From today's Guardian:<br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The proposed new offence of acts preparatory to terrorism has been strongly pushed by the police following the acquittal of defendants in the "ricin trial". <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair went so far as to suggest that there would have been convictions if the new offence had been available.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> This is disturbing. The defendants in that trial were acquitted because of the lack of any evidence linking them to the plot - there was no ricin. It seems as if the intention behind the new offence may be an attempt to convict people on the basis of association with others without evidence of knowledge or intention. This is likely to result in innocent people in the Muslim community fearing to report their suspicions.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1539337,00.html">politics.guardian.co.uk/c...37,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><br>So what was the Ricin story? Well you wouldn't know unless I'd saved this. It was subject to a PII after a few days. (For those of you who don't know, a PII is issued by Her Majesty, who sees no "public interest" beyond herself and her family, and positively refutes the concept of natural justice)<br><br>=============================<br><br>The ricin ring that never was <br><br>Yesterday's trial collapse has exposed the deception behind attempts to link al-Qaida to a 'poison attack' on London <br><br>Duncan Campbell<br>Thursday April 14, 2005<br>The Guardian <br><br>Colin Powell does not need more humiliation over the manifold errors in his February 2003 presentation to the UN. But yesterday a London jury brought down another section of the case he made for war - that Iraq and Osama bin Laden were supporting and directing terrorist poison cells throughout Europe, including a London ricin ring. <br>Yesterday's verdicts on five defendants and the dropping of charges against four others make clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the "ricin ring" make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with us. Until today, the public record for the past three fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat occupied by some of yesterday's acquitted defendants. It wasn't. <br><br>The third plank of the al-Qaida-Iraq poison theory was the link between what Powell labelled the "UK poison cell" and training camps in Afghanistan. The evidence the government wanted to use to connect the defendants to Afghanistan and al-Qaida was never put to the jury. That was because last autumn a trial within a trial was secretly taking place. This was a private contest between a group of scientists from the Porton Down military research centre and myself. The issue was: where had the information on poisons and chemicals come from? <br>The information - five pages in Arabic, containing amateur instructions for making ricin, cyanide and botulinum, and a list of chemicals used in explosives - was at the heart of the case. The notes had been made by Kamel Bourgass, the sole convicted defendant. His co-defendants believed that he had copied the information from the internet. The prosecution claimed it had come from Afghanistan. <br><br>I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant exploring Islamist websites that publish Bin Laden and his sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the gun lobby. <br><br>The experience of being an expert witness on these issues has made me feel a great deal safer on the streets of London. These were the internal documents of the supposed al-Qaida cell planning the "big one" in Britain. But the recipes were untested and unoriginal, borrowed from US sources. Moreover, ricin is not a weapon of mass destruction. It is a poison which has only ever been used for one-on-one killings and attempted killings. <br><br>If this was the measure of the destructive wrath that Bin Laden's followers were about to wreak on London, it was impotent. Yet it was the discovery of a copy of Bourgass's notes in Thetford in 2002 that inspired the wave of horror stories and government announcements and preparations for poison gas attacks. <br><br>It is true that when the team from Porton Down entered the Wood Green flat in January 2003, their field equipment registered the presence of ricin. But these were high sensitivity field detectors, for use where a false negative result could be fatal. A few days later in the lab, Dr Martin Pearce, head of the Biological Weapons Identification Group, found that there was no ricin. But when this result was passed to London, the message reportedly said the opposite. <br><br>The planned government case on links to Afghanistan was based only on papers that a freelance journalist working for the Times had scooped up after the US invasion of Kabul. Some were in Arabic, some in Russian. They were far more detailed than Bourgass's notes. Nevertheless, claimed Porton Down chemistry chief Dr Chris Timperley, they showed a "common origin and progression" in the methods, thus linking the London group of north Africans to Afghanistan and Bin Laden. <br><br>The weakness of Timperley's case was that neither he nor the intelligence services had examined any other documents that could have been the source. We were told Porton Down and its intelligence advisers had never previously heard of the "Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, containing recipes for ricin and much more". The document, written by veterans of the 1980s Afghan war, has been on the net since 1998. <br><br>All the information roads led west, not to Kabul but to California and the US midwest. The recipes for ricin now seen on the internet were invented 20 years ago by survivalist Kurt Saxon. He advertises videos and books on the internet. Before the ricin ring trial started, I phoned him in Arizona. For $110, he sent me a fistful of CDs and videos on how to make bombs, missiles, booby traps - and ricin. We handed a copy of the ricin video to the police. <br><br>When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaida link claims. But it seems this information was not shared with the then home secretary, David Blunkett, who was still whipping up fear two weeks later. "Al-Qaida