10.03.11
Posted in Phlogiston, Ricin Kooks at 10:18 am by George Smith
I really enjoy the AMC series Breaking Bad.
Gustavo Fring, Walter White’s boss in meth manufacturing, is one of the finest characters on current television.
Let’s give Giancarlo Esposito, the fellow who plays him, a big round of applause.
However, for last night’s episode it pains me slightly to note a lapse in reality in scripting.
Jesse Pinkman thinks the little boy, Brock, has been poisoned by his vial of ricin, produced by Walter, secreted away in a cigarette, for use at some future date on Gus.
The entire episode revolves around this. And at one point Jesse pleads with Brock’s mother, Andrea, to tell the doctors at the hospital about ricin.
In the real US, the moment she does, the jig is up for Jesse, Walter and Gus’s meth operation.
That’s because suspicion of ricin reported in the hospital at any state activates the national security network. Homeland Security and the FBI get called in, no matter how small the connection.
Five years ago I wrote about how it works here, for the Register.
In this case, an Arizona man named Casey Cutler was rounded up and convicted on a terror charge when his roommate went to the emergency ward with a respiratory illness, but reported he thought he might have been poisoned with ricin because Cutler was fiddling around with castor oil.
It doesn’t even really matter if no ricin is present. When the national security infrastructure is tripped, all Hell breaks loose.
I wrote:
[Once] the word ricin was uttered, it had to be reported to the federal network. When that happens, an array of responses is tripped, including the summoning of a Phoenix SWAT team, and WMD units from the Arizona National Guard and the FBI.
And that standard overwhelming federal response would assuredly mean the end for Jesse Pinkman, Walter White, Gus Fring and the high tech super meth production facility they run.
The only way out for the script writers: Having Andrea never mention ricin to Brock’s doctors at hospital. Or leaving the question in limbo for the final episode, probably a cliff-hanger, next week.
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09.23.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 6:55 am by George Smith
From a monetizing-Homeland-Security publication:
American intelligence officials recently warned that AQAP is actively involved in efforts to produce the deadly poison ricin for use in attacks inside the United States. According to analysts, the poison would likely be packed around small explosive charges that would disperse the deadly toxin on detonation. Ricin is so deadly that even a minute quantity can kill someone if inhaled or otherwise absorbed into the blood stream. But while American intelligence is aggressively pursuing investigation of this threat, it’s severely hampered by the chaos on the ground in Yemen. The virtual collapse of Yemen’s government has allowed Al Qaeda to expand its operations throughout the country …
The truth is, there is no finish line – there is only eternal vigilance.
The tagline: “Charles Faddis is a retired CIA covert operations officer and the former head of the Agency’s WMD terrorism unit.”
The CIA’s WMD terrorism unit? No WMD’s (in their real sense) have been found during the decade of the war on terror. That is ZERO.
“[Faddis] is author of, Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, and, Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security. His first novel, Codename Aphrodite, which is based on his experiences as a covert operative abroad, was published in June …”
And if you’re wondering why DD has never had a book on the subject, the answer is fairly obvious. In a world where the stuff published is as you see above, of what monetary value is the material found here?
Rhetorical, of course. The only consolation is that you can’t pay regular people enough to make them read the ocean of books like those cited.
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09.11.11
Posted in Decline and Fall, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 1:40 pm by George Smith
Here’s my ten year anniversary reminisce on the war on terror, one drawn from expert perspective. And it’s simple.
The bad guys won.
I don’t mean bin Laden or al Qaeda.
My view deals with the US mechanism, the security and threat assessment machine that was part of the post 9/11 Bush boom in the tools of war.
Today there’s no visible mechanism in the nation looking at things from the perspective of a devil’s advocate. There is nothing acting to put the breaks on a function where the only purpose is to find new enemies.
It hardened into this all things terror all the time half a decade ago.
Arms control agencies, any public information source that didn’t directly serve the war on terror by finding new threats, any threats, went silent, were marginalized or ceased to exist.
It’s a matter of economics and capitalism. There is no money in not feeding the fear.
