As I mentioned earlier today, in an abrupt change from the war on terror years, [some] officials have apparently realized that more than a decade of telling everyone that ricin is easy to make and that castor bean mash is deadly has been counterproductive.
One can add that this particular received wisdom has some bearing on why America seems to have more bean pounders than anyone else.
Throughout the decade of the war on terror government (or other counter-terror) people called on to comment on ricin always recited a gospel that it was easy to make with particular emphasis on how little necessary to kill someone.
However, there have been no domestic cases, or foreign incidences, where anyone has produced pure ricin. (Except for the presumed Markov assassination decades ago.)
The recipes available on the Internet don’t do it, as analytic
work on castor powders always shows. Purifying ricin isn’t within reach of the people who are always caught with castor seeds or castor mash containing ricin and net recipes.
But the many years spent yelling about how ricin is easy to make, just by getting castor seeds and browsing the net for instructions, has some relation to what we now see.
People believed all of the cant on ricin passed on by the media. Why not? Read or heard or seen innumerable times, the sheer weight of it convinces anyone not an expert that it must be true. It became received wisdom. And being steeped in this received wisdom has contributed to our very unusual micro-demographic of castor bean pounders.
More simply, people are suggestible.
So it was a bit different to see this published at Fox today:
Officials cautioned that there is “a significant difference??? between a trained scientist weaponizing the ricin extracted from castor beans and an individual “taking some castor beans, running them through a coffee grinder, and soaking them in acetone??? – a crude and ineffective homemade process that officials said would only be liable to induce, in a recipient foolish enough to go so far as to swallow the contents, symptoms as mild as diarrhea.
However, for every piece like it there is always another stock piece of incompetence, news that collects the usual standard counter-terrorism men, people with little or no experience in the biochemistry of terrorism, to act out the standard scripts for the press.
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The key ingredient — castor beans — is easy to find. Crude instructions for extracting the lethal poison in them can be found on the Internet. And it doesn’t require a chemistry degree or sophisticated lab equipment.
Security and counterterrorism expert Michael Fagel, who teaches at Northwestern University and is a veteran of ricin investigations, said ricin may be employed because castor beans are so easy to come by.
The plants grow wild along highways and in other spots in the U.S. They are also considered ornamental by some gardeners and are cultivated for medicinal castor oil and other products.
“And you can go on the Internet and find out any one of a gazillion recipes on how to make ricin,” Fagel said, adding that it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to “weaponize” it.
It is shameful to say and publish that “it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to weaponize.”
Any one of a gazillion recipes on the Internet! Pathetic.
Our so-called terrorism experts and advisors to Homeland Security, hard at work, illuminating the public.
This is why one reads DD blog. And why it remains important to spread the word. It’s always an uphill battle.
Welcome to the new weird. The fresh batch of ricin letters has uncovered a bean-pounder, or bean-pounders, even stranger than Tupelo, Mississippi’s accused ricin guru, guitarist and karate instructor J. Everett Dutschke. If you thought ricin mail was already bizarre, it just got a whole lot more so.
I consider it a given you’re either wholly or somewhat insane to pound castor beans and mail the powder to the president and other officials. And inside the house at 111 Maple in New Boston, Texas, something is very insane.
Shannon Guess Richardson of New Boston, TX, a ricin babe?
The FBI detained Nathaniel D. Richardson of New Boston after his wife , Shannon Guess Richardson, tipped authorities that she had found a suspicious material in Tupperware in her refrigerator as well as searches for ricin on the home computer.
The FBI picked up Richardson for questioned and dispatched its mobile evidence and WMD units to the Richardson household, which was flipped.
While castor seeds were found in Nathaniel D. Richardson’s car, under questioned he astonishingly claimed they were not his and that his wife had sent the poison letters to the President and Mayor Bloomberg. The FBI released Richardson yesterday, although he remains a suspect.
Richardson’s wife has now come under suspicion.
Shannon Guess Richardson had been married three times prior to Mr. Richardson. And with five children from the priors, plus another on the way, the marriage is headed for divorce. (Coincidentally, accused ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke has been married three times.)
Of course, the upshot is that as in the case of J. Everett Dutschke, this is more dual use ricin mail, poison letters to frame someone you wish to be rid of, and for officials. But who is the framer and who the framed? Or is it a husband-and-wife ricin-mailing team that has now fallen into scapegoating?
