11.01.11
Ricin kooks: Stupid old white and mean assholes
UPDATED
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
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.