We did this to ourselves. The worst parts in the paranoid reptile brain, convenient for a national business model based on a constant state of fear, were allowed to take over.
Over the years I’ve known a number of good people who did practice reason and criticism, individuals who fought against the making of terror stories and information into commodities, planted p.r. for political recognition and increased funding. If they went into the apparatus, and some did, they were silenced.
Purchase for service and work in the government destroyed all the value of formerly public critical thinking.
Of course, we still have it. It just has no place now.
From my experience, it’s useful to look back at how I got into looking at terrorism. The idea was to be rational. And that doesn’t seem too unreasonable even when printed today.
This occurred when I was contacted by British defense counsel in the infamous London ricin trial. I had been researching “recipes” for ricin and how and where they had circulation worldwide. I published on the web through GlobalSecurity.
And these recipes were going to be part of the trial. The prosecution’s case was initially aimed at linking a recipe found in England with other recipes found when the US overturned the Taliban and routed al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The reasoning was that it would prove a linkage and an operation that had been interrupted.
And I was familiar with all the original ricin recipes and where and when they had been published.
Kamel Bourgass’s jewelry tin of castor seeds, used to help grease the Iraq invasion. “The prosecuting authorities effectively [stood] accused of suborning justice to shore up support for an unjustifiable war,” wrote a columnist for The Telegraph in April of 2005.
Take a close look at that photo of a jewelry tin of castor seeds.
In September of 2002 until January of 2004, British anti-terrorist branch men were engaged in a dragnet for suspected terrorists in the north and east of London. In one operation on January 5, the plant poison ricin was claimed to have been found in an apartment above a pharmacy in a place called Wood Green. The news flashed around the world.
Tension was high and TIME International wrote in a story entitled “Poisonous Plot:” “Watching the police officers come and go, some of them in protective white suits and masks, and seeing the long hours they spent in the top-floor apartment above a local pharmacy, neighbors in North London’s multiracial Wood Green section knew that something big was up.”
Several suspected terrorists were arrested. One at Wood Green, others connected to a raid at the Finsbury Park mosque and one, Kamel Bourgass, a week later, in Manchester. Bourgass stabbed and killed a police officer in the Manchester raid. At the apartment in Wood Green — a “residue of ricin” was said to have been found. “A presumed al-Qaeda terror lab had been shut down.”
The residue of ricin eventually turned out to be a false positive, news suppressed until the trial of accused suspects in 2004. As for anything deadly — 22 castor seeds, most of them in the tin shown above, were the best that could be produced.
When I was first contacted by a representative of the defense counsel, document specialist/expert Duncan Campbell, the opinion was that a crew of terrorists bagged in the London raids were going to be sent over.
Most still believed there was some substance to Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council, a now totally discredited piece of theatre that ended his career. It was a show in which one of the government slides focused on a nefarious network allegedly linking al Qaeda in Iraq to plots in Europe.
Now — replace that ominous-looking and shadowy “UK Poison Cell” with the silly photo of a jewelry tin of castor seeds.
It’s impossible to take even half seriously as any basis for even one plank of an argument for taking the US into a disastrous war in Iraq. That it was used in such a way is criminal.
Nevertheless, that’s what our leaders did.
In England and before a jury, the prosecution’s terror case collapsed. There was no way to link a scrap of a ricin recipe found in England with material taken off al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The British recipe had been actually been copied from a server in California.
The British jury would convict only Kamel Bourgass. And he was already in prison for life. The ricin trial charges were only icing on the nasty cake.
The jury did not buy that the people in the dock with Bourgass were part of an al Qaeda poison ring. They were exonerated although the British government would continue to make things miserable for them in subsequent years. A trial of more men swept up in the original counter-terror operation was canceled. It had been predicated on the idea that a jury would find evidence of a poison ring and convict all men in the first trial.
I realized early that this would be of some news in the US.
The British government had embargoed the trial in the UK, but not here. So, under the rubric of Globalsecurity, American news agencies were approached.
No one would have it. So we published on site.
Then they started to call.