This is what the FBI is attempting to determine.
Did Shannon Guess Richardson not like the President, too?
However, copy cat use of ricin mail to the President and others in framing an acquaintance or your spouse would appear to be totally unique at this point in American history. Is the primary motivation for the ricin mail a frame job, or getting crazy words out to the President and others? Or do they share equal weight?
In less than sixty days, at least three different individuals, in three different states (Mississippi, Washington and Texas) have sent ricin mail to the President and others. One is most certainly a frame job. The third may also turn out to be so.
Everyone knows that the President, and important people in general, never open their mail. (A reader puckishly remarked that nobody earning over $30,000/year in America opens their own mail.)
Everyone also knows, that thanks to the war on terror and anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins, mail to important people is rigorously checked for nasty things. This guarantees that ricin mail is quickly discovered, although the occasional letter may go awry from the collection, as one aimed at the CIA in the Matthew Buquet case seems to.
The discovery of ricin mail immediately triggers an FBI dragnet, with results as have been seen.
This makes the “why” of ricin-mailing unfathomable. Castor powder is obviously not good for framing others. And sending it to the President will inevitably result in embarkation on a long custodial trip.
Ricin mail is crazy and now, virtually always suicidal. Yet ricin mailers persist! They seem without mercy. Does it not occur to them that the only people who will handle their nasty-grams are those in exactly the same economic circumstances?
They are just cruel and irrational. In addition, it seems the detection and apprehension of them, while necessary, is one helluva a waste of taxpayer money.
Welcome to the empire in 2013, from land of the free to land of debris. There’s certainly a book in it.
Can haz castor seeds?
In an abrupt change from the war on terror years, officials have apparently realized that more than a decade of telling everyone that ricin is easy to make and that castor bean mash is deadly has been counterproductive.
In fact, one can add that this particular received wisdom has some bearing on why America seems to have more bean pounders than anyone else.
From Fox:
Officials cautioned that there is “a significant difference??? between a trained scientist weaponizing the ricin extracted from castor beans and an individual “taking some castor beans, running them through a coffee grinder, and soaking them in acetone??? – a crude and ineffective homemade process that officials said would only be liable to induce, in a recipient foolish enough to go so far as to swallow the contents, symptoms as mild as diarrhea.
Three ricin-letter cases in the space of April to May make a remarkable national landmark. This has never occurred before. What we’re seeing right now is novel deeply psychotic, imitative behavior, by Americans very much influenced by the group received terrorism mythology of ricin poison.
And it has been all uniquely domestic, none of the cases seeming to have much to do with 9/11.
I’ll remind readers, particularly with regards to this case, the popularization in use of ricin arose from the neo-Nazi violent right, specifically the writings of Kurt Saxon in The Poor Man’s James Bond.
Two letters that contained threats to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — one addressed to him, the other to a lobbyist who works on his gun control campaign — have tested positive for the deadly poison ricin, the authorities said on Wednesday.
The first letter was opened at a New York City mail center in Lower Manhattan on Friday, the police said. Although staff members at the mail center do not appear to have become ill, several police officers who came into contact with the letter’s contents “indicated some mild symptoms the next day, including diarrhea,??? and they are being treated in hospitals, the New York Police Department’s spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said on Wednesday afternoon. “They’re being checked out as a precaution.???
The second letter, which was opened on Sunday in Washington, was addressed to Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group Mr. Bloomberg helps run and finances, officials said. Mr. Glaze opened the letter, an official said. No injuries were reported, Mr. Browne said.
A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Peter Donald, confirmed that the bureau was investigating the letters, but declined to comment further. Both letters were identical in content, bore references to the debate over gun regulation and contained written threats to Mayor Bloomberg, Mr. Browne said.
Both letters had a Louisiana postmark, said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing …
The letters contained a “pink, orange oily substance,??? Mr. Browne said, which tested positive for ricin on Wednesday at the National Bioforensic Analysis Center in Maryland.
The mild symptoms may not mean anything since others were not affected. Castor would have to be eaten or swallowed to result in diarrhea. Perhaps more likely, something else or shared stress due to the circumstances of a ricin-letter attack.
Doubtless the FBI’s ricin group, now experienced, is well on the case.
