TERRORISTS ON THE HUNT FOR RED MERCURY!

Today we immediately go to the GlobalSecurity.Org senior fellow bookshelf for a copy of Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb, by Sam Cohen, self-published on Xlibris in 2000.

On page 445, in a chapter bluntly called "We Should be Terrified!" -- Cohen begins talking about red mercury, a substance he claimed could be used in a class of miniaturized fusion bombs the size of baseballs!

"Specifically, at issue here is an extremely small pure-fusion mini-neutron bomb, roughly the size of a baseball, which in all probability the Soviets designed years ago with the knowledge of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Mafia and what used to be called the KGB have been smuggling the technology and even the bombs themselves to known terrorist states and others who feel the need for them -- at a price, a big one," writes Cohen breathlessly.

"The triggering material, known as red mercury, is a remarkable non-exploding high explosive which technically is one of a very special class of so-called 'ballotechnic' explosives which apparently Los Alamos has been investigating (at the classified level) in nuclear weapons research," he continues. "Red mercury produces vastly more energy per pound than conventional explosives but does not explode in the conventional sense . . . Instead, upon being detonated, it becomes very hot, extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen [also in the mechanism] and a pure-fusion mini-neutron bomb."

Fascinating, frightening, and none of it real.

Cohen motors on, writing that "[Edward Teller, one of the father's of the hydrogen bomb] openly denounced me at a conference where I warned the audience about red mercury and its horrendous implications . . . [Teller said] 'Red mercury is nonsense. I could not find any physical evidence anywhere, classified or unclassified, that is other than pure imagination. I believe, however, that there is not a particle of evidence that there is here a basic new discovery. That this could be at present something important for the terrorist, I think, is nonsense.'"

Cohen was undeterred, coming the conclusion in his book that Teller did know of red mercury, but said the opposite because he was afraid of what the US government would do to him if he told the truth.

And such is the material out of which the whole cloth of conspiracies and extravagavant miracle weapons is spun.

Although red mercury is a sham, we're not going to go into 'why' here anymore than someone would care to explain why a housecat can't make a campfire. Suffice to say, enough rhapsodizing on it exists in newspapers, magazines and the Internet to ensure that some people will always think it's real.

Fast forward to a jihadist terror trial in Britain, just ended, in which the men in the dock -- dubbed the Red Mercury Gang -- were cleared in a curious plot to obtain the nonexistent substance.

From Reuters:

Three men accused of plotting to buy a dangerous radioactive material known as "Red Mercury" to sell on to a terrorist group for profit were cleared of all the charges at the Old Bailey on Tuesday.

The three men, Abdurahman Kanyare, 53, Roque Fernandes, 44, and Dominic Martins, 45, had been on trial for almost three months accused of trying to buy hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of the substance.

But the man they were trying to buy the material from was reporter Mazher Mahmood, a well-known journalist with the News of the World, famed for duping criminals and celebrities using his undercover "fake sheikh" persona.

The court heard that Mahmood had taped conversations with the suspects during August and September 2004 and informed the police of their intentions.

But the three men, who had pleaded not guilty, were cleared after the defence questioned the newspaper's tactics. The three men said their intentions were just to make money and argued that they did not know what the substance would be used for.

One of the men, Fernandes, also said he intended to tip the police off about Mahmood's actions once he started talking about toxic substances.

More briefly, the jury didn't cotton to the idea of a dodgy newspaper, the News of the World, and its reporter, entrapping some alleged terrorists/dunderheads in a scam designed to sell some copy.

According to various British sources, trial testimony seemed to have degenerated into unintentional comedy.

From the BBC:

The prosecutor, Mark Ellison, admitted the police had no idea if there even was such a thing as red mercury - supposedly the main ingredient for a "dirty bomb" which could have devastated London.

But he told the jury at the outset: "The Crown's position is that whether red mercury does or does not exist is irrelevant."

He warned the jury not to get "hung up" on whether red mercury actually existed at all.

Testimony was received that alternately described red mercury as a compound with which to wash soiled money or a "faith medicine."

Detectives described searches conducted off one defendant's computer looking for red mercury and focusing on an article on it, published on About.com by a bead-work artist and free-lance writer, which described some of the maniacal elements put forward by Sam Cohen in Shame.

The BBC then finished one of its articles with a waffle and a needless tease. Although red mercury does not exist, journalists -- it would seem -- often just can't say so if authority figures like the police and justice are involved.

Of course, this leaves plenty of Internet-published reference material for future stupid people looking for red mercury. Indeed, even this blog entry will, in the fullness of time, become flypaper for nincompoops interested in red mercury. That's why the sensational title! Ha-ha!

Wrote the Beeb:

In the early 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, several articles were published claiming that a pure fusion device had been invented.

It reportedly weighed around 10 pounds and was no bigger than a baseball.

If such a device existed, and was capable of triggering a nuclear explosion, the threat to the world - especially the western world - would be catastrophic.

But no such bomb has been discovered and nobody - not even Osama bin Laden from his mountain base in Afghanistan or Pakistan - has even threatened to use one.

So is red mercury just a hoax?

Let us hope so.

Using the logic of the trial of the red mercury gang, you can have your own fun with what constitutes terrorism in the crazy world of 2006.

For example, if you were to talk of hatching a plot to ignite the phlogiston -- an ancient imaginary element thought to cause combustion and present in everything -- in the Golden Gate Bridge or the Statue of Liberty or even the walls of the Lincoln Tunnel, would you be a terrorist if the police were informed. Or just a crazy and stupid person?

Remember, don't get hung up on the fact that phlogiston doesn't exist.

An analysis of the red mercury gang farce in the Old Bailey, by the Register, is here.

"[Sam Cohen's] 'Shame' is not a good book in any conventional sense. It is long, whiny, profane, and self-indulgent. It seems to have escaped editing altogether. Part reminiscence, part crank manifesto, it is a mess. But it is an honest and compelling mess that students of nuclear history will not want to miss," wrote Steven Aftergood's Secrecy News a few years ago.

More on Shame here and where to get it in .pdf on-line here. The alert reader will notice that the link takes you to the the third edition of Shame, which has been raffishly retitled, F--- You, Mr. President! We are informed the "first edition" is obsolete. Alas, the third edition does not include the keen story of red mercury.

James Woolsey testimony, archived at GlobalSecurity.Org, on Organized Crime and Nuclear Security in which red mercury is briefly mentioned as scam material.

Run of the mill farcical discussion of red mercury by assorted net ninnies.

Review of "Imaginary Weapons" by Sharon Weinberger, a book on the hafnium bomb, another weapon that doesn't exist but which the Pentagon was interested in. Hafnium isomer, which does exist, or more accurately -- can be made to exist in miniscule quantity -- is of the 'class' of materials into which the mythic "red mercury" was said to fall.

Weinberger writes: "Journalists love a good story about exotic new weapons. Perhaps they love it even more if it turns out to be true, but does it really make any difference in the end?"

She calls red mercury the "equivalent of Elvis sightings." Amen.

AS USUAL, BIO-DOOM INEVITABLE: The cliche of custom-made viruses and bio-hackers

The Post continued its series on the fun business of fighting bioterror with Custom-Built Pathogens Raise Bioterror Fears Monday morning. It was not as good as Sunday's The Secretive Fight Against Bioterror.

Why?

Briefly, the story about custom-made diseases being cranked out by biological hackers as future terrorists is already a cliche. It was done earlier in the year by the MIT Technology Review and as senior fellow looking at the issue at GlobalSecurity.Org, Dick Destiny blog has seen it repeated in various forms countless times.

Plus, the sourcing is lazy. (See to the end of the entry for the Post's endless use of Tara O'Toole, who through the years sings the same tune over and over about biological catastrophe.)

The script this is always the same: Start with scientist Eckard Wimmer and his cheap and custom-made variant of the polio virus in 2002.

The newsmedia bioterror, as well as technology, beat simply can't get enough of Wimmer because he affords them a kernel around which they can wrap more scarey stuff without actually having to be anywhere near the reality of what terrorists seem to actually know or be doing in the area.

So right off, cue the opening reel teaser/nightmare: "Eckard Wimmer knows of a shortcut terrorists could someday use to get their hands on the lethal viruses that cause Ebola and smallpox. He knows it exceptionally well, because he discovered it himself."

Next, deliver the declarative bromides on the subject.

"The future," [Wimmer] said, "has already come."

And,

" . . . synthetic viruses are well within reach and getting easier . . . "This . . . is a wake-up call."

"The biological weapons threat is multiplying and will do so regardless of the countermeasures we try to take . . ." said another scientist for the Post.

People who read about national security have seen "wake-up call" thousands of times.

Everything bad that happens or that could happen is a wake-up call of some kind. Hurricane Katrina was a "wake-up call." The poor response by the health system for the postal workers during the anthrax attacks was a "wake-up call." Bioterror wargames that had horrible outcomes, mentioned in yesterday's entry, were wake-up calls. Dig this nifty Google search string on "bioterror" and "wake-up call." Yikes! Over 10,000 hits. Now, 'atsa "wake-up call!"