and the international network is seen to be, and will be demonstrated through the courts over months to come, actually on our doorstep and threatening our lives," he said on November 14. <br><br>The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaida manual" into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to produce in the 2001 New York trial for the first attack on the World Trade Centre. But it wasn't an al-Qaida manual. The name was invented by the US department of justice in 2001, and the contents were rushed on to the net to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act. <br><br>To show that the Jihad manual was written in the 1980s and the period of the US-supported war against the Soviet occupation was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book called the Poisoner's Handbook, by Maxwell Hutchkinson. <br><br>We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an Al Qaida-trained superterrorist. An Asbo might be appropriate. <br><br>================================<br><br>Guardian pulls ricin terror debunk from website<br><br>By John Lettice (john.lettice at theregister.co.uk)<br>Published Wednesday 27th April 2005 14:31 GMT<br><br>A Guardian story on "The ricin ring that never was" has been pulled from the newspaper's website, for what are said to be 'legal reasons'. The story, by Duncan Campbell (the investigative writer, not the Guardian journalist of the same name), analysed the collapse of the UK's 'ricin conspiracy' trial, and reported Porton Down evidence that had made it clear that claims of mass poisoning attacks had no basis.<br><br>Campbell's story, which is still widely available on the web (including here (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="https://www1.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/04/309555.html)),">/www1.indymedia.org.uk/en...55.html)),</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> covered similar territory to George Smith's pieces at GlobalSecurity.org (here (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/nsn/nsn-050411.htm)">www.globalsecurity.org/or...50411.htm)</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> and here (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/nsn/nsn-050413.htm)).">www.globalsecurity.org/or...413.htm)).</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> Campbell and Smith were both involved in the preparation of the defence case in the ricin trial, and what they and the Porton evidence had to say was essentially that ricin is a one-on-one poison, not a weapon of mass destruction; that Kamel Bourgass' efforts to manufacture it were amateurish and had left no sign of having been successful; and that the distribution of ricin by smearing it on car door handles was not feasible, because it is not absorbed through the skin.<br>Experiments undertaken by Porton Down had made this clear at the trial (subtext: no ricin terror campaign), but these tests did no more than support the generally known facts about ricin. The Guardian has not yet responded to a Register request for an explanation for the story's removal, but The Insider (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://theinsider.org/mailing/article.asp?id=1117)">theinsider.org/mailing/ar...p?id=1117)</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> reports that it was told the article was "removed from the archive for legal reasons", and that a further request for clarification received the response: "The article was not removed because of any inaccuracy. It was to do with a PII certicate [sic] protecting the identity of Porton Down [government weapons laboratory] experts who appeared as witnesses in the trial."<br><br>Campbell's piece had named a Porton scientist who had given evidence, but the names of Porton Down scientists are not a state secret. Or they weren't, anyway. A Public Interest Immunity Certificate is a relatively seldom-used legal mechanism for placing restrictions on evidence. According to the Crown Prosecution Service (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/section20/chapter_i.html)">www.cps.gov.uk/legal/sect...er_i.html)</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> "the government now considers that where government documents or information are material to legal proceedings, PII will only arise if disclosure could cause real damage to a genuine public interest."<br><br>If a PII did constitute the "legal reasons" it's difficult to see where the public interest in the action lies. The removal of the article does however mean that one of the very few correctives to widespread 'UK 911 poison terror scare' hysteria no longer exists in the mainstream press. Au contraire; the weekend after the end of the trial and the publication of the evidence, the Sunday Telegraph reported that we were/are faced with "chaos and panic in London's public transport system", and our security forces narrowly averted "our September 11, our Madrid. There is no doubt about it, if this had come off this would have been one of al-Qa'eda's biggest strikes", a "senior officer at Scotland Yard" told the paper.<br><br>Having observed the trial and - one presumes - read and digested the Porton evidence the "senior officer at Scotland Yard" should surely have grasped that smearing ricin on the handles of the Heathrow Express was a complete non-starter. Security forces' 'discovery' of a 'map' of the train's route is meanwhile baffling; the train is non-stop, so either you're in it smearing away or you're not. But perhaps the terrorists intended to fling gobs of it at ventilation intakes as the train whistled by.<br><br>As for those tests showing there was no chance of mass poisoning, Porton Down took ten grams of castor beans, ground them down and rinsed them with acetone in accordance with the Bourgass recipe found at the flat, then tested the result for toxicity in a cell culture assay (more details at GlobalSecurity.org (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/nsn/nsn-050413.htm)).">www.globalsecurity.org/or...413.htm)).</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> It found that the process had destroyed 90 per cent of the ricin contained in the beans. The Bourgass recipe called for five grams of beans; Porton concluded this would produce sufficient ricin to kill if injected, but would only be likely to cause nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain if eaten.