11.22.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 3:37 pm by George Smith
J. Everett Dutschke, still industriously refining the concept of weird obsessions:
A Mississippi man charged with sending poison-laced letters to President Obama and other officials has been charged with trying for a second time to frame the man first arrested in the case. The suspect, J. Everett Dutschke, has been jailed since April on charges of sending ricin-tainted letters to Mr. Obama, Senator Roger Wicker and Judge Sadie Holland of Lee County Justice Court. The new indictment says Mr. Dutschke, while in jail, tried to recruit someone to make more ricin and send it to Mr. Wicker, a Republican of Mississippi. The indictment filed in Federal District Court in Oxford says he was again trying to frame Paul Kevin Curtis, an Elvis impersonator.
The annals of Dutschke — from the archives.
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11.05.13
Posted in Decline and Fall, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 2:10 pm by George Smith
This would have never happened back when I started in the early Nineties.
No one would have been talking about ricin. And on the outside chance they were nobody would have thought much of it.
From Aiken, South Carolina:
Two Aiken High School students have been accused of conspiring to make ricin, according to the Aiken Department of Public Safety.
The leader of a school group notified police about some suspicious activity that took place while the group was on a field trip to the zoo and botanical gardens in Columbia, according to an incident report. The two students were heard discussing making ricin, a highly toxic protein produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant.
The students told their group they wanted to go to the botanical gardens at the zoo in order to find a castor oil plant, which is used to make ricin, the report stated. Other students confirmed the reports.
Each of the students told officers it was the other’s idea to find the plant and make the ricin, according to the report. The students’ parents were also contacted regarding the incident.
No charges will be filed, reads the newspaper, although the state and federal governments were contacted.
The students had no materials. “[An official] said the castor oil plant [at the botanical garden] was never touched,” it added.
The country is radically different than it was fifteen years ago.
Does anyone think this has been for the better?
What does it say about the nature of the national security megaplex and how average people and thought have been warped by it when two teenagers on a field trip make trivial talk about ricin, they’re overheard, reports are made and the federal government contacted?
And, worse, this is no longer seen as profoundly abnormal.
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10.31.13
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 9:25 am by George Smith
Contrary to American war on terror mythology, castor seeds and ricin don’t make a good weapon. In fact, it is even harder than one might think to achieve simple poisoning.
A recent case of attempted suicide by a 37-year old woman using ricin had a happy ending, of sorts.
Excerpts from the news:
A suicidal North Logan woman who survived poisoning with the deadly ricin toxin earlier this month is getting another break: she will not be criminally charged.
North Park Police Chief Kim Hawkes confirmed Tuesday that the 37-year-old [Utah] woman, who ingested a large amount of ricin-laden castor beans on Oct. 3 in the basement apartment of a home in North Logan, was released from the hospital last week. — Salt Lake City newspaper
Police say around 10:30pm Wednesday night, a women living in a basement apartment at 2270 North 740 East attempted to commit suicide by boiling caster beans. When the woman boiled the beans, she created ricin. The fumes contaminated the home, putting the family of 4 upstairs at risk.
Police say the woman did eat some of the beans and was taken to the hospital. The family living upstairs was also taken to the hospital to get decontaminated from ricin gases. — KUTV
According to North Park Police Chief Kim Hawkes, the woman purchased about 60 castor beans from an Internet website about a month ago. After soaking the beans for 24 hours and then boiling them, the woman ingested about half of them, he said. — Kansas City newspaper
Proteins are denatured by heating. Ricin is a protein. And it is certain that it is destroyed by heat. Boiling the castor seeds is most probably what saved the woman’s life, although she was still hospitalized after eating 30 of them.
Boiling castor seeds does not produce ricin gas. A Hazmat team was summoned. No one except the woman was every really in any danger.
America used to process large amounts of castor seeds. The mills produced dusts and mash containing ricin. Neither killed workers.
In the Ricin Mama video, you can see workers in a foreign country heaving castor seeds into a grinder, the process producing clouds of powder, some of which must contain ricin.