Analytically, what a castor powder mixture containing ricin looks like. Example from a ricin and domestic terrorism case in the US. Arrow denotes ricin component in crude mixture from castor seed.
So to answer the question — and I’d answer and have answered it, the same way. Yes and no.
Yes, America’s always had a lot of ugly sides, much in its character that deeply black. But WhiteManistan has become special in that it is now so obviously divisive and predatory.
Ted Nugent is the living example. He’s even earned a visit from the US Secret Service, something 99.8 percent of Americans manage to avoid in their lifetime.
As a result, he’s moved to center stage in America, not for his music, but for his glowering ideology and nihilism. It needs to be reiterated in case you don’t quite get it: The current national social environment is such that the US Secret Service visit seems actually to have been good for his career!
From this blog, in 2012, here’s Nugent making one of his metaphorical references to shooting an animal when discussing the president of the US, at a GOP fundraiser in Sangamon County, Illinois, the county Abraham Lincoln represented in the state legislature:
“We have a guy in the White House who is an absolute, America-hating punk,??? Nugent said. “And it isn’t really the punk’s fault. It’s we the people for bending over and letting the punk in the door.???
“How about a welfare program … (where) for every kid who gets a sandwich from the welfare program, there’s about 10,000 pigs buying bling-bling, dope and meth with my welfare money,???
“If we don’t fix the United States government this November, we will get exactly what we asked for,??? Nugent said, “and it won’t be the rabid coyote’s fault for getting into our living room – it will be our fault for not shooting him.???
What happens when these utterances hit the press? Well, the local newspaper journalists really don’t know how to deal with it. And so it appears funny and idiosyncratic, someone just being a colorful character.
But it’s built up over time and now the din is continuous from WhiteManistan, which is not a place, but an ideology, a way of life.
And it has paralyzed the government of the United States because it refuses to recognize the elected legitimacy of the president of the United States.
The country can run itself on automatic, through apparatus and structure, but there will be no progress. And that’s because the ideology of WhiteManistan has taken up a adversarial position.
The country cannot be governed when the legislature and the executive branch are engaged in a duel to the death.
It doesn’t take any genius to see the John Wilkes Booth element in WhiteManistan.
At the Times, Stanley Fish writes:
“Secession is near. Can’t wait. Which by the way is Constitutional.???
It’s constitutional, in this view, because a government in the act of eroding constitutional values is itself unconstitutional and has become a tyranny. Therefore to oppose it by whatever means available, including force, is not to undermine constitutionality, but to affirm it. It is in this spirit that John Wilkes Booth cried “Sic semper tyrannis??? (“thus always to tyrants???) just after he shot Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln famously said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.??? Booth’s modern successors are saying that a house in the hands of tyrants does not deserve to stand and they are ready to bring it down with their constitutionally protected guns.
As Police Chief Johnson said, this is creepy and scary, but is it — to return to my original musings — un-American? Yes and no. On the one hand, nothing can be more American than throwing off the shackles of a government that has overstepped its bounds and disregarded the rights of its citizens. That’s how it all began. (“No taxation without representation.???) But on the other hand, the American tradition of accepting the results of elections — even when they bring with them policies you believe to be misguided at best and disastrous at worst — is in danger of being undermined when groups of armed people decide that the present leadership is infected by unpatriotic, socialist ideas and must be resisted at all costs.
A government founded in a revolutionary moment is always vulnerable to a determination by a zealous minority that its revolutionary ideals have been compromised by itself. When that happens, each side will engage in its favored rhetoric, one proclaiming, watch out, they’re coming for our guns, the other warning that militant right-wing nuts are preparing themselves for armed insurrection. One side will cry “tyranny???; the other will reply, “You guys are crazy.??? And both will claim the title of true American. That’s where we are.
I don’t claim the title of “true American.”
But there is no equivalence between my beliefs and those labeled the intellectual property of “Booth’s modern successors,” as Fish refers to the N.R.A.
There is just bad.
And in American history, if there is an obvious linkage between America’s former leading tribe and the man who shot down Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War, that’s where the bad lies.
WhiteManistan lost the last election and is having a collective paranoid nervous breakdown. This, in turn, has severe repercussions for everyone.
Anyone can go to Google and search images for Americans carrying guns openly, all taken during the years of the present administration. And there are more always coming. It’s what I did for the WhiteManistan Vacation video.