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post was perturbed. The information, he growled over the phone, put the paper in a difficult position. This meant having to scramble for confirming anonymous sources in England.
Harrumph! Such things disturb the digestion.
Somebody from 60 Minutes called. What did my sources in the government, the intelligence agencies, tell me? What did Colin Powell have to say?
That’s what I was asked. I didn’t have any sources in the government and intelligence agencies. Colin Powell? Surely, 60 Minutes had to be joking! I never heard from them again.
At Newsweek, reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball found a wind-up toy terror expert to help craft the impression a British jury had gone rogue and set free a detachment of al Qaeda men:
The mixed outcome dismayed U.S. counterterror specialists who were convinced that Bourgass and his four codefendants were in fact acting as part of a broader international terror plot …
“This is very disturbing …” [said a] a government consultant on international terror cases about the acquittals in the ricin-plot case. “These are dangerous people …
It was tripe. Newsweek wouldn’t have the truth.
At the end of one of my write-ups at GlobalSecurity I tried to sound an optimistic note:
The [al Qaeda poison ring] news was too terrible and repeated too often to easily replace as common wisdom. Indeed, there will be many convinced that justice was not served, that a poison plot was foiled and that convictions would have been certain if only the right evidence had been presented and taken seriously. They will think that the case of Bourgass and others was a defeat in the global war on terror.
Others, however, will view it as a victory, an affirmation that specious intelligence, fear, stupidity and suspicions cannot forever trample on reality.
That hesitant optimism was unwarranted. Things were only going to get worse.
The number of people hired to search for and analyze threats exploded.
Today it’s a fact there there are a lot more people working in this capacity alone, paid for by the taxpayer, than there are actual members of al Qaeda worldwide.
And you can define the number of times in the last decade even one of them has come forward to offer public reason and perspective contrary to the usual mantra of everything being at threat at any time, simply by using the index finger and thumb to make a big zero.
That’s none in the ten years since 9/11.
This has resulted in very many bad things.
For example, at a micro level millions of dollars a year have been thrown away on not one, but two, experimental ricin vaccines for a decade. It’s been enough to support one pharmaceutical business and one government operation, the former of which has not brought one product to market in the time since 9/11.
Just multiply that kind of thing tens of thousands of times throughout the country.
Another result is that at the local level, nationwide, the belief has been embedded nationwide in many people, including those ostensibly involved in counter-terrorism, that al Qaeda men are everywhere, ready to spring from behind any bush to spray Americans with germs or poisons.
And yet another, the worst: The cynical monetization of all information and news on terrorism.
It’s always good business to have it for your new book’s publicity or your big news scoop. Or to manipulate it, leak it, massage and exaggerate it for political purpose, for improving the career or expansion of manpower and funding to search for always more threats.
Indeed, much of it has been written about here, at GlobalSecurity, and at other venues. Almost a decade’s worth of work on what now looks like historical documentation for the inexorable downward slope.
After bin Laden was killed there was a week of celebration. However,
what was the benefit? Seven days later it was back to more business as usual.
All the people who died ten years ago are not honored by this machine, this gigantic thought-destroying mechanism erected because of one very bad day. One wonders what some of them might say to us if they could have just one look at the way things are now.
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08.23.11
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 9:00 am by George Smith
Just having recipes on ricin and bomb-making on the pc or any memory storage device get you sent over in Britain.
That’s just a fact. And it’s been that way for a few years.
The latest from the beat:
Asim Kauser, 25, of Bardon Close, Bolton, is charged with four offences under the Terrorism Act relating to material found on a computer pen drive.
He is accused of having details likely to be useful to someone committing or preparing an act of terrorism.
The judge remanded him in custody until a trial. The date is yet to be fixed.
Mr Justice Calvert-Smith said the case should be heard in Manchester.
Mr Kauser is alleged to have committed the offences between January 2009 and June 2011.
One of the charges relates to having “various instructions in how to make an improvised explosive device”.
Another relates to a recipe for the poison ricin.
If you’re a young man or woman in Britain with dark skin and a “Muslim” name you can’t have this stuff. It’s a trip to jail if you’re caught, even if you’re only curious because you heard so much on them.