(Late addition: A couple weeks later, the search string returns about 1,000, indicating potential Google funny business. But if we use this new and improved search string, yow, back in business again with the truth laid bare!)

Anyway, when you see wake-up call in print, you know the person uttering it is posturing and the reporter is acting as a stenographer than actually thinking about what's going on.

There is no significant attempt made to balance the article or talk to any scientists with a less hysterical version of the future to deliver. It would wreck the menace of the story, the creation of the feeling that bioscience has swept us away and we won't survive it. Doom is inevitable.

Of course, al Qaeda doesn't have the ability to custom-made viruses. Having gone over and over and over the subject on this blog, like most recently here, readers know that the jihadists have the desire. But their capability is woeful or fairly limited as far as can be determined.

It doesn't matter to the scientists who push bioterror as an inevitable catastrophe. The future custom-made virus on a modest budget just provides a new slate of unverified, theoretical enemies called lone-wolf biological hackers. This is much better than having to actually find out about things like, what terrorists are actually doing.

If you're smart you can see where this is going.

Recalling yesterday's story about the NBACC at Ft. Detrick, the secret national lab that will be used to probe bioterror capabilities so that allegedly countermeasures can be developed, it doesn't take a great intuitive leap to imagine the lab getting into seeing how easy it is to make a handful of viruses, just so someone can have a classified paper on what the lone-wolf biological hacker can do.

Surprisingly, the Washington Post doesn't mention it.

But it does have time to furnish more quote of the wowee-zowee future-is-now variety.

". . . living machines from off-the-shelf chemicals" to suit the needs of science, said Jonathan Tucker, a bioweapons expert with the Washington-based Center for Non-Proliferation Studies.

"It is possible to engineer living organisms the way people now engineer electronic circuits . . . In the future, he said, these microbes could produce cheap drugs, detect toxic chemicals, break down pollutants, repair defective genes, destroy cancer cells and generate hydrogen for fuel.

Yes, the lame will be made to see, the blind to walk, the plantar wart on your foot will be history, AIDS eliminated, global warming stopped . . .

Not only is the quote insipid, the juxtaposition of it with others that are delivered to paint the picture of a dark technological future in which no one will be saved is intelligence-insulting.

Well, which is it? Pollutants eliminated, dependence on fossil fuels ended? Or everybody is plagued with homelab-made viruses? F--- if I know!

Even drugs and vaccines won't be enough. Our current medicines are compared to the Maginot Line, presumably making the new bio-hackers the equivalent of the panzer divisions slicing through Luxembourg in World War II into our unprotected rear. (For the record, the Maginot Line reference was first delivered numerous times by another bioterror-is-coming scientist, Roger Brent, before Congress a year ago, and you can read it here. The Post apparently fancied it so much they either dug him up again to repeat it exactly for their story, or reprinted the quote without the original attribution to make themselves look smart and current.)

None of this is informative in any useful way. For example, if antibiotics and modern medicine and vaccines and national health care are Maginot Lines that won't protect us against the virus bio-hacker of the future, what do we do? There's no answer. Pray? Or die!

For the Post's big finish, out comes Tara O'Toole again, like a jack-in-the-box, the official designated harbinger of bio-doom.

"We haven't yet absorbed the magnitude of this threat to national security . . . It is true that pandemic flu is important, and we're not doing nearly enough, but I don't think pandemic flu could take down the United States of America. A campaign of moderate biological attacks could."

Just to put the shallow nature of the Post's article in perspective, we'll repeat some quotes from yesterday's blog entry, quotes also delivered by O'Toole, the chain-rattling ghost of bioterrors past, present and future.

On pandemic flu in a newspaper in 2005: "You're looking at a nation-busting event."

And also in 2005 for the Washington Post, on the message delivered by the jumped-up Atlantic Storm bioterror wargame: "The age of biological weapons is not science fiction; it's here."

Here at Dick Destiny blog we figure the Post and O'Toole are on track to repeat the same message once or twice more between now and this time next year, don't you?

THE FUN BUSINESS OF FIGHTING BIOTERROR: To fight disease, we will make disease

Today's Washington Post went with a frontpage story, "The Secretive Fight Against Bioterror." You can read it here.

The nut of it, although the Post hems and haws slightly in stating it for the sake of balance, is that the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) at Ft. Detrick is going to violate American compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, a 1972 arms control treaty to which the country is signatory.

Specifically, the BWC prohibits research into stabilizing, disseminating, increasing virulence and working out delivery systems for biological weapons, and it is just this kind of work which part of the NBACC appears to have been designed for.

The Post article doesn't really get into it but the anthrax attacks and the commencement of the war on terror after 9/11 radically set back biological weapons arms control efforts in the United States.

This sounds like an audacious statement but if you discuss the issues with bioweapons arms control experts behind the scenes, you hear it. The unravelling of adherence to the Biological Weapons Convention in the United States comes under the rationalization that this country reserves the right to conduct any defensive research it sees fit into biowarfare as a result of the war on terror.

However, defensive research into biowarfare is a squishy area. It can easily be simply interpreted as offensive biowarfare research or move across the line in more subtle ways.

The NBACC, according to the Post, is "classified as a highly restricted place."Everything that goes on at it is top-secret, difficult to oversee, which in and of itself presents obstacles to arms control. In any case, their currently appears to be no real planned oversight of the NBACC although the Post article mentions advisory groups attached to it as fig-leaves.

The Biological Weapons Convention line-crossing research stems from a sub-center of the new agency called the BioThreat Characterization Center (BTCC). A Department of Homeland Security briefing on the NBACC/BTCC in 2004 indicated that research aims included things that many scientists believed would violate the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, a treaty that outlawed production of BW.

That NBACC briefing immediately led to a memorandum called "Biodefense Crosses the Line," published in Politics and the Life Sciences, and written by arms control experts Milton Leitenberg, Richard Sperzel, an UNSCOM weapons inspector, and James Leonard, the US ambassador who negotiated for the Biological Weapons Convention treaty in 1972.

In the memo it was argued that "many activities [described] -- most particularly the 'Store, Stabilize, Package and Disperse' and 'Computational modeling of [bioweapons] feasibility, methods and scale of production' -- may constitute development in the guise of threat assessment" and that "they would very likely be interpreted that way by at least other states."

"Researchers have to make real biological weapons," at the NBACC, writes the Post. This is, argue NBACC scientists and supporters, the only way to figure out how the country can defend itself against them. In other words, it's the war on terror justification that to prepare for the worst from terrorists we must first make the worst.

One big criticism of this line of weird reasoning is that it leads to theoretical and actual work on threats that haven't been verified. So the Post trotted out the science director for the NBACC to say that it wouldn't be done, that research wouldn't be conducted on threats someone had just "dreamed up." There would have to be some indications, was the implication. But since the work at the NBACC will be highly classified, whether or not this is true will be impossible to determine.

"De facto, we are going to make biowarfare pathogens at NBACC in order to study them," said Penrose Albright, to the Post.

Albright was billed as "former Homeland Security assistant secretary for science and technology" by the Post but is now more accurately described as a director of Civitas Group, a K Street security industry investment and lobbying firm which serves to show how businesses can get taxpayer dollars being doled out by the Department of Homeland Security or other government agencies.

While Albright was at the Department of Homeland Security he basically served as a person who saw to it that taxpayer dollars were doled out adequately to big business for the purposes of national security.

And if the Civitas Group rings a bell it's because another Bush administration Homeland Security apparatchik, Richard Falkenrath, was also a director. Although Falkenrath is no longer advertised on the Civitas Group website, up until March of this year he was still billing himself as part of it. (See Richard Falkenrath: A telegenic anti-terror man. )

And like Falkenrath, Penrose Albright is another of the Bush administration's supply of national security adminstrators who are experts on everything, "everything," in his case, being stuff that's not very good, from purported anti-missile systems for commercial airplanes that can't be used but are really, really expensive, radiation sensors that don't work right but which are very expensive and -- well, you get the idea. Anything that the private sector national security industry can make that is costly but not cost effective, that's Albright's bag. (Not only was Albright in the Post on Sunday, he also made it to the New York Times, in an article on an aerospace company-made pricey but dogcrap laser-shooting anti-missile system, subsequently cancelled, which he oversaw while working in the Pentagon.)

Civitas Group can be seen as an intermediary by which the war on terror is made good for business, by transferring government money to the private sector in support of efforts, weapons and gadgets to make the country more secure.

Anyway, while back at the Department of Homeland Security, Albright emitted the following transmission, in which the private sector is also invited into the classified bioterror research family:

"The National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasure Center (NBACC), based at Fort Detrick in Maryland, is the hub within homeland security for research and operational capabilities to anticipate, prevent, respond to, and recover from current and next-generation biological threats to the American people and our agricultural system . . . NBACC aims to achieve efficient interagency and private sector cooperation with a structure that integrates facilities and technical expertise in biodefense . . . "

Dick Destiny blog has chosen to put in bold-face "next-generation biological threats" because it's national security codespeak for the rule-breaking activities described above. Or in another manner of speaking, "At the very least, we're going to think up new bioweapons even though terrorists or other nations haven't been demonstrated to have them because someday they might."

But back to the Post's news story.