“Soligenix, Inc. (OTCQB: SNGX) (Soligenix or the Company), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing products to treat inflammatory diseases and biodefense medical countermeasures (MCMs) where there remains an unmet medical need, announced today submission of a full contract proposal to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases,” reads a press release from Soligenix today, a company that has been paid by the US government for over a decade to produce a ricin vaccine. “Successful award of the proposal would support a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract for the advanced development of RiVax™ as a vaccine MCM candidate for biodefense threats to protect the public.”
Soligenix’ stock is worth $1.94 a share today, down from a high of two dollars and fifty cents about a month ago.
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10.06.13
Posted in Bombing Moe, Bombing Paupers, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:45 pm by George Smith
The mighty US war on terror machine grinds on. Big news, big news, an allegedly important al Qaeda man, nabbed by US special forces in the failed state formerly known as Libya. Hate to rain on the parade. (Well, no, not really.)
Anas al Libi was a retiree from the Afghan war against the Soviets.
The picture now all over the news is misleading. Anas al Libi most probably does not look like that now.
Reads the New York Times today (no link):
American commandos carried out raids on Saturday in two far-flung African countries in a powerful flex of military muscle aimed at capturing fugitive terrorist suspects
[Anas al Libi’s] brother, Nabih, told The Associated Press that just after dawn prayers, three vehicles full of armed men had approached [his] home and surrounded him as he parked his car. The men smashed his window, seized his gun and sped away with him, the brother said.
Military muscle.
In 2000 al Libi was living in England when the British took the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” off him and gave it to the FBI. Al Libi was not arrested and later faded from sight, apparently leaving the country.
After 9/11, the US government started calling this book the “al Qaeda manual.” It’s what you used to see quoted from when authorities wanted to produce some evidence of the methods of mayhem used by al Qaeda. Photocopies were published, various edits of it have been posted around the web, by the GWB White House and, of course, here.
British authorities tried to use it in a famous ricin trial to establish that an “al Qaeda poison cell” was linked to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The US government also used the alleged “al Qaeda poison cell” as evidence in Colin Powell’s discredited UN Security Council exposition on the Saddam Hussein regime’s WMD programs and its connection with al Qaeda.
The British jury for the London ricin trial did not agree there was a poison cell (and the defense proved a ricin recipe seized in an anti-terror raid in England was not the same as that in al Libi’s “Manual of Afghan Jihad”) and found all of the Muslims rounded up as part of the alleged plot not guilty, except for one man.
Every regular knows I wrote about it extensively years ago.
Excerpted, from GlobalSecurity.Org:
It was the British prosecution’s aim to link the “UK poison cell” to al Qaida by associating its ricin and poisons recipes with documents of Afghan — read al Qaida — origin. It cited three documents of interest: the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” seized in an information gathering raid in Manchester in 2000, notes found in English and Russian in Kabul in 2001 and notes found in Kabul, written in Arabic, also in 2001.
In a mini-trial within the trial, the prosecution’s claims became unconvincing for a number of reasons. The “Manual of Afghan Jihad” was obtained in Manchester in April 2000 by British anti-terrorism agents and subsequently turned over to the FBI’s Nanette Schumaker later that month and contains sections on poisons. Its ricin recipe is clearly taken from Hutchkinson and Saxon and although it is of similar nature to the recipe in the Bourgas trial, it is not identical.
In the manner of details, the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” calls for the use of lye in the treatment of castor seeds. The use of lye was subsequently dropped for many methods found in terrorist literature and it also does not appear in the Bourgass recipe. Other portions of the “Jihad” recipe straighforwardly descend from Hutchkinson, including the reference to DMSO. And still other fine details separate it from the Kamel Bourgass formulation.
A further knock on the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” as an al Qaida source comes from its apparent origin in the first jihad against the Communist occupation of Afghanistan, prior to al Qaida. The “Manual of Afghan Jihad” was the property of Nazib al Raghie, also known as Anas Al Liby to the US government. At the time the manual was taken off al Raghie in Britain, UK authorities were not interested in him. Neither, apparently, was the FBI and he was not arrested. These days, al Raghie, as Al Liby, is on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists.
The “Manual of Afghan Jihad’s” ricin recipe was fairly obviously not the same as the one presented as evidence in the trial and a representative of the defense added that its appellation as an “al Qaida manual” was and is an invention of the United States government. More to the point, it was the work of the Department of Justice because nowhere in the manual is the word “al Qaida” mentioned although one could find it entitled as such on the DoJ website copy.
