02.02.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 2:44 pm by George Smith
Soligenix, a small company from the old Alliance for Biosecurity, recently acquired about six hundred thousand dollars from a New Jersey government state tax division function. Essentially, it looks like an accounting trick installed by the state to keep poorly-performing companies alive for a little while.
In the last ten years Soligenix hasn’t brought anything to market. And its main claim to funding has been for development of a ricin vaccine, called RiVax.
There is no demand or need for a ricin vaccine except perhaps among other researchers who work with pure ricin.
More recently it has also hitched its dray to anthrax vaccine manufacturing — another area of endeavor where the taxpayer is a guaranteed buyer.
From a press release:
Soligenix has received $574,000 in funding in a non-dilutive financing through the State of New Jersey’s technology business tax certificate transfer program, the company said Thursday …
The funds boost the company’s cash position to $6.2 million, or $0.028 per share, with no debt or preferred stock outstanding.
Soligenix expects the cash to last until the third-quarter of 2013, it said …
The technology business tax certificate transfer program allows approved and unprofitable biotech companies to sell their unused net operating loss carryovers (NOLs) in addition to unused research and development tax credits for at least 80 percent of the value of the tax benefits to “unaffiliated” profitable corporate taxpayers in the State of New Jersey … This allows biotech businesses to turn their tax losses and credits into cash proceeds to fund additional research and development, buy equipment or facilities, or cover other allowable expenses …
In September the company’s stock went virtually to zero (from a high that wasn’t so great) when one of its other products called orBec, failed in clinical trials.
Trading below a nickel, right axis.
More recently the company performed what appears to be another accounting trick in order to boost stock price.
From the Times of Trenton newspaper:
Local pharmaceutical developer Soligenix sought yesterday to shore up its stock price by doing a 1 for 20 reverse split, effectively converting 20 shares into 1, ending at yesterday’s market close with a price of less than a dollar.
The company’s shares have been in a long, slow decline.
This is not precisely true. Soligenix’s stock price went from being worth very little to worth almost nothing overnight, according to the graph.
Soligenix was formerly known as DOR Biopharma. The name change never helped.
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02.01.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 1:38 pm by George Smith
Today I point you to an article in the Western Farm Press on the attempted revival of the castor industry in the US. Castor oil has value in industry but in the Seventies it died here for reasons having to do with price. It was produced much more cheaply overseas and today India owns most of the business.
Castor mills existed in the US and the plant was cultivated in Texas and other places. No significant hazard was associated with its growth and use.
Since castor was cultivated and milled, trucks carrying castor seed and the mash of them traveled the roads of the land.
From this blog, in 2008:
[Castor seed oilcake] and seeds containing ricin would have had to travel the roads of the country. If one searches further, reference to it can be found in municipal codes for the transporting of “hazardous materials” via trucking. Castor seed oilcake [was] a material that [did] not require a 24-hour emergency phone hotline listed on the shipping manifest. In the Texas city of Laredo’s municipal code, the materials, referred to as “castor bean,” “castor meal,” “castor flake,” and “castor pomace” are things deemed of the same hazard, or lack of it, as “dry ice,” “fish meal,” “fish scrap,” “battery powered equipment,” “battery powered vehicle,” “electric wheelchair” and “refrigerating machine.”
The war on terror changed everything. Good science, common sense and a regard for the value in history were tossed out for the equivalent of old wive’s tales, a belief in rubbish minted by the US extremist right in the Eighties, and very bad counter-terror forecasting.
Castor seeds, because they contain about five percent protein — most of which is assumed to be ricin — were deemed easy to make into a weapon of mass destruction. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
However, it became the received wisdom. It hasn’t mattered that no terrorists have ever successfully used ricin. And it has not mattered that there has only been one instance, ever, (one I’m not going to mention because it’s cited ad nauseam, anyway) of the use of ricin in a state-instigated assassination.
So any attempt to revive castor cultivation in the US immediately runs up against belief from the war on terror and the homeland security apparatus.
An article published today, by BusinessWeek, entitled “Biological Attack Threat Cited as Pentagon Bolsters Defenses,” illustrates the problem.
First, the article is based on no actual evidence other than the now bog standard claims about what is easy for terrorists and supposition.
And it furnishes another piece of received wisdom, repeated thousands of times since 9/11, even though it’s not actually true:
“I would put ricin at the top of the list” of threats, Kelsey Gregg of the [Federation of American Scientists] said. “You can get a deadly amount of it pretty easily.”
What you can get is an amount of castor powder, or the grind of castor seeds. And it contains some ricin but not quite enough to make a weapon of mass destruction although it has occasionally been used in domestic poisoning attempts — one, I believe — in the last decade. It’s put into food in such instances and, even then, often the victim stubbornly refuses to die.