<br><br>According to claims made by Mohammed Meguerba, the informant currently detained by Algerian security, Bourgass intended to deliver the poison by smearing it on car door handles, while the Sunday Telegraph's latest version (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/04/17/nricin17.xml)">news.telegraph.co.uk/news...cin17.xml)</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> upgrades this to "hand rails and lavatories" on the Heathrow Express. Porton documents produced for the trial however state: "There is no reliable scientific evidence available... that suggests that ricin toxin can be absorbed across intact skin" and: "There is no evidence... that by dissolving the ricin toxin in the solvent DMSO (dimethyl sulphoxide) or lemon juice, this would produce a contact hazard."<br><br>In summary, according to the Government's own research scientists ricin is ineffective as a poison that could be absorbed through the skin, not massively effective taken by mouth, but can have a lethal effect if injected, as happened in the case of Georgi Markov, (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2636459.stm)">news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2636459.stm)</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> the Bulgarian dissident assassinated in 1978. Whatever Bourgass may have believed, there is absolutely no justification for any security or government source to be claiming there was or is a danger of a 'British 911' from his direction. But a British PII? That's possibly another matter. ®<br><br><br><br><br><br>British Government Ordered Shutdown Of Fake Ricin Story<br>Prison Planet | April 22 2005 <br>The British government has ordered a D-notice clampdown on details relating to the ricin terror ring story which was exposed as being fake last week.<br>Inside sources from the Guardian newspaper in London have confirmed that the reason the Guardian article 'The ricin ring that never was,' was removed from its website was due to a direct order from the government. Several other websites worldwide have also removed the article but it is still available on numerous websites, Rense.com being one. <br>What's next? Are the government going to create a Ministry of Truth and employ Winston Smith to change past newspaper articles and dispose of unflattering truths down the memory hole?<br>"Government pressure" forced the Guardian to pull the article says the source, and that a Ministry of Defence directive was in order that forbade naming of any Porton Down scientists.<br>Porton Down is a secretive government chemical weapons centre and military base in Wiltshire, England. It has been at the center of a scandal involving testing of sarin nerve gas on British soldiers after World War Two. <br>Porton Down was also responsible for the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001. A phial of the virus was released from Porton Down before the outbreak. This was blamed on 'animal rights protesters' who had somehow managed to sneak into a biosafety level four underground facility guarded by armed troops.<br>The British government knew of the outbreak weeks before they told the public, allowing the disease to spread so it could devastate the British farming community who were providing a bulwark of opposition to Tony Blair on numerous different political issues at the time. <br>Porton Down (pictured above) was also the birthplace of Operation Cauldron, a program which led to the testing of lethal plague bombs on the Scottish coast. It has also been linked with the development of race-specific bioweapons. The place is a haven for Mengele-like mad scientists with no moral fibre. It should be shut down immediately and charges brought against those found to have engaged in this barbaric pseudo-research.<br>The Guardian article is set to go back online with the scientists' names omitted. These Nazis dare not let their names see the light of day as hey skulk around like vampires in the shadows cooking up more death and misery for future generations at home and abhorrent chemical weapons to be rained down on broken-backed third world countries abroad.<br>The BBC, otherwise known as the Blair Broadcasting Corporation, is also complicit in the cover-up.<br>A Guardian article (which hasn't yet been removed and can be read here) entitled 'Row as BBC cuts Bafta speech' - explains how Adam Curtis, who won the factual series award for BBC2's The Power of Nightmares, was censored after he criticized the sensationalized threat of the fake ricin plot.<br>The acceptance speech was removed from BBC1's Bafta coverage when it aired two hours later because it "touched a nerve" according to Curtis.<br>"Reporting of the whole terrorist threat has either become exaggerated, distorted or in some cases a complete fabrication and they are beginning to realise this. They know they have to sort it out. It has touched a nerve and the fact they cut it shows that." <br>Curtis went on to add that reports of an "al-Qaida plot to poison Britain" that could have consequences "equal or greater to 9/ 11" were "massively exaggerated or a complete fantasy".<br>The British government doesn't want you to know that of the 500+ suspects it has arrested on grounds of terrorism, only two have been charged and only then on immigration fraud. Prime Sinister Phony Tony B-Liar needs to maintain the fallacy that there are terrorists running around everyone's back garden waiting to kill them. That way he can promise to 'protect' us and ensure a 3rd term of neo-liberal Straussian warmongering.<br>And anyone that rocks the boat in the process, like Dr. David Kelly, will be murdered.<br>Not that Transylvanian Dracula-man Michael Howard (pictured) and the pro-war, pro national ID card Tories can even pretend to offer anything different.<br>However, this scrambling to cover-up the leaks betrays desperation in the establishment and a chink of light for freedom of the press that the Guardian would put this story out in the first place.<br>E mail the Guardian at
reader@guardian.co.uk and get them to put the story back up!<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
by Peachtree Pam » Sat Jul 30, 2005 3:46 am