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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Broken by The Daily Beast, Clarke granted an interview for some 9/11 tenth anniversary radio documentary, one in which he avers the CIA “intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.”
The rationale: They were trying to “recruit” the al Qaeda men living in southern California as informants.
The decision to do the alleged cover-up was made by George Tenet, it reads.
The Beast shoots itself and Clarke in the foot a bit, mentioning way down in the story that the interview in which ol’ RC dropped this bomb was back in 2009.
The question arises: If this is so important why have we had to wait two years to just before the big tenth anniversary outpour on 9/11 to find out?
The answer is fairly obvious. Show business. It’s not really important whether it’s true. It’s just important it achieve maximum impact in the media for the benefit of the radio show’s producers.
Clarke became a hero — if that’s what you want to call it — for his 2004 book, “Against All Enemies, [and] testimony on Capitol Hill about the Bush administration’s alleged absence of diligence in the war on terrorism.”
All of this, and 60 Minutes, made Clarke the darling of Democrats who thought, for sure, he would help bring down George W. Bush.
My brief experience with the frivolity is documented here, in a cover story at the Village Voice entitled I, Vermin from Under Rock.
It made Clarke a fortune in book contracts, magazine articles and consulting/speaking fees.
But the Democrats were thrown to the dogs in the Presidential election, anyway.
A radio documentary isn’t nearly as big a deal — although — if the story is repeated enough, it might become one.
Clarke’s last book was on cyberwar and while it gets its mentions on that beat it’s trivial business compared to the daily news of despair, national paralysis, economic collapse and mass unemployment.
But 9/11 outrage timed right for the anniversary media splurge, now that’s an entirely different kettle of fish. There will be many many people who dearly want to believe in another story of cover-up and betrayal.
Wouldn’t it be nice to make another pass through the rotunda again with renewed book contract?
Unsurprisingly, military excursions, flavor — special operations — at work in private war, well, everywhere:
This global presence – in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged – provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world …
With real clout, it can win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people’s heads(like we really need to make the crazy people who read this even more crazy) or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops. Since 2001, SOCOM’s prime contracts awarded to small businesses – those that generally produce specialty equipment and weapons – have jumped six-fold …
That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home …
Superhuman.
An observation: When the place is declining into the unique status of third world status except for biggest, baddest military it doesn’t take much to impress the locals. It’s not like we’re overloaded with obvious talent. And those old Nick Fury & his Howling Commandos and Sgt. Rock comics always had appeal.
What’s also unsurprising is that these types of stories aren’t from the mainstream media in this country. This, a syndication to the Asia Times from TomDispatch.
Eternal war-footing and willful blindness to what’s happening on the homefront being two of them. The complete handing over to the military of how the US deals with the world and is perceived as a nation being still another.
Maybe Lady Gaga is famous worldwide. But the ubiquity of Predator drones and camouflage uniforms make them much much bigger.
The top commander of U.S. special operations forces said Wednesday that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida is bloodied and “nearing its end,” but he warned the next generation of militants could keep special operations fighting for a decade to come …
But the four-star admiral warned of the fight to come against what he called al-Qaida 2.0
Does al Qaida actually refer to itself now as 1.x going toward 2.0?
Rhetorical. It’s another fatuous American semantic invention from people who think only in terms of devices, be they digital or real world.
A few one line rebuttals for the one-liner claims in the Associated Press piece:
[With] new leaders like American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, who Olson said understands America better than Americans understand him.
Doubt it. Yeah, every older American whose been living in Yemen for years understands “America.” Righty-right.
Olson said others like al-Awlaki will probably refine their message to appeal to a wider audience …
Not if Inspire magazine and Adam Gadahn are examples. They’re both jokes.
“This idea of being able to wait over the horizon and spring over and chop off heads doesn’t really work,” he said, describing the “yin and yang” of special operations as including capture-and-kill raids as well as long-term engagement with host countries’ militaries.
Then why is that the entire national thrust? And how has propping up toady country leadership with military aid worked out over the last decade?
The latter involves U.S. troops “developing long-term relationships, learning languages, meeting people, studying histories, learning black markets.”
See above. There’s no evidence buying the locals off through the new Peace Corps works. Arab Spring indicates many are pretty much done with thinking highly of us.
The article notes near the end that the next super-leader of special ops will be Bill McRaven, the overall commander of the bin Laden raid.
And where has the dividend of actually disposing of Osama bin Laden gone?
Here at home there was no dividend except for a couple days of cheering. Then it was business as usual. He might as well not been popped at all.
The absurd nature of yesterday’s terror warning news about surgically implanted bombs led me to think there must be at least one unit in the US threat assessment apparatus that spends its time thinking of such things.
Have they come up with the dead body bomb?
Here’s how it would work.
Al Qaeda rounds up all the enthusiastic young boys that have come from America or Pakistan to Yemen. All twenty of them.
