right in this country. It speaks directly to an ineradicable crazy white man’s compulsion/obsession ( one held by an always surprising number of people) with having an arsenal for striking back at the government and locals they despise.
It arguably marks a singular and unpleasant flaw in our threadbare national character, one surely not held by the majority but always visible upon closer inspection.
In another manner of speaking, now there’s always some nut sitting at the table, in a quiet rage, convinced he’s a patriot defending against evil and collecting stuff that comforts him in this lonely task.
And if the ricin recipe could have been copyrighted in the way of best-sellers, it would have made the owner a great deal of money.
From Alaska, earlier in the week, a story eclipsed by the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang:
Mary Ann Morgan, the Kenai Peninsula “sovereign citizen” militia member arrested at the Canadian border in October after trying to enter the country with a handgun, also possessed bomb-making documents and instructions on how to make the poison ricin and carry concealed weapons, according to federal court documents filed Friday in Fairbanks …
The documents [found in Morgan’s pickup] included the following:
• A note, apparently in Morgan’s handwriting, with detailed directions on how to build pipe bombs.
• Information downloaded from the Internet on ricin, a deadly toxin derived from castor beans.
• A “plethora of information” on the possession and use of firearms.
• A list of common household poisons and a reference to a “poisonous plants database.” …
Morgan is associated with Fairbanks militia leader Schaefer Cox, currently jailed with others on federal weapons and murder conspiracy charges.
And on the Ricin Beans Gang yesterday:
The assassination of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney was part of the terrorist plot hatched by four North Georgia men, federal prosecutors said Wednesday in a bond hearing for the accused. (Both are African-American and Democrat.)
The four men accused of planning to bomb federal buildings, disperse the toxin ricin in major U.S. cities, and assassinate federal judges and prosecutors pleaded not guilty at the hearing in U.S. District Court in Gainesville.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBurney said law enforcement officers seized 52 weapons and 30,000 rounds of ammunition from [Ricin Beans Gang member Dan Thomas’] home. The weapons included assault rifles, shotguns, pistols with extended magazines and revolvers, and “sniper round” bullets and “sub-sonic??? ammunition designed to be used with silencers, he said. McBurney did not say where the guns and ammunition were kept in the home.
But defense attorney Jeff Ertel countered that Thomas is an avid gun collector and hunter. He said all of the weapons were legally owned, a point McBurney conceded.
It’s quite a legal arsenal/gun collection but probably not all that remarkable in heartland red state America.
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11.08.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 3:44 pm by George Smith
The Atlanta Journal Constitution had someone call today in order to discuss the literature of ricin-making in the US.
I’m the expert. Hit Google with “ricin recipe” or “recipe for ricin” and the I Feel Lucky button and all roads lead to stuff I’ve written.
What’s remarkable about ricin recipes — all those pertinent here originate in the neo-Nazi survivalist backwoodsman far right — is how durable they have been.
I told the newspaper’s reporter that Kurt Saxon had coined it without knowing much about ricin at all in 1984 for his pamphlet, The Weaponeer. And it had been published again in 1988 in The Poor Man’s James Bond.
And there is some real disgrace in the hard fact that Saxon’s legacy is one in which his work has some responsibility in the sending of many people he wrote his materials to advise — to jail.
However, in spite of this and the passage of decades it has persisted. Although sent around the world and copied into many different digital forms, in this country it has remained signal in the unusual subculture of exclusively white guys who are really angry with the government.
Young, middle-aged or old, they all share a virulent and deeply entrenched common paranoia.
The government is taking away their rights in many ways, threatening their existence, and inevitably expected to come for them.
The irony in this is that post-9/11 and the expansion of homeland security domestically, the acquisition of improvised weaponry — in particular castor seeds and the recipes from the extremist far right — seem to guarantee that their belief will come true.
When the US government finds out you’ve been talking about ricin and fiddling with a few castor seeds, it will come for you.