And any larger purchases or attempts to get bagloads of castor seeds in the US are now monitored to a certain extent.
In any case, no terrorists have ever produced purified ricin. None. It hasn’t been done.
And that’s because it isn’t the elementary procedure lay people, and this includes most counter-terror experts in the employ of the US government, believe it to be.
The idea that ricin was easy to make comes solely from the extremist survivalist right in the United States. This group had authors with names like Kurt Saxon and Maxwell Hutchkinson, individuals who put their notional ricin recipes, sloppy inexact procedures for simply grinding and degreasing castor seeds, into pamphlets and books published by the fringe press in this country.
But after 9/11, the US national security apparatus, along with the mainstream media, worked the angle that al Qaeda could whip up anything dangerous with very little effort.
And one component of the hysteria always contained assertions that chemical and biological weapons were easy to make from recipes available from the Internet in seconds.
These recipes were all descendants of the trash printed by the US neo-Nazi/survivalist right. However, that material had gone around the world and been translated in documents subsequently found in hideouts in Kabul and Kandahar after the US overthrow of the Taliban.
But I’ve wandered far from my promise to point to the article on tentative steps toward a renewal of castor agriculture in the US, published in the Western Farm Press.
A few excerpts from it should serve to illustrate the problems:
In a time when bio-security and foreign oil dependency share the spotlight as major issues facing the nation, it comes as no surprise that the idea of growing castor on U.S. soil and extracting castor oil for biofuels and industrial use is a growing controversy with supporters on both sides of the question: Would the benefits outweigh the risks?
On one hand there is little or no commercial castor production in the U.S. Nearly all castor oil used in the U.S. is imported from India, China and Brazil. But because of its high seed oil content, castor has tremendous potential as an oilseed crop in North America, especially in parts of the Southwest. The increasing demand and potential use of castor oil in the production of specialty chemicals, biodiesel, and RFS2 renewable fuel has generated considerable interest by several companies in developing commercial castor oil production in this country. Since castor grows well on marginal land, it represents an alternative crop suitable for production in select areas of Texas.
On the other hand, castor production comes with a reputation, largely related to the fear of growing a potentially toxic crop. Ricin, a protein toxin found only in the endosperm of castor seed, can represent up to 5 percent of the meal weight remaining after oil extraction. It could pose a threat if not carefully isolated and controlled as there is a concern the meal could be refined and used as a bioterrorism agent.
“With castor seed producing as much as 50 percent oil and its ability to grow productively on marginal land, it represents a crop that could address a growing demand for castor oil. India virtually controls the global market now, and there is potential for domestic production,” reports Dr. Calvin Trostle, associate professor and research scientist at Texas A&M AgriLife in Lubbock.
“Castor production will play a major role for many years to come,” agrees Dr. Dick Auld, oilseed crop specialist and research scientist at Texas Tech University. “At one time some 70,000 acres in Texas were dedicated to castor farming. But when prices fell in the 1970s interest faded, and concerns over ricin and the potential for contamination of food crops overshadowed interest for its return.”
Castor/ricin contamination of food crops is not something that seems to concern that part of the world that still uses it for bulk oil and fertilizer production. India, China and Brazil simply do not care what beliefs the United States has twisted itself into accepting because of the war on terror.
Yet, the agricultural scientists working on the worthy idea to bring this industry back must act like ricin toxicity is a substantial obstacle. For practical purposes it is but this is far more due to the nature of the time we live in than any real need to come up with new methods and plans for growing and milling castor plants.
It wasn’t this way in the past. It isn’t anywhere else, either. And in the city of Laredo they once did not worry much about a spilled truck load of castor mash or castor seeds.
Clean it up, sweep it to the side of the road, let the sun and weather take care of it, whatever. But it in no way merits fear like a potential weapon of mass destruction.
“[Calvin Trostle] adds that researchers are recommending stringent management and control measures, such as dedicating combines to castor-only applications, taking safeguard in transportation and storage of castor seed to eliminate contamination and restrictions on growing food crops on fields used for castor,” reads the Western Farm Press near the end.
“Extraction And Characterization Of Castor Seed Oil” is the title of a paper published by researchers at Rufus Giwa Polytechnic, a college in Nigeria.
In the United States this procedure, which here is presented for the isolation and analysis of the chemical properties of castor oil, would be considered a ricin recipe because it also yields de-greased castor mash.
Indeed, the crime one is convicted of when caught pounding castor seeds in the US is that of taking a significant step toward the making of a chemical or biological weapon. And everyone who has been brought up on such a charge, or a related one in the last decade, has been sent over.