"If we saw others doing this kind of research, we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty," said Milton Leitenberg, one of the authors of the original "Biodefense Crosses the Line" memorandum, to the Post. "You can't go around the world yelling about Iranian and North Korean programs -- about which we know very little -- when we've got all this going on."

In this we found the Post disingenuous to its readers and sources. Nowhere in the story does the newspaper mention the contribution of the Leitenberg/Sperzel/Leonard memorandum in 2004 and what it revealed about the NBACC then as the basis for what constitutes a significant chunk of its story now.

One unusual source for the Post was Tara O'Toole, founder of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and a long-time prosyletizer on the imminence of catastrophic bioterrorist attack.

"The philosophy and practice behind NBACC looks like much of the rest of the administration's philosophy and practice: 'Our intent is good, so we can do whatever we want,' " said O'Toole, to the Post. "This approach will only lead to trouble."

The choice in sources is an unusual one because of O'Toole's work as an advisor to the government, her participation in notorious bioterror wargames and her regular appearance in the media as a harbinger of bio-doom. Her public words and actions often seemed designed to serve the creation of just the kind of administration belief in catastrophic bioterror that led to the creation of an NBACC.

O'Toole directed an exercise called Atlantic Storm in 2005 which purported to demonstrate effectiveness and consequences of an al Qaeda bio-attack using smallpox. It has been criticized
effectively by other experts who listed a number of sins attributed to it -- most notably ones of exaggeration, juiced disease transmission and amplification of threat, a terrorist facility for making smallpox into a weapon that even state run biological warfare operations did not possess.

"The [Atlantic Storm] scenario we posited is very conservative," said O'Toole, for the Washington Post that year. "The age of biological weapons is not science fiction; it's here."

For the Los Angeles Times, O'Toole was attributed: "This could have been much worse. The age of engineered biological weapons is here. It is now."

Later in the year, again for the Post, in a story on how or why the failed national smallpox immunization ought to be revived: "People are now back in dumb-and-happy mode . . . when we were going into Iraq, and the possibility of a smallpox attack was seen as much more plausible."

While at John Hopkins University in June 2001, O'Toole contributed to another al Qaeda-delivered smallpox wargame called Dark Winter.

". . . spookily prescient," the Post wrote of it, in a story entitled "A War Game to Send Chills Down the Spine."

However, the Dark Winter exercised used a smallpox transmission rate that was three times its historical average. The alteration juiced the contagion, one that guaranteed the simulation would end in total catastrophe.

"We intentionally picked the absolutely worst-case scenario," said Randy Larsen, a collaborator of O'Toole's and one of the game's architects, to the Post. "We designed a war game they could not win," he added later in the story.

And " . . . suddenly, 'smallpox' is the threat du jour," wrote the Post.

Other O'Toole appearances in the press, and there have been many, have always been achingly predictable emphases on the ease of bioterrorism, doom (as in "we're cooked") and the inevitability of it all.

In the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001: "These [bio]weapons are cheap, they are easily accessible, and they are going to get worse as the science becomes more sophisticated."

Attributed in Investor's Business Daily, in an article about the need for new labs to fight bioterror: "The worst-case scenario is a concerted campaign . . . a little anthrax attack here, a little plague here, and . . . a little smallpox there, then the anthrax again."

In the Los Angeles Times in 2003: "Bioterrorism is a whole new terrain of national security that's going to have the same magnitude of impact as the creation of nuclear weapons . . . We should increase spending [on bioterrorism] to $10 billion next year."

And on avian flu to human flu, in 2005, from various newspapers: "Once you're there, you're cooked"; "You're looking at a nation-busting event"; "[an avian flu plague would be]more difficult and worse than a large terrorist attack, bomb, dirty bomb or airplane slamming into a building" and "If we don't drive down the costs of drugs, we're cooked -- both in healthcare and biodefense."

FOR THE WAR ON TERROR, which is better? True stories that aren't interesting or interesting stories that aren't true?

It's official, the war on terror is a source of entertainment. Not for everyone -- but for those who've become the symbolic interpreters of it, like talk-show newsmen, network news frontmen, or the famous journalist with a revolving book contract -- it is. The terror war works as a provider of material which can be cherry-picked, or embellished, even told straight, but packaged to be delivered as a diversion.

Information and revelations on national security now often don't come through careful reporting, or the public delivery of intelligence into the open by verifiable sources, but in media vehicles which are said to be excellent work, but with the excellence more in the way they are marketed for maximum publicity, impact or some variable political agenda. The stories of terror are for the telling, not for informing.

Of course, good reporting is still done on the war on terror. When that happens, less people pay attention. When they do it's because they've been told to by others for reasons of outrage. As when somewhat less than half of the country appeared to get up in arms over the idea that the delivery boys of news of things thing the Bush administration is doing in secret might be traitors, or that certain name agencies within the newsmedia -- the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, for example -- are helping al Qaeda with their exposes.

But today, Dick Destiny blog -- with its GlobalSecurity.Org senior fellow hat firmly on, comes back to Pulitzer-winner Ron Suskind and his book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11.

In a review in the New York Times book review last Sunday, Suskind was described as "a top notch newspaperman, one of the best natural writers the Wall Street Journal ever produced, and he commands an authorial voice many journalists can only dream of. Give him an hour with a cooperative source, and he'll give you six pages of beautiful scene-setting, scissor sharp dialogue and a nugget or two of insight . . . "

It could be true. Dick Destiny blog isn't sure. Most people it knows aren't scissor sharp speakers and it gets suspicious when it reads non-fiction dialogue that's so alert.

So when it reads Suskind's reporting about things it knows a bit about, it doesn't hear an "authorial voice." It finds what could be errors or extraordinary claims, world-changing ones, that are either not attributed or simply a page or half-page of blurbs.

In Suskind's book you never know who is delivering information to the reporter, just that it could be someone famous from inner circles, a Mr. Z or a Mr. Y or a Mr. X. You can take wild guesses at who they might be but there's no way to know motivations for imparting the information, the credibility of those interviewed or even the level of basic common sense present in the room.

But because Suskind is a name in bright lights within the newsmedia, no one actually addressed this in a major way when retelling items which for them were sensational and pleasing stories of menace and terror barely averted.

The story of al Qaeda's cyanide-producing Mubtakkar bomb was one such cracking fine story. It furnished everything the newsmedia would want in terror news or infotainment. It could be quickly described and it meant black choking death in the New York City subway in big numbers.

While few impeded it even slightly on television or old media print, it did raise questions.

Suskind described an improvised weapon that was assembed by government experts and shown in White House briefings to throw scares into people, convincing them of the gravity of its menace. By the end of The One Percent Doctrine, it's a the equivalent of a knick-knack tossed on a table by George W. Bush.

But there's no picture of the vaunted hardware. It's missing. Too sensitive? Classified? The reader isn't told.

On the other hand, the Department of Homeland Security did distribute a photograph and memorandum containing another jihadist-inspired cyanide bomb in 2003. It was in color, well described and not classified. It was, in other words, in the open.

Suskind's Mubtakkar, however, was not, apparently, until the publication of his book. And his cyanide-bomb does not correspond with the DHS-described cyanide-bomb, one which could be compared with a jihadist drawing of the same also found in open source.

And herein lies a problem. It's not a small issue and it gets at the heart of telling the story of the war on terror as infotainment vs. providing information and careful wisdom on the same thing.

The US government did not describe its cyanide-bomb, made up from a jihadist diagram, as the terror equivalent of "splitting the atom," as Suskind did. The memorandum on it was cautiously delivered nationwide with caveats as to where it might work and where it might not. It came with reasoned analysis that described elements of uncertainty associated with it. It was not made into a sensation. It wasn't a throw-up-your-hands-in- panic piece of technology, like Suskind's Mubtakkar.

Suskind, however, delivered no such uncertainty with his Mubtakkar. It was "a portable disaster, easy to assemble," he wrote. It was "a device that bent the laws of physics" and was "a holy grail for terrorists."

Of course, it did not bend nature, it depended on a simple chemical reaction. But the prose is a sensation, building the icy cold menace into the story of secret terror plots.

For the book, Suskind goes briefly into the history of cyanide-producing devices. He mentions the Aum Shinrikyo terror group's efforts in this area. Aum, flubbed lethal cyanide-production a couple of times in Japan, possibly more, and definitely possessed materials and intent. And as part of a wide-ranging criminal case, the information on Aum's methods, successes and failures made its way into the open. But the DHS-made Mubtakkar, which was also available in open source and which would seem to pertain to the war on terror in exactly the same slot as Suskind's Mubtakkar is absent from his book's account.

Did it not stretch the laws of physics enough?

With the DHS-distributed photo and jihadist diagram of one cyanide-producing bomb in the open, Dick Destiny blog was able to ask enough questions to trace the history of both here. An anonymous government source attested to the truth of it and added that while information had not been publicized, such a device has been used once in Afghanistan, where it failed. This sounded true but because it was not accompanied by anything more substantive than say-so from authority, it's impossible to know if it's absolutely so. Caution is recommended.