Examples of the tickets to jail.
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08.13.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:42 pm by George Smith
Today’s most odious news comes from the New York Times and concerns an alleged plot by al Qaeda in Yemen. And the plot involves — ricin bombs.
Reported by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, the story also appears to be a bit of tease for their book, “Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda.” set for publication next week by Times Books.
The tome is mentioned in the story. However, Schmitt and Shanker do not really mention they’re the authors, too. One supposes editors thought it obvious.
In any case, readers already are sniffing a self-serving business here.
But on the bit about ricin bombs, news of which must have been communicated to the authors a decent interval ago, news-wise.
Here’s the lede from the newspaper:
American counterterrorism officials are increasingly concerned that the most dangerous regional arm of Al Qaeda is trying to produce the lethal poison ricin, to be packed around small explosives for attacks against the United States.
For more than a year, according to classified intelligence reports, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has been making efforts to acquire large quantities of castor beans …
Long time readers know that no one — that’s NO ONE — has ever developed a “ricin bomb.”
A long long time ago the US military tried. And the only result was an infamous patent for the purfication of ricin. Since the work was done long before scientists understood protein chemistry (full disclosure: DD’s Ph.D. is in protein chemistry) reading it leads a current scientist fluent in the field to realize it actually destroyed ricin.
Ricin is a protein. And proteins don’t like lots of things — like heat, harsh handling, many solvents, being taken out of their natural environment, and … well I won’t go into the rest right here.
And the old US ricin patent used all the things that are hard on proteins. Which perhaps has something to do with why ricin bombs have never been made.
Readers will note the first sentence of the Times piece states that al Qaeda is trying to pack ricin around explosives. Therefore, from this it can be inferred that al Qaeda has no competent scientists working on this project in Yemen.
But onward.
These officials also note that ricin’s utility as a weapon is limited because the substance loses its potency in dry, sunny conditions, and unlike many nerve agents, it is not easily absorbed through the skin. Yemen is a hot, dry country, posing an additional challenge to militants trying to produce ricin there.
In the first sentence, the journalists show that someone in government has told them a little bit of what I’ve just put up here on the nature of ricin and proteins.
But in the same sentence they make this BIG mistake: “[Ricin] is not easily absorbed through the skin.”
Ricin is not absorbed through the skin. Period. Proteins are not absorbed through the skin. If they could be absorbed through the skin you could eat your sandwich by putting the slice of salami on your forearm or pouring your cup of beef bouillon on your stomach.
Proteins are large macro-molecules. And they are not absorbed through the skin — which is made up of keratin — the structural protein that makes up the outer layer of our hide.
Nerve agents are not large molecules at all. In fact, they are quite other things.
In the scheme of things during the war on terror, the US has funded the development of two ricin vaccines. They are not ready yet. However, during development ricin toxicity is tested on rodents. And it is used in an aerosol, not as a contact poison.
It is also purified ricin.
The New York Times story does not make any indication that al Qaeda has purified ricin. In fact, if they are planning on using it with explosives, the likelihood is that they do not have anyone savvy enough to purify it to the state in which it is used for research in the United States.
The Times continues:
Michael E. Leiter, who retired recently as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a security conference last month. “It’s not hard to develop ricin.???
And here is the problem of relying on an expert who may know everything about fighting terrorism but who knows nothing about advanced chemistry or biology.
Ricin is not easy to “develop” unless, in using that word, you mean “grinding castor seeds into powder.”
And that is what people fiddling with castor seeds, in large quantities or small, always do. They transform seeds into castor mash. And the mash may be subsequently washed with an organic solvent, like acetone, to remove castor oil.
None of this is a purification. It is merely a change from seed to powder, and a bit of oil removal.
Back to the Times:
In 2003, British and French operatives broke up suspected al Qaeda cells that possessed components and manuals for ricin bombs …
This is also wrong.
The London ricin plot was not connected to al Qaeda. It was one man — Kamel Bourgass — who was sent over for it. No manuals or components for ricin bombs were recovered.