“The castor meal or cake is mainly used as fertilizer, this is because it is unsuitable as an animal feed because of the presence of toxic protein called ricin and toxic allergen often referred to as CBA (castor bean allergen),” write the Rufus Giwa authors. “However, it is noteworthy that none of the toxic components is carried into the oil.”
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01.30.12
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 2:15 pm by George Smith
Sent over in the UK for going to Pakistan, waving a gun, having the wrong name and downloading ricin recipes that don’t work, from the Internet.
The Guardian:
A man who kept a recipe for a deadly poison and documents about how to make bombs has been jailed for two years and three months.
Asim Kausar, 25, from Bolton, Greater Manchester, kept the information on a computer memory stick that contained details about the toxin ricin, assassination and torture techniques and instructions for making improvised explosive devices …
The information came to light only after Kausar’s family suffered a burglary, when Kauser’s father handed the memory stick to police so officers could view CCTV images of the break-in recorded on the device.
Kauser told police he had downloaded the information out of “curiosity and a thirst for knowledge” …
The prosecution accepted the defendant had not disseminated the information and had not put it to any practical use. There was also no evidence to suggest Kausar had any links to terrorists.
Sentencing him, Judge Andrew Gilbart QC said: “I accept that all of this material is available on the internet and can be bought from retailers such as Amazon and I accept some of it is out of date.
“But that makes them no less dangerous or any less useful to a person committing an act of terrorism.”
Riel Karmy-Jones, prosecuting, said the defendant had “scoured the internet” between January 2009 and his arrest last year for information on the mujahideen. The information downloaded ran into thousands of pages …
Police also seized Kauser’s mobile phone, which contained a photograph of him posing with a rifle. The image was believed to have been taken in Pakistan.
Previously — These Documents Get You Jailed
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 1:44 pm by George Smith
From the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, a laboratory designed to fight bioterror has no bioterror to fight.
Because the only bioterror was American bioterror defense industry bioterror. In the entire decade.
So there’s make work setting up test exercises for things which, in all likelihood will never happen. And moving into police work, which in the case mentioned by the newspaper, means helping to chase around those people selling and smoking the new kind of synthetic pot called bath salts.
Anyway you look at it, it’s trivial applications for trivial problems deceptively advertised as things bigger and more meaningful.
Please don’t take the bioterror funding away! See, it’s good for something! Like protecting the populace from synthetic Demi Moore dope and the odd intestinal illness that shows up every couple of years.
In the meantime, nationwide austerity forces the lay-offs of something one does need everyday — teachers.
From the Los Angeles Times:
When Jeffery H. Moran goes to work each day, he swipes his security badge, passes into an airtight chamber, opens a bombproof door and enters a lab full of deadly toxins.
As chief of the counter-terrorism laboratory at the Arkansas Department of Health — one of 62 such federally funded labs in the country — he heads two dozen chemists who are on constant alert for the release of pestilence or poisons in the United States.
Armed with $2 million worth of new equipment, Moran concocts gruesome tests to keep his team sharp. He has laced samples of baby formula with lethal ricin. Poured rat poison into water bottles. Tainted blood with cyanide gas …
Using a counter-terrorism lab to test for synthetic marijuana is the latest sign of how a multibillion-dollar national infrastructure built to detect or respond to chemical or biological attacks over the last decade has adapted to the lack of any actual attacks.
Stewart Baker, former head of policy at the Department of Homeland Security, said he wasn’t surprised that Little Rock’s high-tech lab is helping police ferret out potheads.
“Otherwise they would be like the Maytag repairman, just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring,” Baker said.
The only place ricin has ever been put in food, excluding one case in which a husband tried to kill his wife and failed, in the last decade is in government labs. And the only place pure ricin exists is also in government labs, or private sector research labs funded by the taxpayer.
No terrorist has ever produced pure ricin.
And no terrorists have successfully used cyanide gas bombs.
Edward Hammond is the only critic polled by the Times. For those of us who have followed the issues over a decade, Hammond was known for the Sunshine Project, a watchdog agency for bioterror research, one that worked quite well.
“Pork, pork, pork, pork, pork,” Hammond told the Los Angeles newspaper. “These state departments of health have become addicted to extra federal bioterrorism dollars.”
And Hammond is on the money.
About a week ago a newspaper in the Pacific northwest ran a news brief on a local laboratory that had taken bioterrorism funds to finance testing of oysters for marine vibrios.
Outside the Gulf coast states, the only marine vibrio that causes foodborne illness is known as Vibrio parahaemolyticus.
The Los Angeles Times newspaper mentions the lab in part of its piece:
In California, the Humboldt County Public Health laboratory spent federal bioterrorism funds to buy a DNA-sequencing machine. The lab began using the device this month to test for bacteria in oysters harvested off the state’s coastline.