Historically, whenever a Democrat is in power, their presence in the land becomes much more visible. And the Presidency of Barack Obama, for the obvious reason that he is black, has brought them out like never before.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today, one Ricin Beans Gang member, 73-year old Frederick Thomas:
Frederick Thomas is a man of clear loyalties. In his yard, deep in the woods of White County, a yellow flag with the image of a snake warns: “Don’t Tread On Me.??? Nearby, affixed to the wall of his imposing wood home, a sign proclaims: “Frank Sinatra Fan Parking Only.???
So, which is he? An ordinary American of advancing years who calls his Sinatra-loving wife of 51 years each night from jail to say he misses her? Or the angry, alienated man who emerges from federal affidavits, his own heated rhetoric online and the pages of a novel he allegedly took as a blueprint for revolt?
One thing is certain — until last week, local officials had no reason to suspect him of leading a plot to assassinate federal officials, blow up buildings or murder innocent Georgians with deadly nerve toxins.
In [on-line militia forums], Thomas broadcast his determination to resist a government of “the Obummer,??? which he accused of destroying the Constitution.
“Most of my adult life has been spent in service to America, and here in the twilight of my years I find that my sacrifice and the blood I’ve shed for this country has led to the enslavement of me and mine,??? he wrote in January 2009 on a forum maintained by the Militia of Georgia.
“I’ve decided I can sit idly by no longer, and so I freely join with you to do something about this intolerable situation.???
Thomas’ wife and acquaintances were interviewed for the story. They say only that he was very old and seemingly harmless, so aged “He can hardly walk.”
We should treat elderly people more respectfully,” adds the neighbor.
Over the years, mental and physical fitness have never meant beans in cases such as this. The US government has jailed a troubled autistic man, an enfeebled drug addict who couldn’t get ricin but indicated he had tried to make it from castor oil (you can’t) and others who fair people would judge to be impaired in one way or another.
Note: Ricin is not a nerve poison, as the news item states. Ricin works by inhibiting protein synthesis at the ribosome.
My briefing of the Atlanta newspaper resulted in an article asserting ricin could not have been used as the Ricin Beans Gang envisioned. I told the newspaper the same thing last week. So the newspaper went out and found a couple of other experts to buttress it.
In any case, blog readers know all there is to know on the issue:
George Smith, who analyzes bioterror threats for GlobalSecurity.org, said the men were “steeped in poison lore” spread through the Internet.
“What is absurd about it is how this lore has become so solidified in a certain subculture,” Smith said. “People are utterly convinced of the realness of it.”
He added he thinks the people who subscribe to these beliefs have let their imaginations outpace their ability to accomplish their goals.
He believes the men lack the training to convert castor beans into a weapon of mass destruction.
“Ricin is a protein … the more you purify it, the harder it is to keep it around. People don’t understand that,” Smith said, explaining that proteins are easily broken down by heat, ultraviolet light, acids or elements such as lye.
The entire AJC piece is here.
Note: Lye is sodium hydroxide, a compound, not an element.
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11.07.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 4:55 pm by George Smith
Even FBI special agents make typos.
From the indictment of the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang:
“Castor beans are used for food and agriculture …”
From the Wisconsin office of the Dept of Homeland Security:
“The beans are not normally used as food …”
The Ricin Beans Gang discussing their (actually quite ludicrous) plan to use the poison:
Sam Jerry Crump: What I’d like to do is make about ten pounds of that … Give you 2, me 2, Ray (Adams) 2, Dan (Roberts) 2 and somebody else 2. Put it out in different cities at the same time: Washington DC, maybe Newark, Atlanta, Jacksonville, New Orleans. Dump that little (unintelligible) … that’s all you gotta do is lay it in the damn road, the cars are gonna spread it.
FBI Informant: Yeah, but what’s it take to make it? I haven’t got a clue.
Sam Jerry Crump: Just some seed. I got the, got -uh — one more ingredient, and I’ll get it today …
Other statement concerning ricin from Samuel Jerry Crump:
“Ya got, ya can’t let none of it get on your skin. Got to be a closed environment when it’s made. No wind. If it gets up your nose there’s no cure.”
[Ricin is not a contact poison.]
Samuel Jerry Crump also mentioned another toxic substance, probably botulinum toxin:
“That other kind, 1 pound can kill 30 million people … We need somebody to back us with money so we can make that other shit … This is worse than anthrax … That shit’s deadly! There ain’t no damn, there ain’t no cure for it. And it works, I think, in 2 hours.”