Now, here’s where the planning gets tricky. They boys have to keep in touch with their parents at home, not letting on what they’re really into.
After the parents are truly upset and in a frenzy to get the offspring home, al Qaeda sacrifices them to the dead body bomb office.
They’re killed and a bomb is sewn into the corpse in hope the parents will do anything to get the body back into America for the family plot.
You see where this is going. The operation then follows the general procedure of the failed toner cartridge bomb plot, getting the package onto a transport, to be detonated at some time in flight.
DD is sure this has been considered by our threat analysis centers.
Again, this only underscores the problem the terror agency has in recruiting effective jihadis after a decade of attrition.
This video illustrates the severe problem facing al Qaeda.
It’s Adam Gadahn’s exhortation to buy firearms at gun shows. Which worried some people.
However, Gadahn is inarguably lame looking and in delivery, scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, a terrible example for recruitment.
At a time when you can see Muslims rising up in the street all through the Middle East, people who look a lot more savvy than Gadahn, this was another of al Qaeda’s terrible ideas momentarily dressed up as something to worry about by the mainstream media.
And, as you can see, the video has been turned into a joke — a sales pitch for a book called “Jihad Joe.”
This is not to say that al Qaeda can’t recruit at all, anymore. It’s just that the time when a Mohammed Atta walked into the local office is long gone.
So what other desperation bombs are there to devise?
We continue with our quality programming in a moment. Nearing the end. But there’s still time to earn undying gratitude.
DD blog needs your help. I’m not too proud to beg.
The economic crash of 2008 has been as hard here as everywhere else.
Since stepping into cyberspace in the early Nineties everything written has been provided largely pro bono. And this is the first fundraiser of any kind that I’ve held.
Originally, I went under the rubric of the old electronic Crypt Newsletter, an e-zine devoted to hacker culture, specifically that centered on the worldwide network of young computer virus-writers.
Much of the work published through it was aimed at increasing public understanding of issues in cybersecurity and the hype-laden subjects of cyberterrorism and cyberwar. That continues to this day.
In 1994 some of the earliest published content was used in The Virus Creation Labs, a book on the old computer virus underground published by American Eagle. Interesting side fact: While the book is now technically out of print, the publisher decamped to Central America before 2000, convinced the country would overturn or that hyperinflation would come about as the result of the Millennium Bug.
By 2004 I had moved to a slightly different place at GlobalSecurity.Org, still doing pro bono public research on various security topics.
This work moved into the domain of poison recipes, specifically those for ricin and alleged home-made chemical and biological weapons, which had originated in the American survivalist extremist fringe during the Eighties. By the Nineties these tracts had been migrated to the Internet and simultaneously translated into Arabic.
In terms of practical things, this was one of the first places you could see at least one of the claims made by the US government, delivered by Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council, on reasons for war in Iraq, shot to pieces.
The London ricin ring as a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had been part of Powell’s presentation and the material published at Globalsecurity destroyed it.
At the time, the US news media largely ignored this but the work could not be erased. History had its way. (Examples of the news on the ricin trial in the US news media are here, at the Washington Post; and from Newsweek.)
Around 2006, the public work was formally moved to Dick Destiny blog.
Material published through here pushed back against mainstream and government claims that al Qaeda had capability in biological chemical weapons and that documents found on the Internet conferred equal capabilities to any jihadis interested in them.
While unpublicized that effort has been a success.
With the help of others the official public position was modified. One example was the grudging concession in the 2008 report from the US Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism: “We accept the validity of intelligence estimates about the current rudimentary nature of terrorist capabilities in the area of biological weapons … ” (Page 39.) Those intelligence estimates were not furnished by the US government’s analytical apparatus. They came from the work of outsiders, from here and analysis provided by colleagues.
Other proof is the anecdotal evidence that mainstream news is no longer littered with scare pieces insisting that al Qaeda men in some broken down hideout can make WMDs because of global access to terror capabilities granted by the Internet. Still, occasionally I have to issue burn notices on retired CIA men who resist getting the message. One example of such, from last year, is here.
Not bad for a blog.
Since then regular readers know I’ve kept up the fight while expanding into system domestic problems of economy and inequality which threaten the nation’s security in ways foreign threats during the war on terror never could.
This short history touches upon why the work has mattered. And so I ask for your help in keeping it moving forward and vital. Please help spread the word.
Donations are taken through PayPal. And you can still contribute without a designated PayPal account. Just page down to “Don’t have a PayPal account?” and click “continue.”
U.S. authorities have warned their counterparts abroad as well as air carriers about … new information and were taking steps to boost security.
“The Department of Homeland Security has identified a potential threat from terrorists who may be considering surgically implanting explosives or explosive components in humans to conduct terrorist attacks,” the advisory to foreign counterparts said, according to the U.S. security official.
Such a threat is likely to come from overseas rather than domestically, but precautions were being taken on both sides, the official said on condition of anonymity.