“We don’t just purchase the equipment and it sits in the corner,” said Jeremy Corrigan, who manages the lab and is state bioterrorism coordinator for Northern California. “I use it for dual purposes.”
The initial story on the lab, which ran in the Times-Standard of Eureka, CA, informed:
Humboldt’s vibrant oyster farming industry and bioterrorism funds have allowed the county’s public health laboratory to deploy a cutting-edge process to test for shellfish contamination.
The laboratory is now the only public facility in California to utilize a molecular process — known as polymerase chain reaction — for oyster testing. The only other laboratory to perform this type of work is a private lab in San Diego …
According to public health, two cases of the intestinal infection caused by virbrio parahaemolyticus were reported in 2007, but it is unclear if they were linked to oyster consumption. No cases have been reported in the past four years.
Dale said the company has done quality control for oysters and water as a precaution. About 70 percent of California’s oysters are grown in Humboldt Bay.
Although there has never been a positive result, a recent false positive illustrates the streamlined convenience of the new process, he said.
The LA Times piece did not mention how minor the nature of the threat was. And it is baffling that the only result, one false positive, could be peddled as something which is actually fulfilling a need.
“Last year, people who smoked Spice or other fake pot variations made 6,955 calls to poison control centers across the country, more than twice the number of calls in 2010,” wrote the Times reporter, in trying to make the case that identifying bath salts synthetic dope is more than a trivial business.
Some statistics from the Bulletin of Cannabis Reform:
Number of estimated marijuana users, nationally, 2007: 25.2 million
Number of estimated marijuana users, California, 2007: 3.3 million
Number of arrests for marijuana use, California, 2007: 74,024
Percentage expression of poison calls on bath salts usage relative to total number of marijuana users in US: 0.000275992063
“What are you people? On dope?” — Mr. Hand, Fast Times at Ridgemont High
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01.03.12
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 1:26 pm by George Smith
Since the war on terror the samizdat literature of America’s neo-Nazi/survivalist extreme right has meant collateral damage in surprising places.
From just before the holidays, an old tale from Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook (printed by the defunct American publisher of notoriously repugnant crap, Loompanics) built around a bit of fact about rosary peas, inconvenienced a tourist attraction in Cornwall, England, called the Eden Project. Bad publicity and embarrassment was the immediate symptom, as it always is with anything even remotely connected to America’s special brand of paranoid underground literature on how to strike your enemies down and overthrow the government.
From the Daily Mail newspaper:
An alert has gone out for the recall of thousands of beaded bracelets sold in tourist attractions after it emerged they are made from a highly toxic seed.
The Eden Project in Cornwall, which sold 2,800 in a year, is one of 36 retailers urging customers to return the red and black wrist charms.
They are made from the Jequirity bean – a deadly seed of the plant abrus precatorious which contains the toxin abrin, a controlled substance under the Terrorism Act.
Rosary peas have been around forever. And despite fear in the US and UK security apparati, they have inconveniently declined to kill anyone in the last decade. Even though they are routinely sold on eBay.
However, because of The Poisoner’s Handbook, rosary peas — and the small amount of abrin inside their very hard shell, have been treated like castor seeds.
In other words: Ahhhhh, danger!
The Daily Mail reported that the Eden Project had been selling the wristlets made of jequirity beans for a year. With no known intoxications.
Now, if readers turn to page 8 in The Poisoner’s Handbook:
The phytotoxin from precatory beans, also known as jequirity beans, is very similar to ricin and and the extraction process listed … may be used for both …
Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads …
If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can be easily modified to kill.
Obtain, if possible, some acupuncture needles or grind down regular needles as thin as possible while still being strong enough to puncture the jequirity bean coating. Wearing leather gloves, very carefully about a dozen minute holes in each bean on a rosary. When you are finished, spray the string of beads with DMSO … which will dissolve and carry the abrin, and allow to dry.
As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin; the worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse, etc.
These items make wonderful presents for the more religious target.
We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.
Marvelous stuff, that.
Keep in mind that the only stupid people here are those who believe anything in Hutchkinson’s book, having secured it or copies of its ‘information’ for edification and/or training. And over the years there have been hundreds, even tens of thousands of such people, many — surprisingly — in government and national security work.
As with ricin, which is listed next in this thin volume, one sees the obsession — carried into the neo-Nazi/survivalist far right — with the idiotic idea that dimethyl sulfoxide can make ricin, and by extension — abrin from rosary peas, into a contact poison.
Which is rubbish.
Hutchkinson’s book was turned into digital copy and distributed in anarchy files on underground bulletin board systems in the US. They were part of what was considered a forbidden lore. In that world, having access to it meant you were special and clever, when — in reality — just the opposite, you were a fucked-up anti-social dullard, was a more accurate assessment.