Finally, on prodding, Ray Adams names the more deadly toxin.
Crump: “Kills about 30 million people at one time, one pound of it. It’s caused from dead food.”
Ray Adams: “Oh, botulism.”
Crump goes onto to roughly describe the ricin recipe devised and distributed by Kurt Saxon in his pamphlet, The Weaponeer, back in 1984.
Further along, he goes into details on his plan to disburse it. First the castor powder should be mixed with charcoal to make it black. Presumably so it would be hard to see at night, one guesses.
Later, Sam Jerry Crump makes one astute observation:
“[But] if they find that shit on your computer you’re hung.”
Crump later mused on “going to Africa” to get “botulism”:
“Well, I thought you can’t make that botulism (unintelligible) … got some good backers … go to Africa, uh, and get some of that to make.
“We’d bring it back over here. Ya don’t make it over there. You just get the samples of the stuff out of the soil. It comes from dead animals, from rotten meat. That’s where botulism comes from. It’s more potent than the stuff (ricin) … I know somebody can make it.”
Ray Adams, another member of the Ricin Beans Gang, alleged to a lab technician at one time, discussed making ricin:
“Well, I’ve never done it (made ricin) but I have laboratory experience and once you extract that stuff enough just splashin’ it on your skin can kill ya. Once it dries, while it’s wet, any kind of solvent, like anything, it just takes water solution to soak through your skin. It’s highly permeable through the skin. There’s no antidote.
“I’ve handled all kinds of deadly stuff, pesticides and that kind of stuff, so … ”
[To emphasize the level of knowledge on display, it’s worth repeating that ricin is not a contact poison.]
The entire Ricin Beans Gang indictment is here.
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11.05.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 10:33 am by George Smith
A news story from Georgia reveals a marker on what the geriatric ricin beans gang was working from:
ATLANTA — Four men who were indicted in alleged terror attacks had the weapons they wanted and were one ingredient away from making deadly toxin ricin, according to a criminal indictment.
Two days before they were arrested defendants Ray Adams and Samuel Crump said they needed just one more ingredient to produce ricin, according to the indictment. Adams said he needed one pound of lye and was ready to begin the process of making the deadly toxin.
This means the ricin beans gang had a copy from Kurt Saxon’s Poor Man’s James Bond, or something similar descended from it.
Soak castor seeds in lye, Saxon advised as early as 1984 in The Weaponeer, one of his pamphlets later incorporated into the Poor Man’s James Bond volumes.
Ricin is a protein. Proteins are destroyed by strong base. Lye is a a strong base.
Saxon had no real idea what ricin was. The Poor Man’s James Bond contains a couple methods for working with it, some seemingly made up out of whole cloth. At one point there’s a procedure recommending using a strongly acid solution, which is also very harsh on proteins.
And article discusses using ricin on bullets, an absurd idea since the heat and explosion in the barrel of a gun would destroy all the poison. The idea here was that if you only winged somebody — a “degenerated person” — the poison would do them in later. Quaint.
However, another part of the news story shows the ricin beans gang repeating the treasured old and undying script of the far right extremist:
Thomas is quoted in the affidavit from a recorded conversation with the informant: “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save the country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly illegal. Murder. That’s (expletive) illegal, but it’s gotta be done. When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people gotta die.”
Saving the country, saving Georgia, saving the Constitution — by, among other things, following almost thirty year-old poison recipes manufactured by the US backwoodsman neo-Nazi survivalist right.
A member of the Ricin Beans Gang, photo taken in 2001.
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11.03.11
Posted in Extremism, Psychopath & Sociopath, Ricin Kooks at 2:22 pm by George Smith
One imagined way of dispatching your enemies with ricin — dreamt of by Old Weird America extremists in the Eighties and passed down through the years.
DD is intimately familiar with Old Weird America.
I grew up in part of it, Schuylkill County, PA. There, fear of fluoridation and the existence of the occasional barn burner, invariably an unsettled young man who set fire to the obvious target, marked it in my youth.