I wrote of this back in 2009, at the time of the failed underwear bombing plot, as being the next thing people would get worked up over.
Even then it was old. A New York newspaper — not the Times — had made a big joke out of stories about an alleged al Qaeda “butt bomber” who supposedly carried a bomb in his rectum
This turned out to be untrue. A discussion of the matter ishere.
The problem that’s easy to grasp with surgically implanted bombs is one of disability. It was even seen in the Batman movie, you know — where the henchman behind bars was doubled over in pain.
It’s real hard, almost impossible, to carry toxic chemicals — which is what explosives are — in your body. For any length of time. Without giving yourself away, being rendered immobile, or dieing.
Can you imagine all the al Qaeda volunteers lining up, now that bin Laden’s dead, to test what kind of packaging and surgical implantation will work best for these kinds of things? In Yemen.
Me neither.
Al Qaeda is demonstrably an enfeebled organization after ten years of being leaned on by the US security apparatus. And it has a real problem in finding capable operatives. Which is why its underwear bomber failed. And why it went to failed bombs placed in printer cartridges.
It’s a question of reliability.
When you can’t find anyone capable to carry out plots with reasonable chance of success, you think about taking the human element out of the equation. And when even that fails, you go to … whatever.
Realistically, it’s hard to know exactly where this warning came from. Is it actually based on reasonable intelligence?
That would seem not to be so — if one uses any common sense.
Did it come from some out-of-control threat assessment unit within the US government, one casting around for something to warn about now that bin Laden is dead?
That would seem more likely than the former, although it is not a given either.
In any case, I’d bet against seeing anything come of this in the near future. With only a slight chance that some young man from Pakistan or Yemen, very mentally ill or extremely crippled in some way, being netted at a checkpoint with a failed bomb wedged into him in some very painfully odd way.
We continue with our quality programming in a moment. Help keep it that.
DD blog needs your help. I’m not too proud to beg.
The economic crash of 2008 has been as hard here as everywhere else.
Since stepping into cyberspace in the early Nineties everything written has been provided largely pro bono. And this is the first fundraiser of any kind that I’ve held.
Originally, I went under the rubric of the old electronic Crypt Newsletter, an e-zine devoted to hacker culture, specifically that centered on the worldwide network of young computer virus-writers.
Much of the work published through it was aimed at increasing public understanding of issues in cybersecurity and the hype-laden subjects of cyberterrorism and cyberwar. That continues to this day.
In 1994 some of the earliest published content was used in The Virus Creation Labs, a book on the old computer virus underground published by American Eagle. Interesting side fact: While the book is now technically out of print, the publisher decamped to Central America before 2000, convinced the country would overturn or that hyperinflation would come about as the result of the Millennium Bug.
By 2004 I had moved to a slightly different place at GlobalSecurity.Org, still doing pro bono public research on various security topics.
This work moved into the domain of poison recipes, specifically those for ricin and alleged home-made chemical and biological weapons, which had originated in the American survivalist extremist fringe during the Eighties. By the Nineties these tracts had been migrated to the Internet and simultaneously translated into Arabic.
In terms of practical things, this was one of the first places you could see at least one of the claims made by the US government, delivered by Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council, on reasons for war in Iraq, shot to pieces.
The London ricin ring as a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had been part of Powell’s presentation and the material published at Globalsecurity destroyed it.
At the time, the US news media largely ignored this but the work could not be erased. History had its way. (Examples of the news on the ricin trial in the US news media are here, at the Washington Post; and from Newsweek.)
Around 2006, the public work was formally moved to Dick Destiny blog.
Material published through here pushed back against mainstream and government claims that al Qaeda had capability in biological chemical weapons and that documents found on the Internet conferred equal capabilities to any jihadis interested in them.
While unpublicized that effort has been a success.
With the help of others the official public position was modified. One example was the grudging concession in the 2008 report from the US Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism: “We accept the validity of intelligence estimates about the current rudimentary nature of terrorist capabilities in the area of biological weapons … ” (Page 39.) Those intelligence estimates were not furnished by the US government’s analytical apparatus. They came from the work of outsiders, from here and analysis provided by colleagues.
Other proof is the anecdotal evidence that mainstream news is no longer littered with scare pieces insisting that al Qaeda men in some broken down hideout can make WMDs because of global access to terror capabilities granted by the Internet. Still, occasionally I have to issue burn notices on retired CIA men who resist getting the message. One example of such, from last year, is here.
Not bad for a blog.
Since then regular readers know I’ve kept up the fight while expanding into system domestic problems of economy and inequality which threaten the nation’s security in ways foreign threats during the war on terror never could.
This short history touches upon why the work has mattered. And so I ask for your help in keeping it moving forward and vital. Please help spread the word.
Donations are taken through PayPal. And you can still contribute without a designated PayPal account. Just page down to “Don’t have a PayPal account?” and click “continue.”
