The ricin ring; or American survivalists revisited

It gets worse for Blair and company. Their Al Qaida ricin conspiracy is just another con.

Below the Irish Times has tracked the story down.

You won't see this story in the Mail the Express the Telegraph or the Sun though. Most people will go on believing that we are under threat from WMD.

We are only threatened by mistakes in our own laboratories!

All the information roads led west - not to Kabul, but to California and the US midwest. The ricin recipes now seen on the internet were invented 20 years ago by survivalist Kurt Saxon, who advertises books and videos on the internet.Before the ricin ring trial began, I called him in Arizona. For $110, he sent me CDs and videos on bombs, missiles, booby-traps - and ricin. We gave a copy of the ricin video to the police. When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaida claims. The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaida manual" into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to produce in the 2001 New York trial relating to the first attack on the World Trade Centre. But it was not an al-Qaida manual. The name was invented by the US department of justice in 2001 and the contents were rushed on to the internet to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act. To show that the manual was written in the 1980s during the US-supported war against the Soviet occupation was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book - The Poisoner's Handbook by Maxwell Hutchkinson. We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an al-Qaida-trained super-terrorist. - (Guardian Service) Duncan Campbell is an investigative writer and a scientific expert witness on computers / telecommunications. He is author of "War Plan UK."