Later, these files were migrated to the Internet.
In this way Hutchkinson’s poison book, torn into fragments, traveled around the world. Eventually, its poison recipes also found their way into al Qaeda/jihadi documents, just in time for the War on Terror.
If you’re found with recipes from the book in the US, along with a few castor seeds or, perhaps, the makings of a silencer or pipe bomb, they’re part of the evidence that will send you to the pen.
In England, jihadi documents containing items bowdlerized from Hutchkinson’s notes are treated as things deemed likely to be of use in terrorism. As such, they’re considered seditious and, again, if you’re caught in the wrong circumstances or religion, enough to have you imprisoned.
“In Trinidad in the West Indies the brightly coloured seeds are strung into bracelets and worn around the wrist or ankle to ward off jumbies or evil spirits,” reads the Daily Mail newspaper.
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11.27.11
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 11:17 pm by George Smith
The title of this news items tells everything you need to know:
Oklahoma legislators want castor beans to be outlawed
Fast cut to the link and the first thing seen is the standard chubbish white guys in suits. Minor empirical proof the US began rewarding the useless and nasty decades ago.
The piece reads (it’s almost too intelligence insulting to believe):
Castor beans do not immediately leap to mind when one considers the state’s most serious problems.
And yet bills outlawing the production and transportation of castor beans were among the first filed in anticipation of next year’s legislative session.
Castor beans, being 50 percent or more oil, are the among the most promising biofuel crops.
They are also the source of one of nature’s deadliest poisons …
But state Sen. Mike Schulz, R-Altus, and Rep. Dale DeWitt, R-Braman, did not have terrorism or espionage in mind when they filed their castor bean bills this fall. They were concerned about a more direct threat – inadvertent contamination of the food supply.
“Prohibiting castor beans may not be something we want for the long-range,” DeWitt said. “But until we have more research into ways of lowering the ricin levels, we have to be very careful with it.”
Although castor plants are fairly common as ornamentals, their commercial production is virtually unknown in Oklahoma. With growing interest in them for biofuels, however, wheat growers and other crop producers became concerned about a burst of speculative cultivation spreading castor and ricin residue into fields, planting and harvesting equipment, storage bins and trucks and railroad cars used for transporting grain.
This is intellectual failure on so many levels it is difficult to know where to begin in explaining the stupidity of it.
At some time in the nation’s past — a few decades back — castor was a crop in the US. I have written about this before. None of it sticks. Journalists, politicians, and American alleged terror experts pay no attention to historical precedent or fact. If there are agricultural history and science books in libraries or old newspaper articles and stories to be consulted, they are all discounted and discarded for the apparent reason that people are now too lazy and crippled to be bothered to read them.
As an agricultural resource castor posed no real problem. It does not in those places around the world where it still is a crop. And castor mills in the United States were not poison dumps. People were not felled by wandering castor seeds in their morning cereal.
Castrol, a famous name in lubricant manufacturing and motorcycle racing, was not known for directly or indirectly killing anyone.
It is no longer a surprise to find that people around the world find Americans to be dangerously incompetent. Ignorance and the reward of it are now commonly seen at malevolent levels in this country.
Here’s a brief news item, republished here at DD blog, on the old timey production and milling of castor in the United States (the excerpt is from an article published in the newspaper of Plainview, TX in 2010):
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,” Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.”
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
Bayonne, N.J.-based Baker Castor Oil Company already was a major importer and processor when it embarked on a plant breeding program in the late 1950s centered in Plainview in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Baker needed a dependable domestic supply of castor beans since the government was building up its strategic reserve,” Anderson explained. “Baker at the time was having to primarily rely on what was being harvested by hand in Brazil and India from plants growing wild.”
Not only were there concerns about production and price volatility, the imported oil had a tendency to turn rancid during transport, Anderson said. A domestic source would reduce transportation costs while substantially improving quality. And, Plainview was a logical choice since the harvested crop could be shipped to crushing facilities on both East and West Coasts.
Amazing. Harvested castor seeds were crushed daily. And nobody died!
Obviously, in Oklahoma you can be … I don’t even wanna get into it.
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11.17.11
Posted in Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 8:36 am by George Smith
There’s not a defense lawyer in the US capable of arguing a client/defendant out of jail when ricin and accusations of terrorism planning are the central matters.
Never been done. Everyone has eventually gone to prison. And those in jail generally always stay there until trial.
Judges are not swayed once the word “ricin” is uttered. Juries pay no attention to arguments about the relative harmlessness of a handful of castor seeds.
From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Citing concerns that the four North Georgia men accused in a plot to bomb federal buildings and disperse the toxin ricin may still intend to harm federal authorities, U.S. Magistrate Court Judge Susan Cole denied bond to the defendants late Wednesday.