In any case, Suskind did not stop with the Mubtakkar. He writes that al Qaeda produced anthrax in Afghanistan and that a sample of it was seized in Kandahar. Apparently this, too, was a secret, because nowhere in the scholarly record, or in any attachments to official reports on 9/11 and its aftermath, has this startling fact been revealed.

Like Suskind's writing on the Mubtakkar, the details are scant but sensational. "The CIA . . . descended on a house in Kandahar and discovered a small, extremely potent example of the biological agent."

Anthrax, like efficient mass cyanide-production, was thought to be "beyond al Qaeda's abilities . . . it could be easily reproduced [by al Qaeda] to create a quantity that could be readily weaponized."

These are astonishing statements. With all the information and investigation into anthrax and terrorism since 9/11, the US government has not seen fit to tell the people that it was found in Afghanistan, leaving it to a popular book?

The scholarly take on al Qaeda and anthrax was pieced together by arms control experts, most prominently Milton Leitenberg, a research scholar at the University of Maryland. One description of their desires and work, "Al Qaeda BW efforts in Afghanistan: 1997-98 to 2001" can be found in his monograph, "Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat." (It's here.)

It has a few obvious differences with Suskind's story. It's more detailed, as befits a scholarly discourse, and it is footnoted.

Leitenberg writes of an individual, revealed in letters seized in Kandahar in 2001, a man "with Ph.D.-level training who understood the professional microbiology literature, and who understood professional procedures for purchasing pathogen cultures. He was willing to trade on the access provided by his status, while concealing the true purpose of his activities, which was to provide al Qaeda with the means to attempt its first [Biological Warfare] capability. However, he was not prepared to do any of the laboratory work himself. There is no evidence in any of the declassified pages to indicate that any bacterial cultures had yet been obtained, or that any had been shipped to Afghanistan or Pakistan or that any work had yet begun."

Leitenberg also picks up the story prior to and after the invasion by analyzing the statements of government officials, including CIA-director George Tenet, and information revealed in interrogations with al Qaeda men tasked in the project for developing a biological weapon, Yazid Sufaat and Hambali (aka Raduan Isamuddin).

The discussion is careful and replete with caveats but comes to the conclusion that while al Qaeda had plans in Afghanistan and had allocated resources and men to carry them forward, that "nothing so far translated indicated access to the most dangerous microbial strains or to any advanced processing methods . . . "

"After his capture, Hambali told his interrogators that he had earlier been collaborating with Sufaat, that he had been trying 'trying to open an al Qaeda bioweapons branch plant,' and that Sufaat 'had been working on an al Qaeda anthrax program in Kandahar' . . . but that after the U.S. attack on the Taliban, they had planned to move the 'program' to Indonesia. However, Sufaat had been unable to obtain a pathogenic strain of anthrax," wrote Leitenberg. (Leitenberg gleans these statements from open source newspaper accounts.)

Leitenberg adds, "The key question regarding the information . . . is whether there is additional documentary or material evidence to support it beyond that already obtained in the papers found in November 2001 and the locations occupied at the time. Those did not indicate success 'in isolating cultures of [anthrax]. And only the Sterne vaccine strain had been available to the group in Afghanistan . . . "

It is a complicated analysis. Dick Destiny blog encourages you to read it completely, and Leitenberg qualifies his examination with uncertainty where appropriate. History, of course, is changeable when new facts arrive.

However, Suskind's support for al Qaeda's production of anthrax is far slimmer. He also mentions Hambali and Yazid Sufaat, but in his book's telling, "One disclosure was particularly alarming: al Qaeda had, in fact, produced high grade anthrax. Hambali, under interrogation, revealed its whereabouts in Afghanistan."

And that is it.

But that was enough to be mentioned in a Sunday New York Times magazine article and to be hit upon in a brief bit of drive-by terror war infotainment on the McLaughlin Group, an interview in which the Suskind book is called "a staggering achievement."

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Now, you know that anthrax is not easy to deliver.

MR. SUSKIND: It is not.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: It's highly milled, extremely highly milled.

MR. SUSKIND: Yep.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: It has to be inhaled in true inhaling. It has to be -- sometimes it can be put in an air conditioner, but even that's hard to do. And then if you -- the talk about the Super Bowl and wiping out hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people at the Super Bowl from an airplane above, the airplane would have to be flying at a certain speed; it would have to deliver it in a certain atmosphere, et cetera -- not easy to do.

MR. SUSKIND: Not easy to do.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And is that all that al Qaeda is thinking about now, or is that gone too?

MR. SUSKIND: Another thing we now know from this investigation is that al Qaeda, to our surprise, had produced a very virulent sample of weaponizable anthrax. I won't get into all the specifics as to how we know it's weaponizable, but it is. That shocked us. We knew they were working on labs and trying their best, but it is hard to do, as you say. We found in the fall of 2003, through intelligence, we found that they had produced and we went to Kandahar and found the sample.

All nicely wrapped and finished. Although the U.S. government has never officially revealed it, "we" can't get into the specifics of how "we" know al Qaeda had "weaponizable" anthrax but "we" do and "we" found it.

Likely, unlikely, yes, no, truth, fiction, factual fiction, or half-truths, there's no way to tell. What can be said is that the biggest claims find their way into the best newsbytes delivered in selling the book.

Now, let us jump to page 185 of Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine. The writing is rat-a-tat-tat and "we" again comes into play:

There was an up-and-coming player named Zarqawi -- we'd been tracking him through 2002 . . . He was, it seemed, behind several biochemical attacks in Europe, including a scare involving ricin, the toxic paste made from castor beans, in Britain the previous summer.

Except there were no "several biochemical attacks in Europe."

And the panic over an alleged ricin ring in Britain did not occur in the summer of 2001.

The frontpage headline of Britain's Mirror newspaper on January 8, 2003, was "IT'S HERE" and the accompanying story suggested that a ricin plot had been found in England, just before the war in Iraq.

British anti-terrorist branch men swooped down on suspected terrorists in the north and east of London in September of 2002 and January of 2003. In one of the sweeps on January 5, called Operation Springbourne, the plant poison ricin was claimed to have been found in an apartment above a pharmacy in a place called Wood Green. The news flashed around the world.

In the subsequent trial of the alleged London ricin ring in 2005, a jury found everyone but one loner, Kamel Bourgass, not guilty. During the proceedings it came out that no ricin had actually been made at Wood Green and that the initial finding publicized in British and American newspapers had been a false positive.

The story of it was long and complicated, littered with inconvenient facts that contradicted the original received wisdom delivered in the newsmedia. Despite that, much of it still made its way into British newspapers and onto the Internet.

But somehow the Pulitzer-winning reporter and his editors at Simon & Schuster missed it. The date was wrong and the association with Zarqawi was wrong. The poison recipes attributed to Kamel Bourgass, the principal defendant in the poison terror ring case, were found on Yahoo servers in Palo Alto, California, and no biochemical attacks had been carried out in Europe.

Eh -- to err is human.

But when the selling point of your book and the credence given to its extraordinary stories are aligned with the reputation as a Pulitzer-winning reporter . . .

The lay reader of Suskind's book might not be expected to know such details. But some people do and botching that which is easy to get right doesn't inspire confidence in the reporting of bigger claims that have much less substantiation for them in open sources.

So here is the dilemma for publishers, editors, reporters and readers: Are the stories of the war on terrorism not so good if they don't come with the extraordinary claim from the inside, if the truth is judged uninteresting? Are they perhaps not entertaining enough, too incapable of selling books, of captivating viewers, of getting attention?

What's true? What's not? Is it better for the polity to have interesting stories provided to it by its symbolic interpreters, ones that aren't necessarily true, to understand the war on terror?

Near the end of The One Percent Doctrine, some scissor-sharp dialogue emerges:

No one says, "There's no proof!" the CIA manager exhorted, his voice rising . . . "There is no judgment in the system. No one is saying, 'Based on my experience, this person is a lying dog' . . . "

WHO DESIGNED THE CYANIDE BOMB? An answer, shrouded in secrecy

Readers of Dick Destiny blog know it has spent some time asking about the true origin of the cyanide-producing bomb discussed in Improvised Cyanide Munition: Prototype by government agency. The US-made prototype, described by photograph and memorandum distributed by the Department of Homeland Security in September of 2003, purported to show what intelligence had revealed of an Islamic terrorist design. (See photo at foot of page)

In picture and words, it did not fit the model in the much publicized story of Pulitzer-winner Ron Suskind's Mubtakkar. Suskind, whose grasp of the science of hydrogen cyanide production could best be described as feeble, described the Mubtakkar as a two-compound weapon, one in which hydrochloric acid was mixed with a cyanide salt. But the memorandum distributed by the Department of Homeland Security described a different bomb, one composed of three compounds -- hydrochloric acid, a salt of cyanide and potassium permanganate. The permanganate and cyanide salt in this weapon would react with hydrochloric acid violently.
Whether the weapon would work as advertised in another matter entirely.

As publicity around Suskind's story increased, some terror hunters became excited by a jihadist-drawn diagram of a cyanide bomb, which they also called a Mubtakkar. Described in this article, sponsored by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the diagram was said to have been on al Qaeda-affiliated websites as early as late 2005 and its errors and limitations are discussed in Jihadist cyanide bomb -- complete with error. (Drawing at foot of page, below DHS-distributed photograph.)