It’s interpreted, by some, as Americans exhibiting their freedom. But when you look at all of it, it’s just creepy and off-putting. It’s a collective pathology, a sickness in the soul.
I am not the only person, by far, who’s said it.
Why should millions of people who don’t carry arms feel encouraged and heartened by this? I refuse to believe people with any empathy for their fellow citizens think and feel this way. I was not raised in a community where even a small minority thought it was an act of freedom to march around on the sidewalk or at the supermarket with a gun strapped over their shoulder.
I think you wouldn’t be normal, considering the state of the nation, if you weren’t unnerved by someone carrying a weapon in a common place. “There goes a real asshole,” is a gentle reaction.
With WhiteMan, it goes way beyond this, too.
One is just not not paying attention (or being willfully obtuse) if you haven’t seen the routine displays of rage and the threats, sometimes veiled but often very obvious, that come with the gun carriers, the defenders against the socialist usurper non-American who is the president.
Don’t get in the way, or we just may have to shoot you, traitor/gun grabber.
That’s the message. There is quite frequently perceptible pleasure, an enjoyment, in this public bullying.
I’m sick of it. But there’s no remedy, coming together or rapprochement in the future.
This makes the phenomenon of WhiteManistan one of the foremost security challenges facing the nation.
If the country, and the people in the majority who vote, cannot remove the ideology of WhiteManistan from its blocking and corroding position on the center stage of American government, the country will remain in paralysis.
Worse will come from it. A recent West Point study on domestic terrorism from the violent right in the United States drew the conclusion that one factor was the statistically most important as a predictor for increases in the incidence of right wing violence.
That factor was the number of Republicans in the House of Representatives.
The authors speculated this was perhaps because the ideology, or the atmosphere created by this governing body, was seen by people liable to commit domestic terror attacks as favorable to their cause.
Notice, this is not insurrection, but something far more common: right wing, politically-motived violence, almost always against non-whites, or groups, businesses and agencies viewed as enemies of white male American universalism and supremacy.
That’s WhiteManistan.
It has always been present in the American body politic. But when the country was stronger and better governed than it is today, the worst aspects of it could be kept from overturning everything.
That’s not the way it is now.
The United States won’t get another Fort Sumter. It will just become more brutal toward non-WhiteManistan in states were legislatures and local government are controlled by extremists, the federal government dysfunctional and incapable of reining it in.
The paradox will lie in that kicking the shit out of anyone who isn’t white, right-wing and pro-corporate fascism will be embedded as the meaning of freedom.
When making WhiteManistan Vacation there had to be an absurd quality written in. And so with the embarrassing juxtapositions, cartoon lettering and queasy color changes over pictures of gun-toting white Americans and their shelves of ammunition. Because without laughter the impact of such an outlook is too hostile.
Who on earth thinks a country is great when one very public reaction to a massive slaughter of children is marching around in public with assault rifles and shopping runs on guns and ammunition?
But that’s the Ted Nugent-ization of the country: “Fuck you, idiot! We’re gonna keep buyin’ them guns and ammo, yearrrrrrgh!”
From the New Yorker, related, on WhiteManistan central, Texas:
This very month, the Texas House of Representatives passed twelve bills in a single day designed to soften gun laws, although Texas is already among the most permissive states in the Union when it comes to firearms. One of the laws allows college students to carry handguns to class. There is no waiting period to purchase a weapon, or any need to register a firearm. Machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and silencers are perfectly legal. Indeed, one bill now under consideration exempts assault weapons and high-capacity magazines from federal regulation in Texas. If that provision is ruled to be unconstitutional, another bill now in the Senate would make it a crime for any law-enforcement office in Texas to carry out federal rules restricting gun rights.
In bold-face, the now commonplace strategy in the neo-Confederacy of WhiteManistan: nullification.
A sad picture of unintended consequences is emerging in the investigation of five bald eagles that were poisoned and killed on the outskirts of a farming village on the Eastern Shore.
A sixth bird survived the ordeal and was released a week ago into the marshy wilds of Back Bay in Virginia Beach.
Wildlife experts and law enforcement officials say the five deaths, coming on the same day in early March and probably involving the same family, represent the largest killing event of bald eagles in Virginia history.
“We sometimes see one or two poisoned birds, but six? And with five dying? That’s unheard of,??? said Randy Huwa, executive vice president of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, a renowned animal-care clinic in Waynesboro.