If she released them on bond, “I think there is a concern they would not be prevented access to instruments of harm,” Cole said. She also echoed prosecutors’ contention that their arrests are likely to have heightened the “ill-will” the men feel toward the government.
Defense attorneys for each of the men intend to appeal Cole’s decision, they said.
“It’s very disappointing. I thought we presented a good case and I don’t believe he’s a danger to the community,” said Jeff Ertel, who is representing Thomas.
In a hearing that stretched over the course of three days, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBurney said the men — two of whom are veterans of the U.S. military — may “love their country,” but had demonstrated a “hatred” of their government.
Defense attorneys argued that owning weapons or castor beans –- the key ingredient in ricin -– is not illegal.
Dan Summer, who is representing Crump, said recordings of his client speaking about how to make ricin depict an “aspirational” goal, not something Crump intended to do or was even capable of doing.
“It’s almost like an old man in the throes of the very early stages of senility,” he said.
Barry Lombardo, Adams’ attorney, said his client — who worked in horticulture for the U.S. Department of Agriculture — owned castor bean bushes for the same reasons many Georgians do: for mole control.
But McBurney said the men had taken concrete steps that crossed the line into illegality: purchasing a silencer, explosives activated by a cell phone, and the ingredients for making ricin.
“We’ve moved beyond the hypothetical to reality,” he said.
During the hearing several family members and friends of the defendants were called to testify, helping paint a fuller portrait of the men at the center of the domestic terrorism case.
Adams’ daughter Melissa said her father is active in masonic organizations and has helped raise money for sick children through the Shriners. Crump’s twin daughters testified that their father, a retired electrician, often donated his services to people in need. Roberts’ wife Margaret said the couple is active in animal rescue and are currently caring for dozens of cats and dogs. And Thomas’ family described him as a peace-loving man who, with 30 years in the U.S. Navy, was dedicated to serving his country.
Both Thomas’ wife Charlotte and son Paul said last week that the 52 weapons found in his home were part of a gun collection. Federal authorities also seized about 30,000 rounds of ammunition, including ammunition compatible with silencers, in the raid.
There is regular discussion of use of castor seeds in “mole control.”
There is no evidence that it actually works.
However, castor seeds have been considered in pest control for many years.
From this blog, a couple years ago:
In the November 1941 issue of Timely Turf Topics, the association grapples with the problem of controlling mole crickets in southern golf courses.
“It is reported that turf in some sections of Georgia and Florida has just experienced the worst infestation of mole crickets in a number of years,” reads the issue. “Attempts to eradicate them from turf by the use of well-known poison bait as well as by treatments with arsenate of lead, ground tobacco stems and castor meal have not been successful in several localities this fall.”
The point to be made is that people once worked with large quantities of the grind of castor seeds in this country without dropping like flies. Castor beans were considered a renewable resource, used as a source of lubricant and fertilizer. Even golf course gardeners worked with castor mash, noting that it wasn’t so hot as an insecticide, being ineffective against mole crickets.
The working wisdom, embedded during the last ten years, and repeated regularly in the newsmedia is that it is elementary to purify ricin from castor seeds.
It’s not. But from a legal standpoint in the US, this makes no difference. No one is capable of making a legal argument that would change things.
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11.10.11
Posted in Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 9:48 am by George Smith
I’ve commented on the durability of the poison recipes from the neo-Nazi survivalist extremist right in the United States.
Starting in books, the recipe is now on handwritten papers copied from digital copies, passed down through the years.
And they all serve as tickets to prison and personal ruin in a certain very unique and queer American demographic.
The ricin recipe is self-destructive flypaper for militia members, “sovereign citizens,” agonizingly excessive ammo and gun hoarders, raging anti-Semites, alleged defenders of the sanctity of the Constitution, Gadsden flag fliers, gold and silver bugs, pro-lifers and tax resisters.
As must-have lore, the Saxon ricin recipe and its derivatives have seemingly penetrated into every nook and cranny of the violent white power far right in this country. It speaks directly to an ineradicable crazy white man’s compulsion/obsession ( one held by an always surprising number of people) with having an arsenal for striking back at the government and locals they despise.
It arguably marks a singular and unpleasant flaw in our threadbare national character, one surely not held by the majority but always visible upon closer inspection.
In another manner of speaking, now there’s always some nut sitting at the table, in a quiet rage, convinced he’s a patriot defending against evil and collecting stuff that comforts him in this lonely task.
And if the ricin recipe could have been copyrighted in the way of best-sellers, it would have made the owner a great deal of money.