But the jihadist diagram was also an exact duplicate of the photo of the US-made weapon distributed in 2003. This led to the very legitimate question: Did the American prototype, distributed in cyberspace, result in the jihadist diagram? Or was the US device, made for illustrative purpose, actually based on a jihadi design, the original of which the Department of Homeland Security chose not to publicize?

Since al Qaeda terrorists have copied from US literature in the past for their plans on chemical and biological weapons, without knowing the dates of generation of the designs and photos of the two cyanide bombs, it was difficult to determine which came first.

But donning our Senior Fellow at GlobalSecurity.Org digging helmet, answers -- of a kind, were unearthed.

But they don't come free of strings or in the clear. Since the US intelligence apparatus does not share its information easily, the information comes by way of the insider, the anonymous source with a history of knowing.

And the story is, although no diagrams or paper can be provided to verify it, that the US-made prototype was -- indeed -- made from the jihadi diagram and that it had been found on an al Qaeda-affiliated website prior to the distribution of the Department of Homeland Security memorandum in September of 2003.

Readers will recall that the various designs for a jihadi cyanide-bomb were critically regarded by this writer and a number of trained colleagues in the wake of journalist Ron Suskind's claims that the Mubtakkar weapon was a revolutionary step, equivalent to the terrorist splitting of the atom.

It would, perhaps, create a bang and a splash: " . . . other scientists [which included Dick Destiny blog] that UPI spoke to about the reaction, which uses acid and cyanide crystals to produce hydrogen cyanide gas, stressed that it was a highly volatile process, which generates a huge amount of heat as well as gas -- and would likely destroy the device itself.

Inside information seems also to have indicated this theoretical assessment was correct. Again encumbered with secrecy, and not publicized, a jihadi-made cyanide bomb based on the discussed design was used in Afghanistan. It did not work. And no other information was provided. Take it as you will.

I COULDN'T HACK IT: Says jihadist of plan to kill two rabbits with ricin

Readers of this blog know that Islamic terrorists, or wannabe terrorists, while drawn to ricin recipes aren't arrested with the toxin in their possession nearly as much as white American men. Late last week, US Dimwit Found with WMD in Shed, summarized the issue nicely.

Part of the received wisdom passed around by the media and our government-paid national security gurus depends on Americans not understanding what the reality is. They are to understand that ricin is easy to make and that Islamic terrorists make it and that someday, it will kill people. They are to understand that because of these things, it is necessary to fund dozens of scientists and companies with taxpayer dollars to teach how to defend against ricin, how to clean up ricin and how to detect ricin as well as develop a vaccine for it.

They are not to understand that no terror attacks with ricin have been conducted in the last ten years, that no one has been assassinated by a terrorist using ricin in the same time and that the people caught with so-called ricin recipes are absurdly inept and incompetent. If they were to understand such things, it would be bad, because they might begin to resent the good fortune, the terror-war welfare, so to speak, being doled out from their purses.

So a terrorist trial in London's Old Bailey central criminal court is of of interest for the unintentionally comic relief it provides by way of an accused man's testimony. While the jihad men in the dock were not found with ricin in their possession, one of them apparently sang like a bird for British police. Somewhat over half a ton of ammonium nitrate, however, was seized by the UK government and the case is revolving around pinning it on them as part of a plan to make explosives.

"British al Qa'eda suspects planned to use ricin and fertilisers bombs to attack UK armed forces in Afghanistan, the Old Bailey heard today," went the news piece from a British publication.

"But Salahuddin Amin, 30, told police that when the deadly poison was [to be] tested on rabbits he became squeamish and begged terror trainers not to kill the them."

The accused terrorist told police he was "trained" in ricin-making at a camp in Pakistani Kashmir.

British police questioned Amin about what he knew of ricin.

"As far as I was told it is a poison that can be mixed with food to give it to people. . . . I think to slowly kill a person."

For the police, he continued: "Anybody could use it you know, even if you have an enemy like you know, say if you have an enemy you want to kill, obviously you can just put ricin in his food and kill him."

Later he told police, "So I thought, to be honest with you, I just did the whole [ricin-training]course because I had nothing better to do so this was part of it and I just went along with it."

During the alleged ricin-training terror class, Amin told police that the test, the final exam, of sorts, was to try and kill rabbits with the poison.

"They did buy two rabbits and there was a whole like you know nice little thing (going to be) killed and I just told them please don't use it on these things because I can't hack it to be honest," said Amin.

The ricin recipe, used in terror training, of couse, is this: Take one handful of castor seeds, grind into a mash, and rinse with four times their weight in acetone. Keep the dry powder, which will contain about 90 percent less active ricin that what originally was present in the seeds. (Sources: Kurt Saxon's "The Poor Man's James Bond, Vol. 3", Maxwell Hutchkinson's "The Poisoner's Handbook" and The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook.)

The efficacy of this method was quantified by England's bio and chemical defense national laboratory, Porton Down, in the trial of Kamel Bourgass last year:

In connection with the Bourgass terror trial, Porton Down performed a facsimile of the [common] ricin recipe. Porton Down ground castor beans and rinsed them with acetone. It took ten grams of castor beans, five more than called for in the . . . recipe, and determined that they contained 290 milligrams of soluble protein, of which ricin was a minority component, 63 milligrams. By gross weight, a castor bean contains approximately 0.6 percent ricin, a very small amount, a quantity confirmed by Porton Down. Naturally castor beans do contain ricin and one expects to find ricin in a powder or mash of them.

In addition, to get an idea on the toxicity of ricin, Porton Down undertook another test of the dried ground castor bean mixture it had produced in a cell culture assay. The scientist performing the test found the ricin in the mixture to be an order of magnitude less toxic than Porton Down's laboratory ricin standard. That is, of the 63 milligrams of ricin, a small quantity, thought to be present, only ten percent was still intact and biologically active.

The original article and Porton Down citation in conext is here, at GlobalSecurity.Org And the British news article on the terrorist who balked upon being asked to "ricin-ize" rabbits is here.

LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES: Two good books dealing with security and the war on terror, reviewed at the Voice, investigate the Department of Defense's pursuit of dubious technology

The first question that comes to mind on reading Ed Halter's From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games is: How did a military that's so handily made a mess of its real war make one of the best computer war games for kids ever? The title of the 2002 game was America's Army, downloaded from GoArmy.com a whopping 2.5 million times in its first two months of availability. Intended as a recruiting aid, it's been a failure. While it seemed to be a fun digital war experience, the army's limp tally sheet indicates the game didn't persuade a legion of young people desperate to get out of town after graduation to sign up . . .

Sharon Weinberger's Imaginary Weapons is another tale of military technology—one more disturbing than Halter's. It's a fascinating investigation into the investment in the hafnium bomb, a device that entranced the military because salesmen promised a weapon with the bang of an atomic bomb in the size of a golf ball. As with Halter's book, one defining feature of the story is the military's enthusiastic pursuit of the dubious.

Read all of it, by me for the Village Voice, here.

STUMBLING THROUGH THE WAR ON TERROR: News departs from results (as well as reality)

Astute and critical readers of news on national security in the war on terror know the absurdist's sham into which it has degenerated. They know that the national psyche has been unreasonably distorted by one searing day. Perhaps they are even suspicious they are not really more secure, just inundated with news and cant about security. And that when the details on security are revealed and thoroughly discussed, frequently the war on terror and the measures taken in our name, aren't even close to being of the benefit they're cracked up to be.

If you read this blog during the past seven days you know that while government terror experts and the newsmedia are convinced ricin is easy for Islamists to make and that it is seemingly only a matter of time before they poison Americans with it, it's not the entire picture or a particularly accurate one. You know that more Americans than jihadists, a lot more, have been arrested with castor beans and ricin in their sheds, homes and warrens.

You know that the US government made a prototype of an improvised cyanide-producing bomb in 2003, attributed to a jihadist threat that was and is generously described as ill-defined. While the government made the weapon in 2003 and distributed a photograph and explanation of it through the Department of Homeland Security via a .pdf file into cyberspace, no one has yet produced an actual working example of a jihadist-made cyanide-producing bomb that fit this advance billing.

Readers also have learned that in 2006, a jihadist diagram of the exact same weapon was published on the Internet. However, nobody from the U.S. government has seen it logical, reasonable or proper to explain in any public way which came first, our prototype or their diagram.

It is a legitimate question to answer, one that a rational person would think would be good for security. Would it not be good to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, for example, that American national security boffins did not produce a prototype of a weapon that does not yet physically exist in the hands of jihadists and spray its details into cyberspace, where it was subsequently copied by jihadists? It's a rhetorical question.

But, for the most part, such issues are unexamined. Americans and much of the newsmedia seem largely content to let the war on terror run itself, without much scrutiny.

So it comes as something of a happy surprise when someone, anyone, writes a piece that gets at the nasty fine results of our alleged national security procedures.