At first wild-life experts suspected lead poisoning, from the eagles consuming carcasses loaded with shot.
But this was not what killed them. It was, instead, a far more powerful compound, one the newspaper never actually mentions.
I am not 100 percent certain but reasonably sure, from the oblique wording, that this was the result of use, possibly without government permit, of Compound 1080, also known as sodium fluoroacetate. (Another possibility, somewhat less likely because of the description, is the M-44 cyanide cartridge.)
Autopsies were performed on two of the dead birds, and both tested positive for the same powerful chemical that wildlife officials say was likely aimed at a nuisance animal prowling in the Birdsnest area – perhaps a coyote or a fox.
“We don’t think the eagles were the targets,??? said Sgt. Steve Garvis, an investigator on the Eastern Shore for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. “But somehow the eagles got into this stuff, and that was that. By the time we found them, it was too late.???
While saying the chemical in question “is not the kind of thing you’d buy at Lowe’s,??? given its intense toxicity, Garvis declined to name the poison, noting that the case remains under investigation.
A number of years ago I wrote about sodium fluoroacetate because it was found in the hands of the Hussein regime by the final work of the Iraq Survey Group.
Returning to the main body of the ISG’s assessment, an assessment which already has been discussed by many at great length, one finds on page 45 of the section entitled “Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program — Annex A,” photos of a couple of interesting things: a picture of empty plastic perfume bottles and a bottler — said to be contemplated for use in squirting mustard gas into the faces of Americans — and a cardboard box with a bottle of a chemical investigated for its potential in assassinations.
While the ISG recovered no smoking gun of squirtable mustard gas, the chemical in the cardboard box was sodium fluoroacetate, also called Compound 1080.
Compound 1080 is converted into an analog which poisons a critical enzyme in the final common biochemical pathway of oxidation of food and nutrient molecules in aerobic organisms, for this case, warm-blooded animals. This reaction’s consequence is great toxicity.
Compound 1080’s use is very strictly controlled in the United States where government agency occasionally OK’s it for the killing of coyotes. Because of the compound’s well-documented hazard to animal life, even the dispensation of it in these cases is often subject to citizen protest.
In late 2004, the Department of Homeland Security was asked to halt use of the compound by Rep. Peter DeFazio, D – Ore. (Milstein, Michael, “Wolf poison raises alarm for its terrorist potential,” in -The Oregonian-, November 03, 2004)
So it is rightly seen as problematic that minions within the Hussein regime had interest in sodium fluoroacetate. It is not a thing that should be in the hands of tyrants, intelligence agencies, militaries, secret police or terrorists.
The Iraq Survey Group report says Iraqi intelligence services “researched a variety of chemicals including: Fluoro-acetate, nitrosoamine, strychnine, [and] thallium chloride …”
The ISG’s photo of a bottle of sodium fluoroacetate found in Iraq was taken in early May 2003. The bottle is labeled in English, as it should be, because fluoroacetate is manufactured by the Tull Chemical Company, of Oxford, Alabama. It is the only legal maker of sodium fluoroacetate in the United States.
Since the bottle of Compound 1080 recovered by the Iraq Survey Group has, potentially, such a clear provenance, it is surprising that there was no more comment on it in the report. It literally begged the inspector to contact its American vendor for information on the lot information, date of sale and final destination.
Was Compound 1080 bought directly by the Hussein regime or did it arrive through black market channels? If the former, how much Compound 1080 was purchased and what reason was given, if any, as to the need for it? Questions, questions, always more questions.
Within the overall context of the Iraq Survey Group report, the lack of information on the bottle of Compound 1080 is unusual because so much else in the total effort is meticulously detailed, extending to long tracts of analysis which are largely a collection of first person accounts and hearsays contributed by witnesses or prisoners of unknown credibility and condition. Of course, a highly regulated American-manufactured super poison in the hands of bad people is potentially awkward news, even if minor. But it is a little late in the game to be squeamish about such things now.
Killer of bald eagles as collateral damage of an attempt to kill a coyote or fox on Virginia’s eastern shore? Probably.
It’s worth emphasizing sodium fluoroacetate has no purpose other than poisoning living things, very badly. It has been the target of protests and complaints for years because of events like this. It is simply so toxic that when put into the wild, even in small quantity, it invariably takes down other furry and feathered neighborhood denizens that were not intended.