From Alaska, earlier in the week, a story eclipsed by the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang:
Mary Ann Morgan, the Kenai Peninsula “sovereign citizen” militia member arrested at the Canadian border in October after trying to enter the country with a handgun, also possessed bomb-making documents and instructions on how to make the poison ricin and carry concealed weapons, according to federal court documents filed Friday in Fairbanks …
The documents [found in Morgan's pickup] included the following:
• A note, apparently in Morgan’s handwriting, with detailed directions on how to build pipe bombs.
• Information downloaded from the Internet on ricin, a deadly toxin derived from castor beans.
• A “plethora of information” on the possession and use of firearms.
• A list of common household poisons and a reference to a “poisonous plants database.” …
Morgan is associated with Fairbanks militia leader Schaefer Cox, currently jailed with others on federal weapons and murder conspiracy charges.
And on the Ricin Beans Gang yesterday:
The assassination of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney was part of the terrorist plot hatched by four North Georgia men, federal prosecutors said Wednesday in a bond hearing for the accused. (Both are African-American and Democrat.)
The four men accused of planning to bomb federal buildings, disperse the toxin ricin in major U.S. cities, and assassinate federal judges and prosecutors pleaded not guilty at the hearing in U.S. District Court in Gainesville.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBurney said law enforcement officers seized 52 weapons and 30,000 rounds of ammunition from [Ricin Beans Gang member Dan Thomas’] home. The weapons included assault rifles, shotguns, pistols with extended magazines and revolvers, and “sniper round” bullets and “sub-sonic” ammunition designed to be used with silencers, he said. McBurney did not say where the guns and ammunition were kept in the home.
But defense attorney Jeff Ertel countered that Thomas is an avid gun collector and hunter. He said all of the weapons were legally owned, a point McBurney conceded.
It’s quite a legal arsenal/gun collection but probably not all that remarkable in heartland red state America.
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11.08.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 3:44 pm by George Smith
The Atlanta Journal Constitution had someone call today in order to discuss the literature of ricin-making in the US.
I’m the expert. Hit Google with “ricin recipe” or “recipe for ricin” and the I Feel Lucky button and all roads lead to stuff I’ve written.
What’s remarkable about ricin recipes — all those pertinent here originate in the neo-Nazi survivalist backwoodsman far right — is how durable they have been.
I told the newspaper’s reporter that Kurt Saxon had coined it without knowing much about ricin at all in 1984 for his pamphlet, The Weaponeer. And it had been published again in 1988 in The Poor Man’s James Bond.
And there is some real disgrace in the hard fact that Saxon’s legacy is one in which his work has some responsibility in the sending of many people he wrote his materials to advise — to jail.
However, in spite of this and the passage of decades it has persisted. Although sent around the world and copied into many different digital forms, in this country it has remained signal in the unusual subculture of exclusively white guys who are really angry with the government.
Young, middle-aged or old, they all share a virulent and deeply entrenched common paranoia.
The government is taking away their rights in many ways, threatening their existence, and inevitably expected to come for them.
The irony in this is that post-9/11 and the expansion of homeland security domestically, the acquisition of improvised weaponry — in particular castor seeds and the recipes from the extremist far right — seem to guarantee that their belief will come true.
When the US government finds out you’ve been talking about ricin and fiddling with a few castor seeds, it will come for you.
Historically, whenever a Democrat is in power, their presence in the land becomes much more visible. And the Presidency of Barack Obama, for the obvious reason that he is black, has brought them out like never before.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today, one Ricin Beans Gang member, 73-year old Frederick Thomas:
Frederick Thomas is a man of clear loyalties. In his yard, deep in the woods of White County, a yellow flag with the image of a snake warns: “Don’t Tread On Me.” Nearby, affixed to the wall of his imposing wood home, a sign proclaims: “Frank Sinatra Fan Parking Only.”
So, which is he? An ordinary American of advancing years who calls his Sinatra-loving wife of 51 years each night from jail to say he misses her? Or the angry, alienated man who emerges from federal affidavits, his own heated rhetoric online and the pages of a novel he allegedly took as a blueprint for revolt?
One thing is certain — until last week, local officials had no reason to suspect him of leading a plot to assassinate federal officials, blow up buildings or murder innocent Georgians with deadly nerve toxins.
In [on-line militia forums], Thomas broadcast his determination to resist a government of “the Obummer,” which he accused of destroying the Constitution.
“Most of my adult life has been spent in service to America, and here in the twilight of my years I find that my sacrifice and the blood I’ve shed for this country has led to the enslavement of me and mine,” he wrote in January 2009 on a forum maintained by the Militia of Georgia.
“I’ve decided I can sit idly by no longer, and so I freely join with you to do something about this intolerable situation.”