On July 21, James Bovard wrote in an op-ed on "The 'terrorist' batting average" [carried over from the Politech mailing list:

The federal government has inflated the ``No Fly List" to 200,000 names. But the list has nabbed more members of Congress than it has terrorists. US Senator Edward M. Kennedy and US Representative John Lewis have been inconvenienced by it, and anyone named David Nelson is likely to face a major interrogation each time he flies. Federal officials make it very difficult to correct the list, thus tormenting citizens who are guilty of nothing more than having a name resembling a name suspected sometime by some government official . . .

Federal officials have charged 10 times as many people in terrorist investigations as they convicted on terrorist-related charges. Bush declared a year ago that ``federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted." But only 39 people were convicted on crimes tied to terrorism or national security, a Washington Post analysis found.

Read the entirety of it here.

DICK DESTINY RECOMMENDS, AN OLD FRIEND LISTENS: Pat Travers' "PT Power Trio 2" rocks

Ha-ha. Claiming something to be rocking is easy. CBS's Supernova, Tommy Lee and Jason Newsted -- heh-heh - rock! As readers of this blog surely know. But not as much as Pat Travers, who doesn't need television and a network production budget to prove that he's not dead yet.

Pat Travers' "PT Power Trio 2" CD is something to have if you're still listening to hard rock in your old age. Pat Travers was a mainstay in the Dick Destiny jukebox during the 70's and 80's. The power blooz guitarist was a virtuoso of the electric six-string, a writer of note within the idiom, and a live performer of power, concussion and grace.

We have just about every one of his records that matters.

Records of classic rock covers have gained in popularity with artists over the past couple years. They've decided there's no stigma to performing the songs of their older rock heroes and the loyal core of fans they retain has no problem with it. Take for example, Def Leppard's "Yeah!" -- written of here. It's glammy version of the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset" is superb, the entirety the record making you remember why you fell in love with 70's British hard rock the first time around.

However, the hard rock record in my changer the most this past two months, the one that is purest of soul and undiluted in delivery, is Pat Travers' new one. It is part of producer Mike Varney's Shrapnel series in which known and semi-known guitarists in the idiom are given a plateful of classic rock hits and fan favorites to perform. Sometimes they work spectacularly -- the Pat Travers selection is one such -- and none have been less than fair.

Travers' CD is the second he's done for Varney. "PT Power Trio" was published a a couple years ago and was exceptional for its concentration on Texan hard rock, covering ZZ Top, Point Blank, and Stray Dog. Varney's taste in hard rock apparently is about identical with Dick Destiny's.

In any case, DD blog recommended Travers' "PT Power Trio" to Byron Goozemann, the Highway Kings' old second guitarist. Goozemann has catholic tastes in music and not much gets a rise out of him.

But for his Blog of Lose, he waxes enthusiastic on the new Pat Travers disc.

On a tip from Dick Destiny, I picked up the new Pat Travers Power Trio 2 record...er, CD. Most people might remember Pat Travers from his lone early 80's hit "Snortin Whiskey, Drinking Cocaine" tune where he hit his peak and did the arena circuit. So what does an aging ex-guitar hero offer today, you might ask? Absolutely killer versions of classic rock tunes, that's what.

Read the entirety of it in Snortin' cover tunes, drinking Oranges.

Service announcement: Blogger fought posts bitterly this morning. Users know to expect this about once a week. Fiendishly, it displayed cryptic and meaningless error messages while bafflingly publishing the early morning news in triplicate. It was a very bad dog.

BOMBS SOMEWHAT MORE POPULAR THAN RICIN: But jihadist in UK trial says he made the poison, anyway

In an usual story on an English terror trial now underway, evidence in the form of a videotaped confession in which an accused jihadist admitted to making and exploding a fertilizer bomb and "manufacturing" ricin was played to a jury in London's Old Bailey criminal court. The accused terrorist, along with compatriots, is in the dock for possession of about over half a ton of ammonium nitrate, a crime under England's Terrorism act. Salahudin Amin's confession was entered, according to the Daily Mail:

". . . [telling] police how [his colleagues] had received instruction on how to make an ammonium nitrate fertiliser bomb [while in Pakistan] and went on to claim that they had detonated "fertiliser explosive" in a nearby river.

In the first hour of the interview, Amin also said he had learned how to make the poison ricin and that he manufactured, but never used it, the court heard.

The confession to anti-terror police took place eight hours after he had been arrested on a British flight from Islamabad, Pakistan, as it arrived at Heathrow airport in 2003. No reaction from defense lawyers, if there was one, was included with the story.

Read the rest of it here.

BOMBS SOMEWHAT MORE POPULAR THAN RICIN: But jihadist in UK trial says he made the poison, anyway

In an usual story on an English terror trial now underway, evidence in the form of a videotaped confession in which an accused jihadist admitted to making and exploding a fertilizer bomb and "manufacturing" ricin was played to a jury in London's Old Bailey criminal court. The accused terrorist, along with compatriots, is in the dock for possession of about over half a ton of ammonium nitrate, a crime under England's Terrorism act. Salahudin Amin's confession was entered, according to the Daily Mail:

". . . [telling] police how [his colleagues] had received instruction on how to make an ammonium nitrate fertiliser bomb [while in Pakistan] and went on to claim that they had detonated "fertiliser explosive" in a nearby river.

In the first hour of the interview, Amin also said he had learned how to make the poison ricin and that he manufactured, but never used it, the court heard.

The confession to anti-terror police took place eight hours after he had been arrested on a British flight from Islamabad, Pakistan, as it arrived at Heathrow airport in 2003. No reaction from defense lawyers, if there was one, was included with the story.

Read the rest of it here.

US DIMWIT, NOT JIHADIST, FOUND WITH WMD IN SHED: Government says

Readers of this blog know that the newsmedia and government terror experts jones on the idea of jihadists with chemical or biological weapons, especially ricin, the poison found in castor seeds.

"It doesn't take a congressional hearing to figure that al Qaeda or associates are about 70 feet of the Rio Grande away from entering the United States and potentially turning Sea World or Disneyland into downtown Nasarif if they get clever with nerve agent or biofavorites like ricin, anthrax or serin [sic]," wrote a columnist for the Washington Times recently.

"Natural toxins such as ricin from castor beans or bacterial toxins would make very good bioweapons, particularly for clandestine or terrorist use: they are highly effective at very low doses, they are easy to produce . . . " added a press release last week from a couple American terrorism experts flogging their brilliance on the subject in an article from an obscure European journal.

And the simple Google search string of "al Zarqawi" and "ricin" returns this mind-numbing number of hits even though the dead terrorist was never discovered with actual castor seeds or purified ricin.

In the war on terror, we are crazy for jihadists and ricin.

But who is caught most often with castor seeds or the ground mash of them? Dimwit white Americans, that's who!

Every year the FBI or ATF arrest American men as reported here in The Jailbird's Bookshelf or here in Assorted Fiends, Nuts and Kooks.

There's not a jihadist among the crew of perpetrators. Just your plain stupid whitebread countrymen, almost always male, all infatuated with guns, explosives and survivalist literature, and angry at the Internal Revenue Service, or some government agency, or Jews, or the Pope, or the UN, or local officials, a spouse or former friend. Indeed, almost any setback from domestic modern life is enough to convince them of the need to turn their abodes into bunkers equipped with machine guns, pipe bombs and poisons. All of them dumber than bags of rocks.

Consider the case of William Michael Matthews of Davidson country, Tennessee, indicted last week on charges of possession of ricin, pipe bombs and firearms silencers.

" . . . ricin was found in a sealed baby food jar in a shed at Matthews' Nashville home, according to local and federal officials who searched the house [on May 31]," reported the Associated Press.

"Those who manufacture and possess weapons of mass destruction occupy a high priority with both the Department of Justice and this U.S. Attorney's office," said a prosecutor for the federal case.

Matthews' wife, Carole, "was the one who raised concerns about what was in the shed, and authorities said they found five gun silencers, three blasting caps and bomb-making materials."

The lesson: If you're going to manufacture WMDs, don't put them in your shed or your cabin in the woods, where the government will surely find them. Think of someplace else, like Iraq.

Why do Americans believe ricin is the go-to poison in pursuit of their personal revenge manias? It is because they have been told ricin is easy to make, again and again -- thousands of times -- in the media, in books, on television and in their favorite literature. It's the recommended poison of survivalists, gun nuts and terrorists, given certification by received American wisdom, a lore almost at the level of "An apple a day will keep the doctor away."

"Possessing biological agents for use as a weapon is punishable by up to life in prison and a $250,000 fine," reported the Associated Press, a statement American men found with castor mash have found to be essentially true. And careless talk always plays a part of their cases. "Associates of Matthews told authorities that he talked about ricin more than a year ago, but that he was not known to be associated with any terrorist organizations or other violent groups."


But how many people have been killed by terrorists armed with ricin since 9/11? (Hint: It's not a trick question.)

Zero.

FOR REASONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY, YOU MUST READ THIS AGAIN: Is the 2006 jihadist diagram of a cyanide bomb inspired by the photograph of the same bomb distributed worldwide in 2006?

Using our official GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow thinking-cap, we were astonished that no one saw fit to answer the question posed in the blog entry from the 12th, Improvised Cyanide Bomb, Part II.

