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 …
He’s taking the stage at today’s NRA convention. It was at the same even last year when Nugent exploded and earned himself a visit from the US Secret Service. Most people manage to get through life without having one of those chalked up on their record.
Anyway, today’s headline for a picture display of Nugent at the Houston Chronicle is pure unintentional hilarity:
Screen snaps of from the Pennsylvania mail order gun company that sold the “Crickett” kid’s rifle involved in the horrible incident earlier in the week.
Truth about a corrosive white guy-centric social problem in pix and music. Or the most appropriate theme music for the NRA convention in Houston this weekend. Your choice.
“Now it’s time to shoot all the libruls down/And take everyone else we hate ‘n’ run them out of town!” — the general zeitgeist
He pulled the insufferable white male tech dork routine in a Paris Mickey D’s and they tossed him in the street, breaking his trinket. And they didn’t care.
Google Glass only less cosmetically annoying by increments.
When will first photo blog of butthurt white guys with their Google Glasses broken show on the net? Wear ’em in the wrong place in southern California or Pasadena.
Yeah, sure, the local police will want to track down your stolen device by its GPS beacon, or review its video to ID who roughed you up for being tech-enhanced nosy.
You’ll never see them at Baja Ranch in Pasadena.
I’ve argued, in different words, that Google is often in the business of catering to the demographic in American society that corresponds to the white male gadget freak/programmer shoeshine army for the 1 percent. And, boy, is this another piece of proof.
Use of art and music in defining a festering national social problem.
“Three in 10 registered American voters believe an armed rebellion might be necessary in the next few years, according to the results of a staggering poll released Wednesday by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind,” reads the piece at TPM.
One in four Americans, it adds, believe addled conspiracy tales about the Sandy Hook massacre.
Hardly a day goes by without some kid being expelled from an NEA-controlled social engineering indoctrination camp for wearing a pro-gun T-shirt or simply drawing a picture of a gun.
While liberals proclaim they are the vanguards of free speech and tolerance, that protection only applies to their leftist, dope-inspired agenda that destroys everything it touches.
The purpose of kicking little Billy out of school for drawing a picture of a gun or wearing a pro-gun T-shirt or eating a locked and loaded pop-tart is to simply vilify guns, or in the words of Eric “Fast & Furious??? Holder, to “brainwash??? Americans against the Second Amendment. Achtung, baby!
Our social engineering indoctrination camps are intentionally sending the message to kids and parents alike that guns are evil. Commie community organizer Saul Alinsky would be proud. It takes a very special person to dedicate his book to the devil, which must be why Hillary “No security for you??? Clinton was so enamored with old Saul.
Of course, if a kid showed up wearing a shirt with a picture of the president’s mug on it and the words “Like President Obama, I support abortion,??? that would be just fine as that message fits the “fundamental transformation??? agenda even though abortion, not guns, is what’s eliminating the inner-city population …
And I’m sure the leftist blogs are going to attack me, misquote me, but I’ll tell you why more and more warrior heroes of the military are killing themselves: Because they are in absolute frustration and heartbreak that their boss, their Commander-In-Chief violates the Constitution that he has made an oath to while their hero warrior blood brothers are being blown to smithereens and blown up while executing their oath to the same Constitution that the president, the vice president, and the attorney general violate.
Nightclubbing: Old guys in dungarees, one with a white beard and a cowboy hat, doing “My Girl,” make the skin crawl.
Infrequently this blog comments on social phenomenon that seem to indicate large numbers of Americans are increasingly mentally ill.
While diagnosis of mental illness in the entire population can never be achieved as an absolute, the Congressional Research Service has released a report which attempts to collate data on the matter.
It comes as little surprise that a quarter of American adults, perhaps more, are mentally ill. National conditions logically seem to predispose for it. And anecdotal evidence is manifest weekly, if not every day.
The United States, it is often said, is truly the exceptional country.
Prevalence of Mental Illness in the United States, by the Congressional Research Service, has been put on-line by Steven Aftergood at the Secrecy blog. Along with stuff about the strategic bomber force, terrorism, inflation and that global warming thing half of Congress maintains is a hoax.
Curtis Wilke — “I’ve thought, ‘God, I wish I were still a reporter; it’d be fun to cover this story’ … Neither of them seems very sophisticated. Make a weapon of mass destruction from a bunch of beans????
Pounding castor seeds is always a fool’s idea. J. Everett Dutschke was an amateur, never thinking things through. He blabbed to a friend about being able to make a contact poison powder. (Ricin isn’t a contact poison.) He ordered castor seeds off eBay, paying through PayPal, records of which it took the FBI no time at all to access.
It also does not do to be seen disposing of garbage when the FBI is in town. It has mobile surveillance and this appears efficient when it counts.
The investigation can also tie Dutschke to the mailed letters through addresses and other materials found in his residence.
Two snaps from the FBI complaint describe much of it.
Someone unnamed in the affidavit would seem to be available as a witness if it goes to trial.
The complete affidavit concerning the matter of ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke, unsealed today, is here.
