05.30.13
Bean Pounding: Angry WhiteManistan dude rants
Three incidents with ricin-tainted mail between April and May constitute new and uncharted territory in the US. And in two of the instances ricin mail targeting the President has been intercepted. The first, from alleged castor bean pounder J. Everett Dutschke in Tupelo, Mississippi. And now from Shreveport, LA.
This is a remarkable series of events, one that should shock Americans. Because while no one has been killed or even seriously made ill in any of the attacks, ricin mailing is insane behavior. And real ricin mailings (as opposed to powder hoaxes), which seem to immediately inspire copycat mail, has never happened.
Perhaps years down the road, there is Ph.D. thesis in the psychology of domestic poison powder mailers in it. Who thought unrelated people could be so psychotic, using the same poison powder ploy?
The newest ricin incident contains a message — one to the mayor of New York, and a similar one to the President, that marks it as gun nut hate mail, perhaps from Shreveport, Louisiana:
You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns … Anyone [who] wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional, God-given right and I will exercise that right till the day I die. What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.
To date no domestic terrorist has ever produced pure ricin.
What is produced is the crude powder of castor seeds which contain some ricin.
No one has ever been killed in a domestic US ricin incident.
However, now we’re in new territory, at least for the short term.
The people who mail ricin-tainted letters likely know, at least in a vague way, that their mail will be intercepted if it is sent to any official of great importance. 9/11 and the
anthraxer, Bruce Ivins, saw to that.
They also likely have at least vague recognition that the FBI’s WMD unit is now well-prepared to track such cases and that there is a good chance they will be arrested.
When ricin mail arrives and a determination is made that active poison is present, one can imagine the FBI and other federal agencies immediately begin using Internet search, as well as their own tools, to scour the web for
language similar to the messaging in the ricin mail.
This can be one Achilles’ Heel of the ricin mailer. Another vulnerability is the existence of confidants.
It is one thing to listen to a loony acquaintance rail about the president, or Mayor Bloomberg, and making a poison powder. It is quite another to read in the newspaper that such a thing has been done, the words are nationwide, and you might have an idea who did it.
Considering all these things, the three back-to-back ricin incidents indicate a threshold has been crossed. These are people who perceive that they may certainly be caught.
But they do it, anyway. In this case, the individual certainly appears to want everyone to know his words. It is quite an unusual standard.
This marks a strange and grotesque period as the country enters the summer of 2013. Crazy people engaged in a small and unconnected, but still quite astonishing, national group ricin mailing.
It’s a first in attempted American bioterrorism. We’re number 1, the exceptional country.
Wire reports inform that three police offices experienced mild diarrhea after contact with the latest ricin mail. Consistent with a minor degree ricin (or castor oil, since the mail was said to contain a greasy powder) ingestion?
Possibly. Or something else, unconnected.
Later laboratory testing may shed light on in coming days.
Analytically, what a castor powder mixture containing ricin looks like after SDS gel electrophoresis. Examples from a ricin domestic terrorism case in the US begin in the lanes to the right of the clear lane. The single band lane to the left is a lab ricin standard. And the arrow denotes ricin component in the crude mixture from castor seeds.
Michael said,
May 30, 2013 at 9:36 am
The really amusing thing about this is the president might have actually read those letters, and given them some consideration (if they were more persuasively written), had those dumbasses not enclosed the ricin.
George Smith said,
May 30, 2013 at 10:03 am
I have to add there’s a suicidal egotistic nihilism to this. Anyone mailing such things now knows they’ll make the news. And apparently they like the symbolism and how their words will go nationwide on every news broadcast and website. This person, I’d speculate, is trying to stir others to action.
Mark Turner said,
May 30, 2013 at 5:13 pm
While I agree in general with this post, I feel compelled to point out that no evidence was ever provided linking Dr. Ivins to the anthrax mailings. Indeed there is no proof that Dr. Ivins was anything other than a humble, patriotic American doing biodefense work for the U.S. government.