That signature demographic has many subcultures. My first publisher, American Eagle, belonged to one of them.
American Eagle was a book maker run out of a house in Tucson, AZ. It was the creation of a fellow with advanced degrees from CalTech and MIT. He was also a theocrat.
Most of American Eagle’s books were devoted to publishing computer virus code. My book, a look into the old computer virus underground, Virus Creation Labs, was part of this collection.
But American Eagle, like other small US publishers devoted to the Old Weird America demographic, published one book, its last, that pitched directly to the most dangerous part of it.
It was called Civil War II and swiftly became one of the publisher’s best-sellers, catering as it did to the far right extremist’s view that Mexico and US Latinos would reconquer the American southwest and that the middle class was being destroyed by affirmative action and the US government.
Sound familiar?
It was a terrible read. Nevertheless, it was popular in the reactionary and violent far right underground.
If you liked Civil War II you probably had it on the shelf next to a worn copy of The Turner Dairies, America’s premier piece of raging bigot race war fiction, a novel in which “freedom fighters” bomb the FBI and Pentagon, eventual inspirations for Timothy McVeigh.
Around 2000, seemingly convinced the US government would collapse due to the Millenium Bug and other catastrophes, American Eagle’s creator left the country for Belize.
Between the start of American Eagle and it’s eventual end the publisher would occasionally write pieces on what life in a theocracy might be like, how one might start one’s own micro-nation on an island, or the greatness of Spetznaz knives. In one pamphlet or book he mused about a computer virus that would substitute the word “Sodomite” for every instance of “homosexual” or “gay” found in text.
Can you guess my book didn’t do well in this milieu? Wrong venue.
The point of this introductory is that this part of Old Weird America is always with us.
It had its own publishing arm with imprint names like Paladin Press and Loompanics, makers and distributors of generally always disgraceful and sometimes horrifyingly repugnant books. (I have one or two on my shelves, part of the research library on ricin and American samizdat lit on weaponry. These include the infamous Poisoner’s Handbook and Silent Death by “Uncle Fester,” aka the ex-con methamphetamine chemist, Steve Preisler.)
They all fed and feed to a dark undercurrent, present at gun shows in the hinterland, sometimes off in the corner, on the necessity of preparation for war and preemptively attacking your enemies — always the government, its various agencies, or your neighbors if they got in the way or weren’t the right color. And to be prepared for war meant having a library stocked with pamphlets and books on how to make improvised weapons — bombs, incendiaries, jellied gasoline, fire bottles, homebrew toxins, zip guns, fortifications, camouflaged pits lined with excrement impregnated stakes, booby traps, landmines, whatever you needed.
Old Weird America lives in its own world and is always paranoid.
People in it can’t be approached with reason. In fact, it’s often counter-productive and hazardous to do so. Nothing disturbs their cracked doomsday-is-coming world view.
They may be a crew of white guys who think no laws apply to them because they’re “free men,” far right Christians waiting for the second coming in which all unbelievers are to be sent to eternal damnation, gold bugs, neo-Nazis, survivalists, pro-lifers, census-resisters, people who think the income tax is unconstitutional and therefore illegal, or any combination of these.
They all share an apocalyptic dark vision of the future. And, invariably, they always think a civil war, or some manner of armed heavy combat between the government and the citizenry is imminent. And this is a battle for which they either plan to be well-prepared or intend to strike first. And they have written plenty of non-fiction and romantic man’s fiction about it.
The geriatric ricin beans gang nabbed in Georgia early this week come right from Old Weird America central casting.
Today, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
It was June 9, and Frederick Thomas believed he was meeting with a dealer in black market weapons at a Lavonia restaurant, according to FBI affidavits.
“I ain’t worried about dying,??? said the 73-year-old Thomas, the accused ringleader of a North Georgia militia group now at the center of domestic terrorism charges.
A story grew clearer Wednesday through federal affidavits, interviews and court statements accusing Thomas, Roberts and two other men — Ray H. Adams, 65, and Samuel J. Crump, 68 — of planning to unleash the toxic agent ricin across Atlanta and other major U.S. cities, bomb federal buildings and take innocent lives. Documents say the men intended to launch their plot within a year.