And the question is this: Did the photograph and memo (pictured in the article on 12th and discussed in depth of the 27th of June here) describing the US-made prototype of an improvised cyanide munition spawn, directly or indirectly, the diagram of a jihadist improvised cyanide bomb distributed in 2006?

This is important gentle readers because we now know that in a surprising number of cases, terrorists have been inspired and motivated to obtain chemical and biological weapons by materials published in the American press and literature.

So we now ask the security-minded among you to return to the original article and review the photograph and diagram of the same weapon, separated by three years. And then ponder the question: Are we, if even only in part, making our own nightmares?

CHOOSING BETWEEN BARREL-SCRAPINGS: Rockstar: Supernova's consolation night

Wednesday nights on Rockstar: Supernova are reserved for the consolation race. The "consies," as we used to call them at the Schoentown and Fredericksburg, PA, dirt race tracks in the late 60's, were for the worst of the worst. If your car finished in the bottom three of all the qualifying races, you were swept into the "consy," where you had a chance to stay alive and qualify for the final.

The "consies" were for going to the concession stand for drinks and popcorn. No one gave a shit about the barrel-scrapers.

Logically, all three barrel-scrapers from Tuesday's Supernova should have been sent home. Their performances tonight were not good and the band, as usual, was right in there with them.

A thin blonde woman was sent home for the sin of wretchedness. She was obviously out of her element and her performance was energetic but pitilessly annoying. The crowd cheered, as usual.

You know the reason why.

This live audience is hand-picked and coached so it would cheer Winnie the Pooh singing "Back in Black" by AC/DC. Even the Beatles occasionally took crap in America.

When she was ejected she took the mike, gave an ineloquent speech about Supernova being a good experience for her, and cried. There's no crying allowed for being told you suck at rock and roll.

On Tuesday night, a kid who performed a James Taylor-ized version of a Nirvana tune should have been banished to the showers on the spot. His hair is wrong. He looks like a small boy scout adorned with modest jewelry, thin and without thud or weight, lacking in anything that could be said to resemble a rock and roll backbone, a style of hard pop music no reasonable person would believe he likes.

And there is no way he could possibly front a band of any hard rock neanderthals, let alone one with old members of Motley Crue and Metallica. Pathetic isn't really a strong enough word to describe him. But "pathetic" must also be shared with the producers and judges who've allowed him into the competition for the purpose of perpetrating a sham that works as dramatic spice.

So he did another Nirvana tune and clung to the branch extended him by the judges.

The centerpiece of the night was Dana, a big girl whose face wrinkles up in a pout when she's slightly dissed by her peers. They and the judges tell her they know she's beautiful and that she has a great voice. It's standard American meaningless flattery in place of a suitably humorous and supercilious putdown. Dana's voice is fair to good and she's a bit plump with baby fat, too husky and pink to be in with the members of Supernova, who -- by definition -- must be obsessed with image.

But Dana did have the horse sense to choose a funky 70's-style blooz rock hump to sing to and it's the first time Dick Destiny blog has heard choice in material that matched the professed theme of the TV show. Dana was acceptable in the way Bette Midler was a "rock singer" in the movie, "The Rose." Dick Destiny blog knows that smartest member of Supernova, and least well known, Gilby Clarke, also knows this. (Clarke actually has recently worked with people who do rock, producing Crash Kelly's new Electric Satisfaction, which you can read about here. )

Tommy Lee is dubbed the "hatchet man" because he delivers the bad news to the disqualified. He says how much he hates this and says "Hi guys" to the losers, over and over. He's naturally oily and packs all the imagination and elan of a good-looking mushroom in a pink fuzzy dinner jacket, which is what he was wearing.

Over and over the judges tell the audience, the cameras and the contestants that they want people to "bring it." As in "bring" the rock. As if you can manufacture "rock" which is something, many will tell you, being akin to trying to pick spilled mercury off the floor.

The ex-rockstar judges utter the "bring it" exhortation so much it sounds like half-time in a high school lockerroom where the team being hectored will find a way to snatch defeat from victory, no matter what. So do some warm-ups, boys and girls. Out on the track with you for extra laps and calisthenics. Get down and give us twenty push-ups, slimey scumbags, or shoot rock and roll steroids.

Dick Destiny blog nailed it on Monday here, so have a read if you're late to the demolition.

GUITARS, VICE AND RELIGION: ZZ TOP'S BIGGEST HAW-HAW-HAWs

No one had badder guitar tone than ZZ Top on Tres Hombres and Fandango. Oiled, fuzz burned, thick and twangy, with all these elements often in the same song, Billy Gibbon's geetar trademarked getting tight tales of varmints and worn hookers. Subsequently, Gibbons took on the sobriquet of the Reverend Billy G. in guitar mags, a man of lowdown culture and vice singing early on Rio Grande Mud, the band's second LP, about getting head from Brownie, or being hungover after dealing with the whiskey'n Mama.

The thought of damnation could have weighed on him slightly because by Tres Hombres bets were hedged, gospel religion rinsing away some of the sin. One was to follow Jesus cross-country before cans of dinner, Texas beer. Then the Reverend got down on bended knee after escaping death in a rolling steel cage tossed out of the back of a pickup truck. The master was God, so upon wasting out to La Grange and going down slow with Precious and Grace, the band sang about heaven, come seven eleven.

Naturally, as a kid, I didn't care about any of ZZ Top's relationship with the Lord. The sung messages from those parts were for enduring, the music fine almost everytime on the way to the next installment of Cap'n Billy's dirty Whizz-Bang. Thirty three years later it makes more sense to me, like my dad getting interested in attending church after a diagnosis of cancer at age fifty.

The Tops had asked if you'd heard about heaven at the end of Tres Hombres. A year later, at the beginning of Fandango, they were inquiring whether you'd heard the word about the homeless man's fortified wine, Thunderbird. Dusty Hill's "Jailhouse Rock" was maniacal, but after about a minute of Gibbons coveting his neighbor's wife in "Back Door Love Affair," the wheels fell off for the rest of the side. The "Long Distance Boogie" medley wasn't about rock 'n' roll revival as much as it was repeating the technique Top learned at auctions.

The second side, on the other hand, was as close to perfect as boogie rock got. Getting sightless at the Balinese room in Galveston, the virtues of a "puta," another Mexican whore, who spreads her wings for you and "Tush," since happily slaughtered by everybody who plays or has played rock and roll in bars.

After one more great album, Tejas, ZZ Top would sacrifice their faces to sunglasses and twirling their old man beards (except for drummer Frank).

On the back of the of the new deluxe remastered edition of Hombres you can see teeth and genuine smiles. On the CMT channel about a year or so ago, all that was on display were good clothes and the smirks of royalty. The iron grip on image hasn't relaxed for decades. Billy Gibbons now sounds like a Texas politician, claiming in the biography for "Chrome, Smoke & Barbecue," the ZZ Top box set, that the band's apex predator get-blasted-and-act-irresponsible song, "Arrested for Driving While Blind" is "certainly one of earliest expressions of encouraging the selection of a designated driver." What a dry sense of humor.

The bonus cuts on the new deluxe editions of these two albums are live and will come as a surprise to witnesses of MTV Top or the Milli Vanilli'd performance the band phoned in at the Super Bowl a few years back.

In the mid-70's, ZZ Top live was lashed together with bailing wire, alternately astoundingly in the pocket or on the verge of blowing apart because the trio had trouble hearing each other over the combined trio din. "Tush" sounds like a slog over a sand dune; "La Grange" erupts when Gibbons crushes the sound system with a barrage of stage hog licks.

ZZ Top hauled turkey vultures, rattlesnakes and a steer as props into the Philly Spectrum on The Worldwide Texas Tour of 1976 and while the rockin' blues were just edged out by opener Blue Oyster Cult's built to military specification collimated laser, it was leagues better than anything cash money will buy now.

WET NOODLE HACK-ROCK AND A GOOD GRIMACE: Rockstar Supernova staggers on

The first thing that comes to mind after watching the wrap-up of mostly wet-noodle hack-rock on tonight's Rock Star: Supernova is: If people can vote as many times as they like for any contestant, why isn't there a slot for voting to send everyone home?

It's rhetorical. There'd be no show. A crew of wiseacres would find a way to use it to derail this limp game.

The band was not rocking, as usual. Early in the show everyone stood around while some lame nob turned in a James Taylor-ized version of a Nirvana tune, a band none of the Supernova ex-rock star Tuesday-night-TV-stars would be expected to like much, anyway. The crowd cheered because it would cheer a plateful of singing maggots.

At one point there was a promise from one of the contestants, distinguishable from the rest by an Australian accent, that -- next week -- "the crap" would be rocked out of it." Next week?

During the broadcast the camera lit on judge Dave Navarro for a second, showing him slumped over, head down on arm, before darting away.

Jason Newsted was much less the ersatz USMC D.I. But he had to get onstage, grimace and ram into the designated singer, who got extra points for not losing it, during a random metal treatment of the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." Newsted's still the most hard man in the place, superb with the grimace, much like Bill Shatner was early in his career. You know you want to head butt someone, Jayson, so just do it and leave them bloody.

