04.16.13
Do not succumb to ricin hysteria
It took somewhat less than a half hour for the news media to start lighting up with the usual received wisdom/disinformation on ricin.
Federal officials discovered Tuesday a poison-laced letter sent to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), uncovering the material at an off-site location where congressional mail has been screened since anthrax-laced letters were sent to Capitol Hill in 2001.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other senators exiting an FBI briefing on the Boston attacks, told reporters that the letter was tested at the facility and came up positive for ricin. Officials gave no indication why the letter was sent to Wicker, a low-profile senator in his second term.
In 2004, three Senate office buildings were closed after preliminary tests found ricin delivered through the mail system in the Senate majority leader’s office. At the time the AP wrote, “Twice as deadly as cobra venom, ricin, which is derived from the castor bean plant, is relatively easily made and can be inhaled, ingested or injected.??? But investigators later said the test may have picked up non-toxic byproducts of the castor bean plant used in paper production.
Purified ricin has never been accomplished by anyone known to be fiddling with castor seeds during the long years of the war on terror.
And no terror weapon has ever been made with it.
Castor mash, or powder, which contains ricin, is trivial to make. But all the recipes found on people who have ground (or thought about grinding castor seeds) does not purify ricin. And this can be seen in castor seed powder protein separations using gel electrophoretic methods. (A photo of which I may post one of these days if the rubbish level on the matter continues to rise.)
False positives have been known to occur with ricin tests.
Famously, the London ricin plot, written about extensively by me for GlobalSecurity.Org, involved an initial false positive, an impression that was not corrected for years.
And in another case to which I was privy, a false ricin positive was returned on a possession of a drug addict subsequently convicted in the US for — as the judge awkwardly put it — “[doing something] that was a substantial step toward the production of a biological toxin.”
That case is here and the defendant’s lawyer told me, years ago, that the ricin positive occurred on remainders of the man’s marijuana stash.
Naturally, you can’t find this useful information anywhere else. So you should pass my name around.
Or refer people to the voluminous amount of material under the Ricin Kooks tab.