At that meeting in June, Thomas talked about buying explosives, silencers and mines, and killing officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Drug Enforcement Administration. It was a plan based on a novel by Mike Vanderboegh, a former militia leader and blogger, that detailed killing Justice Department attorneys, Thomas said, according to the FBI affidavits.
“Now, of course, that’s just fiction, but that’s a damn good idea,??? Thomas, a retired aerospace engineer, once told the others in the so-called “covert group …???
Documents allege that Crump planned to disperse the ricin in various U.S. cities including Atlanta, Newark, N.J., and Washington. In Atlanta, the documents said, the plan was to unleash the powdery substance on I-285, I-75 and U.S. 41.
A member of the Georgia ricin beans gang, pic from 2001.
The back of one of the most widely sold books of Old Weird America, one containing advice on ricin, The Poor Man’s James Bond by Kurt Saxon, reads:
“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 …”
Succinctly, it sums up one of the many bleak philosophies of Old Weird America. And while I don’t know if anyone in the Georgia ricin beans gang ever read it, they certainly appear steeped in it.
Full disclosure: Your host was a source on quote on ricin for the AJC piece:
But could the group have made ricin?
“No, what they would have wound up with is dried castor powder,??? said George Smith, a senior fellow for GlobalSecurity.org, a public information organization on terrorism and homeland security. “They would not be able to make that into a weapon of mass destruction, and it’s not something even a lab technician can really do.???
As mentioned, self-published man’s romance fiction as tutelage for and on the destruction of your enemies and the tyrannical government has always been popular in Old Weird America.
It’s all uniformly dreadful and it’s no different with alleged inspiration for the Georgia ricin beans gang.
The authors and bloggers from Old Weird America are always pretty much the same — crippled stereotypes of Kurt Saxon and William Pierce, only dumber, but utterly convinced of their righteousness.
From the Associated Press, by the way of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, on the author of a “book,” Absolved and a blog said to have inspired the ricin beans gang:
On his website, militia leader-turned-blogger Mike Vanderboegh writes about fed-up Americans responding to government violence with guns and grenades. It’s an attempt to warn the government that people are armed and angry, he says, just like last year when he urged those upset with President Barack Obama’s health care plan to toss bricks at Democratic Party offices …
In the introduction to ‘Absolved,’ first posted in 2008, Vanderboegh writes: “If this book is to operate as a ‘useful dire warning,’ then both real sides in my imaginary civil war … must be able to recognize the real threat to avoid it.
“In this, I am frankly writing as much a cautionary tale for the out-of-control gun cops of the ATF as anyone. For that warning to be credible, I must also present what amounts to a combination field manual, technical manual and call to arms for my beloved gunnies of the armed citizenry. They need to know how powerful they could truly be if they were pushed into a corner.”
Last year, Vanderboegh was denounced for calling on citizens to throw bricks through the windows of local Democratic headquarters.
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11.01.11
Posted in Ricin Kooks at 6:20 pm by George Smith
UPDATED
From NBC:
Four Georgia men in their 60s and 70s were arrested Tuesday, accused of being members of a right-wing militia group that plotted to attack federal office buildings and to disperse a deadly biological poison in Atlanta.
Their alleged plot was revealed to the FBI by a confidential informant last spring, and members of the group have been meeting since May with someone they thought was a black-market weapons dealer but who turned out to be an undercover federal agent, according to court documents …
The documents say the men, Frederick Thomas, 73, of Cleveland, Ga.; Dan Roberts, 67, Ray Adams, 65, and Samuel Crump, 68, all of Toccoa, called themselves “the covert group” and began in March to talk about staging attacks against federal targets including the IRS …
They allegedly obtained a silencer from the undercover agent and plotted to buy explosives. Crump claimed he could produce ricin, a deadly biological agent, and talked about dispersing it from a car driving on an interstate highway, according to court documents.
“Ya get on the trunk of Atlanta, you get up on the north side, ya get on 41, ya throw it out there right on 285, ya go up 41 or 75, go up 75 to get away from it. Keep the heater on, that way keeps the pressure out. Don’t roll your window down,” he told the informant, according to court documents.