And so this has ended in tragedy on Virginia’s eastern shore.
DD’s piece for Globalsecurity in 2005 was made into a .pdf by PredatorDefense, a non-profit group that works for the cause of non-lethal control of wolves and coyotes for just such reasons as this unfortunate news describes.
Over the years, some American farmers, ranchers and others have hoarded sodium fluoroacetate and fought its ban on the grounds that they must retain the most powerful substances to protect their property.
Sodium fluoroacetate, Compound 1080, should never be in the hands of civilians (actually, make that perhaps all people) because this is what always happens.
While it is a substance of great lethality, it is of marginal utility but always with the potential for the most nasty of consequences.
Rewards totaling $7,500 are being offered in hopes of finding those responsible for the deaths of five bald eagles on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Since Compound 1080 is made only by one company in the US, if sodium fluoroacetate is the culprit, records should exist of sales in Virginia or the surrounding area. Such things could, theoretically, furnish leads.
In March, two congressmen – Reps. John Campbell, R-Irvine, and Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. – introduced a bill that would ban one of Wildlife Services’ most controversial killing tools: spring-loaded sodium cyanide cartridges that have killed tens of thousands of animals in recent years, along with Compound 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate), a less-commonly used poison …
Wildlife Services’ roots reach back to 1915, when Congress – hoping to increase beef production for World War I – allocated $125,000 to exterminate wolves, starting in Nevada.
Popular among ranchers, the effort was expanded in 1931 when President Herbert Hoover signed a law authorizing the creation of a government agency – later named the Branch of Predator and Rodent Control – “to promulgate the best methods of eradication, suppression or bringing under control” a wide range of wildlife from mountain lions to prairie dogs.
Federal trappers pursued that mission with zeal. They dropped strychnine out of airplanes, shot eagles from helicopters, laced carcasses of dead animals with Compound 1080 – notorious for killing non-target species …
“This is an ineffective, wasteful program that is largely unaccountable, lacks transparency and continues to rely on cruel and indiscriminate methods,” said Camilla Fox, executive director of Project Coyote, a Bay Area nonprofit.
“If people knew how many animals are being killed at taxpayer expense – often on public lands – they would be shocked and horrified,” Fox said …
Law enforcement agents should be able to test the toxin found in the letters to determine its potency and purity, as well as learn what chemicals may have been used to extract it from widely available castor beans, said Murray Cohen, the founder of the Atlanta-based Frontline Foundation, which trains workers on preparedness and response to bioterrorism and epidemics. Those chemicals might then be able to be linked to purchases made by Curtis or materials found in his home.
Curtis’ ex-wife has said he likely didn’t have the know-how to make ricin, and she did not know where he would buy it because he was on disability. But Cohen said ricin was once known as “the poor man’s bioterrorism” because the seeds are easy to obtain and the extraction process is relatively simple.
“Any kid that made it through high school science lab is more than equipped to successfully make a poison out of this stuff. Any fool can get recipes off the Internet and figure out how to do it,” Cohen said.
Those seeds, which look a bit like coffee beans, are easy to buy online and are grown around the world; they are often used to make medicinal castor oil, among other things. However, using the seeds to make a highly concentrated form of ricin would require laboratory equipment and expertise to extract, said Raymond Zilinskas, a chemical and biological weapons expert.
“It’s an elaborate process,” he said.
The industry of fear, at work. In the first “expert” claim, you have the case of someone from one of the many small advisory and training firms that moved into national security work in the wake of 9/11.
The Frontline Foundation was originally a business for healthcare worker safety training.
The second expert is someone who knows and has a long career studying bio and chemical weapons and their relationship to terrorism.
The claims are contradictory. The story’s title: Experts: Ricin like that in letters easy to make.
There is one right answer and it’s the second. Again, no one has made purified ricin during the war on terror years for reasons explained over and over here.
But it’s not something one has ever been able to get across to the press.
It does not fit the script, all the received wisdoms. Worse, it does not aid businesses offering their services in training for defense against all those things we are to be afraid of. Because they are easy to make.
There’s no profit in telling the truth because it’s complicated. It does not make as sensational a story nor does it earn money.