I have translations of the papers seized in the British “ricin ring” raids.
They are clearly posted on the web here at GlobalSecurity.Org.
These are not manuals. They are elementary scraps of paper. Rubbish, really.
In London, the plot was to smear ricin (castor powder, really) mixed with skin creme on door handles. No bomb. In any case, an expert testified that ricin wasn’t a contact poison, anyway.
No ricin was discovered in England.
From my old writings on the matter, at GlobalSecurity:
Martin Pearce, the Porton Down scientist who accompanied the anti-terrorism team on the Wood Green raid noted items of potential interest to include, toiletries, a common funnel, two scales, bottles of acetone and some rubber gloves.
Twenty-two intact castor seeds were recovered. Twenty-one were found in a jewelry case along with one other in an unspecified location within the Wood Green apartment.
Furthermore:
Months earlier and behind the scenes, the British government had seen its claims, that the group [of men eventually found innocent in a jury trial] had the capability to produce ricin and that materials on a ricin recipe found in their belongings could be linked to al Qaida, rupture. And equally startling, it was confirmed that a preliminary positive finding of the poison in a residue tested in a raid on their apartment in Wood Green in January of 2003 was false but that through bureaucratic bungling, just the opposite news was presented to British authorities.
Near the end the Times reporters write:
Months after the initial ricin intelligence reports surfaced last year, Saudi intelligence officials revealed a twist to the ricin plot: Qaeda operatives were trying to place the toxin in bottles of perfume, especially a popular local fragrance made of the resin of agarwood, and send those bottles as gifts to assassinate government officials and law enforcement and military officers. There is no indication that Al Qaeda ever succeeded with this approach, intelligence officials said.
Even this idea is old news.
My crude drawing, from years ago, is a copy of how American survivalist Kurt Saxon proposed that ricin might be used from one of his old pamphlets published in the Eighties.
On the old blog, I wrote:
The illustration to the left, for example, is Dick Destiny blog’s rendition of a drawing of what to do with your bowl of ricin poison, published in Kurt Saxon’s “The Weaponeer” in 1984.
It is no surprise that al Qaeda has an abiding interest in ricin. The “recipe” for turning to castor seeds into dry powder is easy to come by. And there has never been any shortage of US government men and mountebank counter-terror “experts” saying that it’s easy to make.
But history has shown quite the opposite. Ricin is far from easy to make into a weapon, much less any notional bomb. It can be used and has been used as a poison aimed at one person, sometimes in a household, or more famously from a Cold War example I won’t bother to mention.
And every year the FBI arrests a share of white American kooks who are puttering around with castor seeds.
So it is quite logical that al Qaeda might wish to try and do something using it. And, through the war on terror, some of them have always believed, too, that ricin is easy to make into a weapon.
Why?
Because they have frequently read that this is so in the American press.
The New York Times article has one takeaway which is not a mistake. The US counter-terror man asserts that any “ricin bomb” would most certainly “scare” people and be very big news.
That’s very accurate, unfortunately. It makes it possible for them to make a “ricin bomb” that doesn’t actually work, although the immediate explosion would, by itself, kill people close by.
Once news got going that a “ricin bomb” had been deployed anyone even remotely near the thing would probably be terrified they’d been poisoned. The American media would be the vector for this whether anyone had actually been poisoned or not.
Related materials: My inimitable Ricin Kooks tab.
My articles on the London ricin case at GlobalSecurity.Org.
This post has been updated slightly for clarity.
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06.23.11
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:50 pm by George Smith
From the wire, in the United Kingdom:
LONDON — A British man appeared in court on Thursday accused of having instructions to make a bomb and being in possession of a recipe to make the deadly poison ricin.
Asim Kauser, 25, an unmarried British national whose family hail from Pakistan, is charged with four offences under anti-terrorism legislation after material was found on a USB key.
Kauser, from Bolton in Lancashire, was arrested at his home on June 6 “on suspicion of possessing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing, or preparing an act of terrorism, between January 2009 and June 2011”.