According to federal investigators, Crump had worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in the past doing “maintenance-type services” for a contractor, and Adams used to work for a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency called the Agricultural Research Service as a lab technician.
One, a glorified janitor. Another, a “lab technician.”
Efficacy of plan? Non-existent.
What happens when someone throws a box of rat poison into the wind on a highway? Nothin’.
Stated in basic English: You can’t purify enough ricin from handfuls of castor seeds and it’s not quite toxic enough to make such a plan even work a little. As in, maybe, making some random rabbit or ground hog feel sick.
So why do people believe making a biological weapon is as easy as grinding seeds into a powder and throwing it out the window of a speeding car?
Because they’ve read about how allegedly easy it is and watched it in episodes on dramatic tv for the last ten years. And they’ve believed all the rubbish.
Absurd claims
From NBC:
At the meeting, Thomas said: “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: Murder,” according to the court records.
Roberts, who attended several meetings, mentioned in May that he knew a former U.S. Army soldier who was a “loose cannon” who may be able to help them make ricin that the group could disperse in major U.S. cities. Crump and Adams were assigned to try to obtain or make the lethal toxin, and Crump was recorded in September saying he would like to make 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of the substance.
It’s not clear from the court documents exactly how the men obtained the trace amounts of ricin.
An informant who met Adams’ at his home in October saw lab equipment and a glass beaker, and a bean obtained by the informant was later tested by state officials as positive for ricin.
This is bog standard ricin kooks fare. (Read the tab, or browse part of it.)
The fellows expose themselves as incompetent in making the claim they’d like to make 10 pounds of ricin. They can make ten pounds of castor powder. Anyone can. However, these days, ordering enough castor seeds to do it (unless you have your own field of castor) draws the attention of the FBI and Homeland Security.
And those are facts, Jack.
Being caught with a beaker, just one castor seed or ten, and a trace ricin finding sets defendants up for the charge of taking a step in making a weapon. A conviction on it means hard time. And everyone who has been charged with such things in the last few years has been sent over.
Just got off the telephone talking to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution on the matter.
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10.18.11
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 9:28 am by George Smith
Today, a press release, one of a steady stream from the homeland security industry.
This one on a DHS contract for ricin detection to small business that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for taxpayer money.
Keep in mind the only market for ricin detection is the artificial one created by the rise of powder hoaxing as hobby for the disgruntled white survivalist nut or felon in the United States. And, primarily, that owes much of its existence due to the explosive growth of the homeland security complex, one which has spent the last ten years loudly telling everyone that ricin is easy to make.
The press release, from PositiveID Corporation:
PositiveID Corporation (“PositiveID” or “Company”) PSID
+32.14% , a developer of medical technologies for
diabetes management, clinical diagnostics and bio-threat detection, announced that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) Science and Technologies (“S&T”) division has directed and funded the development of the Company’s immunodetection assay for the identification of Ricin toxin to meet the specific needs that DHS has in securing the nation against biological threats. Ricin, a chemical warfare agent, is derived from the seeds of the castor oil plant Ricinus communis and has become a tool of terrorist groups across the world due to its effortless production and high toxicity.
Straight off there’s a good bit of lying. In ten years, ricin has not been much of a tool for terrorists. Only 22 castor seeds were found in the infamous Wood Green case in 2003.Castor powder cake was found in Iraq, ground after we invaded the country. And — of course — more recently, the rubbish story about potential ricin bombs being made somewhere in the wastes of Yemen.
Over the last decade the overwhelming majority of incidences of ricin in the news come from stories about powder hoaxes or cases where white American loners (and the occasional British neo-Nazi) have decided to grind castor seeds into a mush.
These are the facts. Amply documented in the Ricin Kooks tab at right, over many years.
Consider this: The country can lay off public sector workers en masse — 250,000 teachers. But no expenses have ever been spared for research and development of detection for a “threat” that has killed absolutely no one in the last ten years.
One can now think of this as something of a Ponzi scheme, entitlement spending, or a small but still significant Keynsian jobs program akin to paying people to dig holes and fill them back in the next day. For years.
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