The so-called super-house band tried out Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" and delivered none of the descending slash of the original's Fogerty-propelled riff. So the singer was shelled for being stiff. And at one point, during the bar-band anthem of the early 70's, Free's "All Right Now," it sounded like the drummer was trying to stuff double-bass drum rolls into the turnarounds.

One girl took on a Helen Reddy-look and sound and was rewarded for the sheer stupefaction factor. And the telecast was closed by 90-seconds of sturm-and-drang from a lady with the look of the wicked witch of the west.

One of the fundamental problems of the show is the poor selection of material for what amounts to a hard rock jukebox. As with last season's show, at some point they will record a CD of select performances.

Now, hard rock jukebox hits performed by ringers can be fun. But the song selection for Supernova is either poor, poorly matched to performer, somewhat poorly performed by both contestants and hack support band, or a weak tea of all of it.

The members of Supernova come from hard rock and metal -- late-70's to early 90's style -- and all that broad style entails. That means power metal, some heavy blooz rock by bands which charted but few remember now, AC/DC, Black Sabbath/Ozzy, arena boogie and southern rock.

And the show brings little of it, with the small part that is thematically right performed with none of the original vigor, that not entirely being the the fault of contestants who don't identify with the music.

LEARN TO ROCK, BE A ROCKSTAR: How novel!

If you haven't seen it on television yet, keep avoiding Rock Star 2: Supernova. Upper middle class doofs portray it as authentic. It is authentic, if your idea of authentic is going onstage with a perfect backing band of hacks, and a perfect sound system, in a crowded southern California theatre with people who would scream and cheer if you threw dogfood at them.

For example, this idiotic cheerleading from Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune:

It’ll take weeks before the winner of CBS’ “Rock Star: Supernova” is revealed, but one thing is for sure right now: The house band rocks.

As part of the Television Critics Association press tour here, writers were taken to a “Rock Star” taping on Sunday at CBS’ studio complex in Los Angeles . . . [Wow!]

More impressive than the antics of [so-and-so and so-and-so] was the precision and power of the house band’s playing. Their taut, mesmerizing version of Stone Temple Pilot’s 'Plush' was, to these ears, better than the original.

Finding musicians who could play with both passion and professionalism was the goal of the show’s producers . . . 'They had to be able to play anything any time under any circumstances,' [a director] said after the taping. “We had to be able to wake them up at three in the morning and say, `Play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ in the key of F’ and they had to be able to do it.”

Still, “the last thing we wanted” was studio musicians or professionals who lacked conviction, Lieberman said.

“I went to music school myself. You meet a lot of people in music school who can play anything but they have no conviction in how they play,” Lieberman said.

Yeah, yeah, whatever you say, Bub.

Of course, "rocking" -- try to say it without gagging -- is subjective. It's a descriptor that comes easy, costing nothing and requiring no credibility to dispense.

Dick Destiny blog, ha-ha, rocks -- on many levels. We know this because we've done journalism on rock 'n' roll bands from garages to dives to the arenas for over twenty years. Dick Destiny knows it when he sees and hears it. And he knows the fakes, the phonies and the pretenders.

Nothing in Maureen Ryan's writing, here, rocks. Does she look like she rocks? C'mon, now, Ryan looks like a Mom. My Mom knew dogcrap about rock.

But it's the script features and entertainment writers like in the big media. "This band really stinks and all the stars and contestants are fundamentally nauseating" isn't something editors like to see in print. Too clipped, too cynical, too upsetting to gentle readers who hate criticism.

It's the truth, though. Tommy Lee, the drummer of Motley Crue, is the biggest star. He's overexposed on reality TV. Everyone knows his face even if they don't know his music. Old news about his problems with rage and drink, kicking the stuffing out of photographers, slapping his ex-wife around, going to jail and phoning into 911 that a kid drowned in his swimming pool -- all worldwide celebrity news and Schadenfreude over his rocker persona as uncontrollable idiot wore Lee out in public. Nincompoops, of which there are no shortage, find him entertaining.

Also on tap is Jason Newsted, ex-bass player for Metallica. On Rock Star 2, Newsted reminds you of a high school phys-ed teacher doing a really poor man's R. Lee Ermey in "Full Metal Jacket."

Newsted scowls and frowns. He shoves Tommy Lee toughly away when the Motley Crue drummer gets too friendly. He's a hard man, stiff in bearing and mien, muscles bulging as he browbeats contestants with criticism and meaningless exhortations, contestants so desperate to preserve their time on primetime, they lack the spine to lunge across the intervening space and connect a fist to his nose.

Newsted used to be a power drunk in the biggest heavy metal band in the world. Now he's a gruff petty scold, incapable of Sgt. Hartman's ugly and sadistic wit. Nope, you'd never catch Newsted saying what he really feels, like "You slimy scumbag!" or, more apropos to the youth of the contestants, "Your days of finger-banging old Mary Jane Rotten-Crotch through her purty pink panties are over!" Since sexuality is flexible in rock 'n' roll, the 50/50 mix of girls and boys among the contestants do not render the observation obsolete.

Rock Star 2 asked me -- and its audience -- to sustain the conceit that the talent being auditioned is uncommon. That might work on a lay audience but it's a no-sale to anyone with experience, eyes, ears and a shred of common sense. Hundreds of classic rock 'n' roll bands make their own CDs. This results in an endless weekly flood spewing into the Internet record store, CD Baby. Guess what? The best of them are better than anything on this TV show. In fact, reading the CD Baby website is more entertaining and less intelligence-insulting than watching CBS's Rock Star 2.

What Rock Star 2 is more in-line with is the phenomenon of Rock Camp. Rock Camp is a child or an adult's chance to start pretending to be a rockstar, the first step in becoming one. Like Rock Star 2, today's Rock Camps usually have down-on-their-luck or former rockstars as counselors. Rock Camp is a middle-class thing for parents to send their kids to. Instead of shipping them off to something quasi-military, like I was for a couple weeks every summer, it's to show a kinder, gentler humor toward your children. Every child has the right to rock and have their parents look on with pride!

Take this recent press release:

Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls in NYC!

With last year's band names ranging from "hellish relish" & "coco chanel & the zeppelinettes", we are beyond excited to find out what emerges out of this years starry eyed little campers.

Rock Camp '06 is located @ Brooklyn Friends School.

Session 1 will take place Monday, July 17 - Friday, July 21, 9 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.The

Session 1 final concert will be on Saturday, July 22, at NY Society For Ethical Culture
Special Session for adult women, Ladies Rock Camp will take place July 28 - 30

http://www.williemaerockcamp.org/photos.html

Even the Mom's aren't left out! If you are an adult, lame with two left feet, a fat ass and a wart or two on your face, you too can be taught to rock.

Here's Dick Destiny's proposal for a Rock Camp that really rocks -- as in real-life. (Good for kids, even better for adults who need a mental cold shower rather than a middle-aged indulgence.)

When you arrive, you're given an instrument like the one old-timey parents used to get their kids, the cheap kind aimed at putting a damper on your enthusiasm for rocking. That means a slave-labor no-name brand guitar made in China, sold in a cardboard box, with bad electronic internals and fretwork so lousy it hurts your hands. It will also refuse to stay in tune.

When you arrive, you'll be able to pick bandmates from a group with equally bad instruments. You'll also be given a choice of singers who can't sing. Maybe you'll get a drummer, maybe not.

When you play in the garage, because that's where garagebands play, you won't have a nice sound system. Your singer who can't sing will have to put his microphone into your guitar amp. This is a good thing, as no one will be able to hear him or her. However, the singer who can't sing has a fifty percent chance of becoming enraged and quitting before he actually learns to sing. Then you'll have to sing.

You'll get one music lesson a day. During the lesson, you'll learn to play music that has nothing to do with rock, like old television or movie themes. But you won't be required to practice this music between lessons, so that's a plus. You can go to the swimming pool.

After you've practiced in the "garage" twice, in the summer heat, always with the door closed, a counselor will flip a coin. If it's heads, he'll check on you, playing the part of a parent. You'll be told you're too loud, or you curse too much, or you're disturbing the neighbors, and you will be forbidden from playing in the "garage." If that happens, you'll be sent home without learning a song.

If the result of the coin flip is tails, you won't be sent home but you'll be told your music is the work of "Satan." If you brought CDs to learn songs off of to Rock Camp, they'll be thrown out. If it's an iPod, the counselor will confiscate it, tell you it's going to be given to a more deserving child, someone without clean clothes or nice things, and then thrown out.

If you cry at this rotten treatment, you're sent home. There's no crying in Rock Camp.

When Rock Camp is over, there is no final concert. You're sent home. You'll have to book your own show, kid. No one wants to hear it. Put your MP3's on MySpace and stop bothering me.

You also won't want to miss: Wet Noodle Hack-Rock & a Grimace.

GUILTY OF BEING NOT GUILTY (continued): 'Guantanamo-like' treatment dogs the exonerated from London ricin trial

Last week, Dick Destiny blog discussed the plight of one man, exonerated in the London ricin ring terror trial in 2005, as revealed in the UK publication, the New Statesman. And you can read it