He was charged with having “various instructions in how to make an improvised explosive device”.
This ricin recipe can get you jailed, from my now half a decade old work at GlobalSecurity.
They’re cheap tickets for enjoyment of the hospitality of Her Majesty. Or a bunk in the bighouse.
This is not progress in service of the rule of law, it’s decline.
This was published, in very readable form, in the Washington Post years ago. In England, it’s good for a conviction if in your possession.
The UK has a solid record of jailing people for possession of “terror documents” judged to be useful in facilitating terrorism. The enthusiasm for it has waxed and waned over the course of the war on terror. But it is always present.
One example, from 2008, at old DD blog is discussed here.
And here, in a case in which Samina Malik — a hapless person with what turned out to be legally hazardous curiosity, was convicted. (Disclosure: Malik’s defense, at one point, asked me to describe — for her defense — the nature of the materials she had downloaded.)
It is entirely remarkable that ten years into the war on terror, when all these things first came to mainstream media notice, fools everywhere still download the same old rubbish.
And the same old trash shows up in court cases again and again, the moldy mythology of printed out useless terror tracts — originally minted by the American right wing survivalist fringe in the Eighties, still very capable of sending people over. (This is the legacy of publishers who specialized in this market, like Loompanics, which went out of business a couple years ago.)
And then there’s the common story of the young man of Pakistan, or Pakistani descent, and the fascination with downloading bomb recipes. It is also a measure of the amount of scrutiny they now all receive, deserved or not, from counter-terror agencies.
It so happens I covered the metric on that, too.
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06.21.11
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 2:02 pm by George Smith
The rest of the world doesn’t give a shit what America thinks about castor seeds and ricin.
So it continued running castor mills all through the war on terror.
And this is because they were not WMD plants and allowed export of a commodity, castor oil, back into the US — which quit the business long ago because it wasn’t competitive against petroleum-based lubricants.
Now, the fly in the ointment in getting US firms back into castor oil production is price. It’s done cheaper overseas.
But the biggest headache is homeland security.
From a press release on a small Texas pilot project for cultivation of “low-ricin” castor in the continental US:
LUBBOCK – Castagra, a Canadian bioproducts company, has entered into an agreement with Texas AgriLife Research, part of the Texas A&M University System, to test production of a new castor bean with less ricin.
The West Texas project will investigate production potential and sustainable production practices that do not conflict with other commodities grown in the state, according to officials.
Castor oil and gypsum are the two main ingredients in the vegetable plastic and castor beans were farmed in Texas back in the 1970s, officials said. Approximately three acres of low-ricin Brigham castor will be seeded at the AgriLife Research Station in Pecos. The produced seed will be used for crushing and processing trials to determine yield and quality with the remainder dedicated to potential 2012 castor production as planting seed.
Dr. Travis Miller, AgriLife Extension program leader and associate department head for soil and crop sciences at Texas A&M University, said castor previously had a bad reputation because of its potential to contaminate grain crops.
[We] are creating jobs and bringing jobs to America that moved offshore several years ago when castor production was discontinued in Texas in the 1970s. AgriLife ( Research ) has done excellent work recently in improving oil yields while greatly reducing the amount of ricin toxin found in castor beans by as much as 90 percent.???
Dr. David Baltensperger, head of the department of soil and crop sciences at Texas A&M, said new castor varieties have increased salt tolerance and are more drought resistant, “so lands in the Pecos area may once again become productive.???
“Additionally, castor can now be fully mechanized unlike in other castor-producing countries, such that we can now effectively compete against countries like India that export millions of tons of castor oil each year to other countries, including the U.S.???
In terms of “new jobs” for three acres of university-sponsored castor production, estimate this means about five people.
As elliptically referenced by the press release, the rest of the world simply didn’t care what the US thought of castor seeds. “Low ricin” castor seed is an invention nobody cares about, except, possibly — here.
Since “low-ricin” castor plants will not be competing alongside castor plants and seed peddled by garden centers, the invention has virtually no meaning for the usual US white survivalist kooks who buy packets of seeds for fighting off their many imagined enemies.