Consider too, there is now an obvious social cost to this, at the general public’s expense. Paul Kevin Curtis probably read the news. Although clearly out of his mind and with no sense of self-consciousness or restraint (you can get it from his pictures and videos), like others before him he’s immersed in an environment that tells everyone how easy things are to make.
Any kid that made it through high school can do it, you see.
And logic and careful thought can never win against such one-line claims delivered by people in performance for the media.
The FBI and national security agencies would, of course, be quite interested in combing over it, and translating various videos linked to by Tsarnaev, in efforts to understand his background. It’s a process that could take days although the broad strokes are apparent almost immediately.
Presumably they have already made a mirror of it.
One of his “favorites” was a disturbed Russian video of someone badgering a pet chameleon set to religious chanting.
A Washington Post blog entry shows a snapshot here.
I am willing to bet Tsarnaev had zero subscribers prior to that screenshot.
The channel now has a steadily increasing trickle of fans. See for yourself. The number ticks up as you refresh the page.
One of the old American ricin kooks occasionally mentioned on this blog during the war on terror years was found dead this week.
An AP story explains:
NORTH PLATTE, Neb. (AP) — A body found nearly a year ago in western Nebraska was that of a Wisconsin fugitive who’d been convicted of trying to produce a biological weapon, authorities say.
DNA samples and other evidence led investigators to conclude that the remains were those of 64-year-old Denys Ray Hughes, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Thursday. Hughes was being transferred by bus from a Colorado prison to a halfway house in Milwaukee when he disappeared in May 2011; authorities believe he got off the bus somewhere in Nebraska.
The body was found April 20, 2012, on private land on the southern side of North Platte, along the South Platte River. Medical investigators said tests on the body showed the man probably died between November 2011 and February 2012. The cause of death was unclear, though Hughes had a handful of health problems.
Hughes, adds the newspaper, had a heart condition and was diabetic.
The evidence list from US vs. Hughes is illuminating in that it shows the standard books discussed previously in “From the Poisoners Handbook to the Botox Shoe of Death??? here.
From Hughes’ “library:??? “The Weaponeer,??? a Saxon pamphlet with a ricin recipe, “The Poor Man’s James Bond, Vol. 3“, also containing a ricin recipe, “The Poor Man’s James Bond, Vol.2,??? Festering Publication’s “Silent Death,??? containing yet another ricin recipe, “Deadly Brew,??? “Deadly Substances,??? and an assortment of what Dick Destiny blog calls really bad science books — cf., “Grandad’s Wonderful Book of Chemistry??? — for idiots or young boys.
Accompanying the books in evidence were a mortar and pestle, bottles of castor seeds, castor beans in a package, castor beans in a bin, and Red Devil lye — which is another reagent dumbly recommended by survivalist literature as useful in purifying ricin. Lye, or sodium hydroxide, is a strong base. Strong bases destroy proteins, like ricin, but for decades the literature of the domestic terrorist has cited it in their ricin recipes and it has become a marker of intent in federal cases where the US is going for a conviction on making or attempting to make a biological or chemical weapon.
Another incriminating marker is dimethyl sulfoxide, also attributed in the Hughes case. Ricin is not a contact poison but because the domestic terrorist-in-training takes seriously material like Hutchkinson’s “The Poisoner’s Handbook,??? which insists it would be handy to combine dimethyl sulfoxide with ricin in plans to poison the Pope or a government employee through the skin, it has been adopted as key part of their chemical armory.
The federal case against Hughes appeared to be an easy one, based simply on showing the jury the man’s books, chemicals, equipment for bomb-making — and one pipe bomb.
For example, it cannot help a defendant to have the jury shown any of Saxon’s books. They tend to include drawings, like Dick Destiny blog’s similar rendition (to the left), on how to attack someone with poison or explosives …
A copy of the original complaint against Hughes from last year describes ATF/FBI flypaper –gunpowder, fuses, road flares, instructions on how to build a bunker, an assortment of guns, silencers and pipe-bomb-building materials.
“Hughes was prosecuted in Phoenix and convicted of trying to produce a biological weapon and for possessing a pipe bomb and illegal gun silencers,” reads the AP report. He received a sentence of 87 months.
During the last twelve years all domestic arrests of people involved in fiddling with castor seeds has been a white man thing. No terror plots have gone forward.
And everyone arrested with the misbegotten recipes for making ricin and castor seeds has been convicted and given to the pleasure of state hospitality. No exceptions.