Thomas’ wife and acquaintances were interviewed for the story. They say only that he was very old and seemingly harmless, so aged “He can hardly walk.”
We should treat elderly people more respectfully,” adds the neighbor.
Over the years, mental and physical fitness have never meant beans in cases such as this. The US government has jailed a troubled autistic man, an enfeebled drug addict who couldn’t get ricin but indicated he had tried to make it from castor oil (you can’t) and others who fair people would judge to be impaired in one way or another.
Note: Ricin is not a nerve poison, as the news item states. Ricin works by inhibiting protein synthesis at the ribosome.
My briefing of the Atlanta newspaper resulted in an article asserting ricin could not have been used as the Ricin Beans Gang envisioned. I told the newspaper the same thing last week. So the newspaper went out and found a couple of other experts to buttress it.
In any case, blog readers know all there is to know on the issue:
George Smith, who analyzes bioterror threats for GlobalSecurity.org, said the men were “steeped in poison lore” spread through the Internet.
“What is absurd about it is how this lore has become so solidified in a certain subculture,” Smith said. “People are utterly convinced of the realness of it.”
He added he thinks the people who subscribe to these beliefs have let their imaginations outpace their ability to accomplish their goals.
He believes the men lack the training to convert castor beans into a weapon of mass destruction.
“Ricin is a protein … the more you purify it, the harder it is to keep it around. People don’t understand that,” Smith said, explaining that proteins are easily broken down by heat, ultraviolet light, acids or elements such as lye.
The entire AJC piece is here.
Note: Lye is sodium hydroxide, a compound, not an element.
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11.07.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 4:55 pm by George Smith
Even FBI special agents make typos.
From the indictment of the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang:
“Castor beans are used for food and agriculture …”
From the Wisconsin office of the Dept of Homeland Security:
“The beans are not normally used as food …”
The Ricin Beans Gang discussing their (actually quite ludicrous) plan to use the poison:
Sam Jerry Crump: What I’d like to do is make about ten pounds of that … Give you 2, me 2, Ray (Adams) 2, Dan (Roberts) 2 and somebody else 2. Put it out in different cities at the same time: Washington DC, maybe Newark, Atlanta, Jacksonville, New Orleans. Dump that little (unintelligible) … that’s all you gotta do is lay it in the damn road, the cars are gonna spread it.
FBI Informant: Yeah, but what’s it take to make it? I haven’t got a clue.
Sam Jerry Crump: Just some seed. I got the, got -uh — one more ingredient, and I’ll get it today …
Other statement concerning ricin from Samuel Jerry Crump:
“Ya got, ya can’t let none of it get on your skin. Got to be a closed environment when it’s made. No wind. If it gets up your nose there’s no cure.”
[Ricin is not a contact poison.]
Samuel Jerry Crump also mentioned another toxic substance, probably botulinum toxin:
“That other kind, 1 pound can kill 30 million people … We need somebody to back us with money so we can make that other shit … This is worse than anthrax … That shit’s deadly! There ain’t no damn, there ain’t no cure for it. And it works, I think, in 2 hours.”
Finally, on prodding, Ray Adams names the more deadly toxin.
Crump: “Kills about 30 million people at one time, one pound of it. It’s caused from dead food.”
Ray Adams: “Oh, botulism.”
Crump goes onto to roughly describe the ricin recipe devised and distributed by Kurt Saxon in his pamphlet, The Weaponeer, back in 1984.
Further along, he goes into details on his plan to disburse it. First the castor powder should be mixed with charcoal to make it black. Presumably so it would be hard to see at night, one guesses.
Later, Sam Jerry Crump makes one astute observation:
“[But] if they find that shit on your computer you’re hung.”
Crump later mused on “going to Africa” to get “botulism”:
“Well, I thought you can’t make that botulism (unintelligible) … got some good backers … go to Africa, uh, and get some of that to make.
“We’d bring it back over here. Ya don’t make it over there. You just get the samples of the stuff out of the soil. It comes from dead animals, from rotten meat. That’s where botulism comes from. It’s more potent than the stuff (ricin) … I know somebody can make it.”
Ray Adams, another member of the Ricin Beans Gang, alleged to a lab technician at one time, discussed making ricin:
“Well, I’ve never done it (made ricin) but I have laboratory experience and once you extract that stuff enough just splashin’ it on your skin can kill ya. Once it dries, while it’s wet, any kind of solvent, like anything, it just takes water solution to soak through your skin. It’s highly permeable through the skin. There’s no antidote.
“I’ve handled all kinds of deadly stuff, pesticides and that kind of stuff, so … ”
[To emphasize the level of knowledge on display, it's worth repeating that ricin is not a contact poison.]
The entire Ricin Beans Gang indictment is here.
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