Expect this to silently piss out and disappear — or be permanently consigned to only very marginal supply — by 2012.
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06.19.11
Posted in Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 11:31 am by George Smith
Back at the beginning of the war on terror I started keeping track of people associated with castor seed pounding.
The “hobby” was popularized by the survivalist and neo-Nazi right in the US. Where it remains popular.
Today, news from the heartland on one of these people, banged up years ago, released and now on the lam again.
From the wire:
Denys Ray Hughes, 64, who has a home in Manitowish Waters in Vilas County [Wisconsin], is wanted and on the run.
According to WITI – TV in Milwaukee, Hughes was to report to a halfway house in Milwaukee on May 25th after serving prison time, but he never showed up.
U.S. Marshals believe he could be somewhere in rural northern Wisconsin or in the south eastern part of the state, where he has family.
He also has family in Arizona.
He was sentenced to 87 months in prison for the attempted production of a biological toxin for use as a weapon, possession of an unregistered destructive device, and possession of an unregistered silencer.
From the old DD blog entry, The Jailbird’s Bookshelf, back in 2006:
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.
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02.18.11
Posted in Ricin Kooks at 9:22 am by George Smith
The war on terror has resulted in reason defenestrated for many things.
Jeffrey B. Levenderis’ castor powder containing ricin in a container in the refrigerator, where it probably sat harmlessly for a long time, has cost Coventry Township officials in Ohio big time.
That’s because of the regulations and hysteria which causes authorities and emergency teams to jump into action when the word “ricin” is uttered.
“More than 80 people from 18 different departments helped during the event,??? said a country official here.
Further:
The [township council] board also approved emergency expenditures totaling $3,000 for the ricin incident.
[Township Service Director and Fire Chief] Dave Calderone said everyone from the township pitched in to make sure the operation ran smoothly and the parties responding were provided food and beverages.
Calderone also announced the township just received a hefty bill from the Summit County Engineer’s Office resulting from the ricin incident. Calderone said the office is charging the township more than $22,000 because South Main Street was shut down for safety reasons during the investigation. He said the township will be fighting this amount, however. Calderone explained the road had to be closed, per the FBI, and there was nothing the township could do about it.
It will probably eventually occur to them to try and squeeze the money out of Levenderis, who is indigent and in jail.
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02.16.11
Posted in Ricin Kooks at 8:28 pm by George Smith
A judge refused bail to Jeffrey B. Levenderis, jailed when a container containing castor powder was found in what had been his refrigerator by a new tenant.
The short news item reads:
A federal judge said no Wednesday to the release of a man charged with possessing toxic ricin.
The judge ruled that Jeff Boyd Levenderis, 54, of the Akron area, failed to show that the community would be safe if he’s released before trial.
Levenderis was arrested in January after authorities said the deadly poison was found in his former home.
The government says he was trying to prove he could make ricin without killing himself. Levenderis has pleaded not guilty and his attorney says there’s no evidence he meant to harm anyone.
A message seeking comment on the judge’s no-release ruling was left for the defense attorney on Wednesday.
What makes this particularly odd and sad is that no one in the US has died from pounding castor seeds in at least the last fifteen years. It just doesn’t happen. So wherever Levenderis got the ridiculous claim, it was pure braggadocio.
Roger von Bergendorff, a castor seed powder maker, convicted on making ricin, did wind up in the hospital, although it remains unclear whether or not it was actually ricin that put him there.
Also incomprehensible is the claim that the man could not make an argument that he was not a threat. The castor powder containing ricin in the refrigerator had been around for some time, forgotten apparently. It posed no more threat to the community or even the home’s new tenant than a box of rat poison abandoned on a shelf.
The terrible reality in the US is that grinding castor seeds sends you to jail. There are no defense lawyers who can competently explain to judges and/or juries any facts about ricin and castor seeds which might ameliorate judgments.
And they are always over-matched by the federal government.
Judges don’t care. Neither do juries. No mercy is ever shown.
And the result has been that no matter how troubled or helpless the defendant is, their situation is always made immeasurably worse.
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