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Showing posts with label Ricin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ricin. Show all posts

21 May 2007

7/7: Ludicrous Diversion, Ludicrous Charges

It's tough to beat such headlines as, "Military studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants - get your copy and join Kalid Khaliq in the slammer," so The Antagonist won't even try. Not even on the new-look Anything that defies my sense of reason....

The media, in the true nature of the hysteria that is their core business, are proclaiming such things as "Terror suspect charged over 7/7 bombings," when in fact that's not quite the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

What has happened, however, is that Beeston resident Khalid Kaliq, 34, one of the four people rounded for questioning about the events of 7/7 almost two years after it happened has today been charged with, possessing "a document or record, namely the al-Qaida training manual, containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" on July 17 2005, according to Scotland Yard.

On July 17th 2005? For one day only? It sounds a little like this one-day-only possession of the CIA Al Qaeda training document, "Military studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants" may have come about during one of the many police raids that took place in Beeston after 7/7, possibly when an agent of the State handed over a copy of the aforementioned "Military studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants" while uttering the words, "Here, son, have you ever seen this before?" A sure-fire way to guarantee possession, fingerprints and DNA evidence proving ownership -- even if for one day only -- of such a document.

Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants
....
The 180-page volume, seized from the Manchester, England home of a bin Laden disciple, offers jihad members guidance on subjects such as assassination, forging documents, and preparing poisons in its 18 chapters. The terrorism manual was placed into evidence last year by prosecutors during the federal trial of four men accused of involvement in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (the below English translation was also placed in evidence). All four defendants were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The document is published widely in America, of all places, and in English, of all languages, and all 18 chapters are available online at The Smoking Gun and Cryptome for all to read. Free entry to HMG's Belmarsh and possibly even Guantanamo Gulag almost guaranteed.

Update: Khaliq's solicitor Nadeem Afzal denied the offence in court and Khaliq has been released on bail. District Judge Caroline Tubbs adjourned the case to July 2, just so a lot of fuss can be made in the run-up to the second anniversary of 7/7.

06 October 2005

Royal Narcotics Production Plant Has Cannabis Plants Stolen

For anyone that missed it in Jeremy Paxman's Newsnight round-up last night, precisely 36 minutes and 8 seconds into the programme for anyone that wants to watch again, Paxman announced:

"Thieves have stolen cannabis from a garden belonging to the Duchess of Northumberland.

The duchess had been granted special permission from the Home Office to grow the - 'pot' - plants as well as opium, ricin, magic mushrooms and coca, used to make cocaine, as an educational tool
. "

Yet more conclusive proof, as if it were needed, of the pharmacratic inquisition that removes the right of ordinary people to consume cannabis and nature's other psychoactive plants used by humans the world over for millennia.

At the same time the pharmacractic inquisition allows idle rich fucks to sit around illuminating their existences with the very same 'educational' cannabis and 'educational' magic mushrooms and 'educational' opium that are apparently oh-so-bad for the rest of us that we, the people, must be prohibited from consuming them at all costs.

Such is the war on drugs which, yet again, has exposed itself as nothing more than a war on ordinary people. The very same 'illegal' drugs that are bad for you as an ordinary person are in fact 'educational' and somehow beneficial if you're royalty. So much so the Home Office will grant you a special license to grow all types of 'drug', classes A, B and C. How fucking far out is that, man?

So the royals illuminate themselves with cannabis, magic mushrooms and opium from their own private, government-approved stashes and then unleash their government, its legislative powers and the wrath of its law enforcers on the rest of us to further remove the right of us mere mortals to consume nature's plants.

Of course, as with anything and everything, there are reasons for this. One need look no further than the recent UK legislative changes that have rendered the vending of magic mushrooms, fresh or otherwise, entirely 'illegal' to understand better the system of pharmacratic inquisition that is in operation the world over.

Anyone with an interest in such things will have noticed that the Amanita Muscaria - the Divine Mushroom of Immortality - reportedly one of the most 'toxic' of all magic mushrooms was curiously exempt from the recent UK reclassification of all-but-one variety of magic mushrooms to the status of Class A drug.

The reason behind the exemption of the most 'toxic' of all magic mushrooms, and why the Royals and other such 'luminaries' are allowed to swan (ho ho ho) about with their own personal drug gardens is very simple indeed and requires nothing more than a basic understanding of the use of Fly Agarics in human history, along with some knowledge about the symbolism of the black and white chequerboards that appear around the heads of the Queen's police (the bit that allegedly contains their brains and minds) and the sorts of places one might also encounter black and white chequerboard floors on which people will stand while performing a bunch of ancient occult rituals.

Sir Ian Blair didn't have much to say in the days after the IPCC leak of documents surrounding the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes but he did have rather a lot to say about Kate Moss and her alleged Cocaine use.

The Antagonist wonders what Sir Ian Blair will say about the Home Office sanctioning Royal gardens full of Class A, B and C drugs for 'educational' reasons while the rest us are actively denied the right to do the same by 'the law' and its misguided enforcers. Oh, wait, 'Sir' Ian Blair wears a chequerboard stripe around his head so it's unlikely he's going to say anything at all.

The legendary Bill Hicks summed it all up best when he said about those who endeavour to impose and perpetuate the pharmacratic inquisition with sanctimonious bullshit:

"Your denial is beneath you, and thanks to the use of hallucinogenic drugs, I see through you."

Although quite why the Duchess of Northumberland is being allowed to grow ricin in amongst her extensive drug collection is still a mystery and The Antagonist expects even less comment about the Royal ricin stash from Sir Ian Blair, or anyone else for that matter.

Maybe it's something to do with this sort of thing.


Note to the Duchess of Northumberland: If one is contemplating organising a house party any time soon, do feel free to invite The Antagonist using the email address link on the right of this page.

28 April 2005

Fake Terror - Ricin Ring That Never Was

Ricin rings in the UK? The Antagonist didn't buy it, nor did anyone else with a sense of reason, realising that it was yet another attempt by government agencies to scare the UK public just enough that they positively relish the soon-to-reappear ID cards bill, fundamental changes in UK law, and a whole host of other infringements of fundamental civil liberties.

Duncan Campbell's story of the truth about the non-existence of alleged UK ricin rings appeared, then disappeared, from the Guardian's web site and is reproduced here courtesy of Indymedia.
Fake Terror - Ricin Ring That Never Was

Yesterday's trial collapse has exposed the deception behind attempts to link al-Qaida to a 'poison attack' on London
By Duncan Campbell, The Guardian - UK 2004-15-05

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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Duncan Campbell is an investigative writer and a scientific expert witness on computers and telecommunications. He is author of War Plan UK and is not the Guardian journalist of the same name.