Summary: Anas al Libi (or Anas al Liby) was once, perhaps accurately, described privately by an expert for the defense in the London ricin trial as a pensioner from the Afghan wars.
He owned the copy of the so-called “al Qaeda manual” that used to be famous.
Anas al Libi has probably not been doing much of anything for years. He finally returned home, his capture partly the result of the turning of Libya into a failed state.
Go team. We expect nothing less than the description of great victories and legerdemain in the removal of poverty-stricken fly dirt.
The capture of Anas al Libi illustrates the working policy of the US government in open-ended military operations.
American special forces can roam the world, easily finding permission to snatch or kill any relative nobody as long as they are deemed problematical, in any failed or failing state, almost always those with warring tribes of Muslims.
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08.20.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 1:59 pm by George Smith
Yesterday’s bit on the National Journal ricin plot news that wasn’t news, because nincompoops on the staff at the magazine’s Global Security Newswire staff had mistakenly resurrected a 2011 article from the NYTimes, has been laundered.
Once nonsense is passed through an alleged source of authority, it can spread everywhere.
Take this snapshot, from Yahoo’s News Service:
To reiterate: There is no ricin bomb plot. This is trash, a mistake, taken from a New York Times piece that was clearly dated 2011.
Makes no difference, though. Just another small example of how degraded mainstream journalism is. Between firings, downsizing of operations, and a conversion to a model that values only page views and eyeballs, it’s not surprising. But it is still dismaying.
With regards to any alleged ricin bomb plot? It was going no place in 2011. Nothing has changed.
DD’s Law, you see:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
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08.19.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 3:24 pm by George Smith
Full size.
I never rely on the National Journal for security reporting on anything. Still, it is considered a sage publication within the Beltway, often getting a lot of good press.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t employ total nincompoops.
The above is my screen snap from the National Journal today, a news item about an alleged plan by al Qaeda in Yemen to launch ricin attacks.
It’s bylined the Global Security Newswire, a National Journal effort that has no connection with the real GlobalSecurity.Org
The article is nonsense. It cites a New York Times report, with a link, one allegedly published last Monday, or something.
However, apparently they don’t even bother to check their own link.
The New York Times piece was published in 2011.
“Confidential findings suggest the terror group has been trying to amass castor seeds and other ricin precursors at a secluded location in Yemen’s Shabwa province, an area beyond reach of the country’s central government in Sanaa, according to the sources,” it reads. “The data — initially reported in 2012 to President Obama and senior White House security staffers — suggests the militants want to have explosives spread the deadly substance through crowded indoor areas, government personnel said.”
The New York Times piece, again, is clearly marked 2011.
It’s such a great example of excrement in reporting one was tempted to
say it must purely be the result of a mistake in web-publishing automation. However, that doesn’t explain how the story was rewritten and advanced a year.
This is what happens when you employ people who are incompetent, or don’t pay them, or overwork them, or some combination of the three. There’s no excuse for it. There’s nothing right about it. There never will be.
DD blog, and GlobalSecurity.Org, debunked the idea of ricin bombs by al Qaeda back when the New York Times tried to pass it.
Indeed, maybe al Qaeda wanted to make ricin bombs back before 2011 (maybe they still do). But that is only because they are feebs and know nothing about the poison. They cannot make enough ricin and, further, since it is an active protein, it would not survive bombing, being denatured by fire, heat and shearing forces.
What to do? What to do? A minor blip in the news, but still — what’s the correct response?
Fire someone? Let other agencies employ them to mess things up?
“Global Security Newswire, produced by National Journal Group, offers daily news updates about nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, terrorism and related issues … A free e-daily, the Newswire provides thorough, accurate coverage …”
Yeah, right.
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08.15.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 3:11 pm by George Smith
After more than 20 years of writing on specialized matters in national security, I’ve come up with a theorem that works on all things American.
The megastructure that now makes the national security a commodity has completely warped the thinking of Americans, from the top to the bottom.
So much so that it’s evident and can be described in a fairly simple rule, one that describes much of the war on terror and the American business of threat-seeking.