After a slightly fumbled start, for which the US government will presumably pay, the FBI recovered nicely in collection of evidence for what looks like a very tight case.
On display in USA Today, a journalist ropes together a bunch of experts from the academy, all attached to bioterrorism studies departments that arose in the wake of 9/11.
They express varying views on both sides of the line. None of them say anything I didn’t almost a decade ago, from the critical thinking side. None have been involved in any bioterrorism cases.
It’s important to remember nothing could get into the media that counteracted the idea that bioterrorism was easy and you could just make stuff from downloading instructions from the Internet.
The J. Everett Dutschke incident has been convenient in that it shows, in an almost comically elegant manner, the badness of many of the arguments used by the national fear industry.
No one could possibly believe that such a fellow could make a WMD.
And, indeed, it took a journalism professor at Ol’ Miss, not a terror expert to put it in perspective over the weekend:
Curtis Wilke — “I’ve thought, ‘God, I wish I were still a reporter; it’d be fun to cover this story … Neither of them seems very sophisticated. Make a weapon of mass destruction from a bunch of beans????
Yet this fool’s belief has been the gospel for the last 12 years.
To which I add this wire quote, from today, for emphasis:
The 41-year-old Dutschke also made two eBay purchases in late 2012 for a total of 100 red castor beans, which can be used to make ricin …
One hundred red castor beans! Get your WMD from eBay! (Horselaugh.)
Homemade and improvised biological weapons, such as ricin, pose a slimmer risk to national security than the mind-set needed to carry out such attacks, security and bioterrorism experts say.
Despite the interest in ricin that was amplified by the recent letters sent to President Obama and other government officials, it is a more specialized and targeted weapon, said Joel Selanikio, a Georgetown University epidemiologist.
“Ricin is more easily produced but more difficult to distribute to large numbers of people than, say, botulinum toxin or tetanus,” Selanikio said in an e-mail. “So it has really been more of an assassin’s weapon than a mass-attack weapon.”
There have been ZERO homemade biological weapons during the war on terror. Failed attempts and wishes do not count.
There was Bruce Ivins, from the heart of the bioterror defense research establishment, and anthrax.
And there was production and sale of purified botulinum toxin to the unscrupulous by a small US private sector research laboratory whose business was dependent on the national biodefense
effort. And I examined it in great detail here.
So who profits from the idea that homemade biological weapons might be a really serious threat despite their total absense? The industry that’s set up to defend against them. And the mainstream media that profits from scary stories, as the need arises.
In 2005, well before the USA Today story, the industry of fear cranked up the idea that it might be easy to make enough homemade botulinum toxin from instructions in trivial documents and that this had the potential to fatally poison hundreds of thousands.
What the Stanford scientist who came up with mass death botulinum toxin scenario did not know at the time was that it wasn’t terrorists who were disseminating botox, it was List Labs, an an American firm just down the road from him in the Silicon Valley. And the incident I linked to above, one in which this was uncovered after a cosmetic surgery salesman administered it to himself and some friends, putting them all on the slab and on ventilators after they suffered near lethal botulism.
This is the scary clown show the US became during the war on terror. Lots of terror experts saying be afraid of this and that because it’s all so easy to do. That was the national line. Period.
In the meantime, the real world told us quite other things. It was untrustworthy professionals, highly trained in the art and science, who caused two problems.
Potent materials, such as the castor plants used to make ricin, could be siphoned and processed from nature with basic microbiology kills, said Leonard Cole, director of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey’s Program on Terror Medicine and Security.
But others … argued that complex scientific knowledge and access to more sophisticated laboratory environments with built-in safety precautions would be necessary to carry out an attack of worrisome scale.
For the newspaper one man acknowledges that “homemade weapons” are not going to bring down the United States.
However, then the piece shows a certain lack of self-awareness:
“The psychological ramifications are hard to measure and they could be pronounced,” he said. “If you had, you know, an event and then another event, another event on a small scale… that would be more of a psychological issue – you know, loss of faith in how things are done by government, that kind of thing.”
In this sense, said Moran, terrorists achieve a sort of victory.
“That’s what the terrorists’ goal is – is just to create fear in the population and make people worried and make people change what they do,” Moran said.
But who has played one of the central roles in creating an environment in which incidents are blown out of proportion?
Who has been telling everyone, for years, that ricin is easy to make?
If anything, the story of J. Everett Dutschke tells us the opposite.
Dutschke was a strange fellow who held grudges, one who indulged one of his weird obsessions in an entirely unique way, not with the obvious aim of terrorizing a populace but with the desire to frame an acquaintance!
And it is in just the way that we can see how the industry of fear works. It twists reality around with what-ifs and hypotheticals proffered by people whose livelihoods depend either wholly or partially on the national security megaplex.
In lending so much power and influence to this structure and process, and now pardon my vulgar reference, we’ve jumped up our own assholes. It’s a dependency that is sickness, one that has done far more harm to the national reputation and character than any good.
There’s no lesson about bioterrorism and its potentials to be had from the J. Everett Dutschke episode. Only that the FBI would have been better off had it not jumped so fast on an initial arrest.