And here it is:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Therefore, you can bet your sweet bippy there’s never going to be an electronic Pearl Harbor, or an electromagnetic pulse attack, or a national blackout caused by Chinese hackers, or people dieing from a ricin mailing even though it’s so easy to make. And al Qaeda does not come back from being hided for more than a decade. No one gets a second chance.
Summed up: Too many bad movies, too much bad television, too much fear-making as edutainment, passed off as serious news, advised by bad people slumming from the national security industry, their purpose primarily maximization of employment. Everything touched by it, tainted by an intrinsic badness. And it is definitely not supported by the real world but must be maintained by a uniquely American machinery of manipulations, lies and purposeful technology-mediated confusion.
And thanks to Frank’s Pine View Farm where I’ve been working it out in commentary.
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07.31.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 11:40 am by George Smith
Ask me how I know.
The sequester, the big process now imposing austerity measures across the federal government, is also having an impact on ricin trials in the US, a few of which are waiting to go forward.
Sequester has hit federal public defender offices, closing some of them one day a week, across the country, to keep the books balanced.
This includes public defenders tasked with defending the few number of Americans arrested and accused of making ricin.
Ricin cases have never moved quickly. Austerity makes the wheels of justice turn even more slowly.
And this slightly related news from AP:
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned Wednesday that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order additional sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress doesn’t act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014.
Speaking to Pentagon reporters, and indirectly to Congress, Hagel said that the full result of the sweeping budget cuts over the next 10 years could leave the nation with an ill-prepared, under-equipped military doomed to face more technologically advanced enemies.
More technologically advanced enemies. How do you even say or write this kind of horseshit with a straight face.
Who are these enemies and where might they be? Alpha Centauri?
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07.24.13
Posted in Ricin Kooks at 3:45 pm by George Smith
American Gothic, 2013:
A Texas woman accused of sending ricin-laced letters to high-ranking officials, including President Barack Obama, has given birth prematurely while in custody, according to her attorney.
Shannon Guess Richardson gave birth to a boy named Brody on July 4, nearly four months ahead of her due date, said Tonda Curry, her Tyler, Texas-based attorney.
The baby weighed less than 2 pounds when he was born at a Texas hospital and “is in need of a lot of medical treatment,” Curry said.
“I’ve been told he’s in need of heart surgery and of course has issues with his lungs not being fully developed,” Curry said of the baby, who is still hospitalized.
He’ll have a fine time at the hands of school yard bullies nine or ten years from now. An Independence Day child, yet.
Obscured by the ricin cluster there actually has been another ricin indictment in the US. The reason it has not made the press is because the accused did not send a letter to the president, it apparently being only part of a domestic poisoning scheme.
From the wire:
Attorneys for an El Dorado woman arrested last month after authorities said she tried to hire someone to poison her husband [with ricin] entered an innocent plea on her behalf Friday in a Bernalillo County, N.M., court.
No other news. Every day like sunshine, more and more examples of coast-to-coast American fucked-up-itude. National exceptionalism, the global brand.
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07.16.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 12:12 pm by George Smith
By reason of insanity or something.
From the wire:
A Texas woman has been charged with federal violations for allegedly sending ricin-laced letters to the president.
Shannon Guess Richardson, a 35-year-old New Boston, Texas, resident, was named in a three-count indictment by a federal grand jury in the Tyler Division of the Eastern District of Texas …
Richardson contacted federal investigators claiming she had found a suspicious substance in the refrigerator and ricin-related internet searches on the couple’s computer, the article says. Investigators say they found evidence that she sent the letters herself.
Richardson’s lawyer, Tonda Curry, told the Associated Press that her client will plead not guilty and that the government must show that the woman had “the requisite mental state??? to prove her actions were a crime.
I’ve not commented on the US government’s spying on the mail program, inadvertantly revealed in one of the indictments hadn’t down in the ricin cluster.
Two reasons: There was no need of it in either the Dutscke or Richardson cases. Dutschke allegedly wanted the FBI to come to Tupelo, MI. And Richardson summoned the agency, allegedly putting a return address on the letters that placed them near her home.
Reason number two: Bruce Ivins, the anthrax mailer, would not have been caught by the program although it was put in place because of him. Ivins drove from Frederick, MD, to a mailbox drop in Princeton, NJ., to send anthrax.
So what is the net effect of the massive spying effort? Virtually nil.
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