Who is Al Qaeda, anyway?

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Re: The name was coined in a law case.

Postby StarmanSkye » Sun Apr 16, 2006 12:16 am

Origin of the name 'Al Qaeda' -- From my readings, it seems most likely the name was assigned after-the-fact to label Muslim charities, organizations and individuals that were loosely linked to the politics of repression and resistance, including members of Muslim Brotherhood and Mujahadeen fighters and Afghan/Soviet War veterans and 'terrorists'. I don't recall having heard the law-suit origin but it fits the same idea of label given 'to' Bin Laden et al., not one that people supposedly within it actually used themselves. I recall reading that the Power Of Nightmares confirms al qaeda referred to the CIA's DATA base of counterintel/terrorist sources, assets and suspects. As Bodansky cited below believes, the name resulted at least in part on the US and west needing to contextualize 'the enemy' -- to market the concept before the public. The same thing can be seen with Osama and Zarqawi -- prepackaged bad-guys whose newscast image/soundbites we can be conditioned to revile and gnash our teeth to. Quaint -- in the best tradition of psychological warfare.<br><br>And yeah -- it IS a damn shame we can't ask Robin Cook.<br>Starman<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,779530,00.html">books.guardian.co.uk/revi...30,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>--excerpt--<br>But other reasons why al-Qaida might be so called are no less mysterious. After all, communiques issued by Bin Laden and his associates never use the name. Instead they refer to themselves as the "World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and the Crusaders", the "Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Places" and so on.<br><br>The first use of al-Qaida in western media was in 1996 in an American newspaper report which identified it as another name of the Islamic Salvation Foundation, one of Bin Laden's jihadi charities. The term only came into general usage after the group's bombing of the US embassies in East Africa in 1998, when the FBI and CIA fingered it as an umbrella organisation for various projects of Bin Laden and his associates - many of which grew out of ideas originally hatched by Abdullah Azzam, who'd been killed by a car-bomb in Peshawar in 1989.<br><br>The network grew exponentially. By the time Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, his roster of jihadis had been computerised. Flying back to Afghanistan on a C-130 transport plane, he is said to have had with him, along with his wives and 150 supporters, a laptop computer containing the names of the thousands of fighters and activists who would help him further expand his struggle against the west. This qaida ma'lumat, this "information base", seems a very plausible source of the name.<br><br>Dr Saad al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident and former Afghan mujahideen, thinks the term is over-used: "Well I really laugh when I hear the FBI talking about al-Qaida as an organisation of Bin Laden." Al-Qaida was just a service for relatives of jihadis, he said, speaking to the American PBS show Frontline. "In 1988 he [Bin Laden] noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organised and arranged for proper documentation."<br><br>Fascinatingly, the acclaimed biography of Bin Laden by Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, hardly mentions the name al-Qaida. Written before September 11, it does so only to emphasise that al-Qaida is the wrong name altogether: "A lot of money is being spent on a rapidly expanding web of Islamist charities and social services, including the recently maligned al-Qaida. Bin Laden's first charity, al-Qaida, never amounted to more than a loose umbrella framework for supporting like-minded individuals and their causes. In the aftermath of the 1998 bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, al-Qaida has been portrayed in the west as a cohesive terrorist organisation, but it is not."<br><br>There's no doubt that the name came to prominence in part because America needed to conceptualise its enemy. This is certainly what Bodansky thinks now. "In the aftermath of September 11," he says, "both governments and the media in the west had to identify an entity we should hate and fight against."<br><br>Rohan Gunaratna, research fellow at the centre for the study of terrorism and political violence at the University of St Andrews, takes a different view. In an important recent book on al-Qaida, he argues that the name came from political theory, citing the concept of al-Qaida al-Sulbah (the solid base) formulated in an essay by Abdullah Azzam, Bin Laden's intellectual mentor. The solid base provided a platform, Gunaratna writes, for the "sole purpose of creating societies founded on the strictest Islamic principles".<br><br>Al-Qaida al-Sulbah mixes a type of revolutionary vanguardism, borrowed from European political philosophy, with Islamic martyrdom: it's the pioneering vanguard that must, in Azzam's phrase, after "a long period of training and hatching", be prepared to "jump into the fire". And there may be another borrowing: the essay reads like nothing so much as Hari Seldon's plans for his foundation. Perhaps it was Azzam, after all, who read Asimov.<br><br>**<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/04/12/the_al_qaeda_myth.php">www.tompaine.com/articles...a_myth.php</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>Tom Porteous on the 'Myth of AlQaeda:<br>--quote--<br>The role of the alleged "Al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq," Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we are now told, was cynically misrepresented and exaggerated by the U.S. military's propaganda units in an effort to discredit and divide the Iraqi insurgency and to provide a retrospective justification for the Iraq war by suggesting a link between Iraq and 9/11.<br><br>Wherever in the world Al Qaeda crops up, its appearance has often been uncannily convenient for the local authorities—dictators, warlords, occupation forces and elected governments alike. And often the precise nature of the Al Qaeda connection turns out, on close examination, to be tenuous or non-existent. But by that time the message has gone out and sunk in: "Al Qaeda was here".<br><br>It's almost certain that as the United States ratchets up the pressure on Iran in the coming months the non-issue of Tehran 's "links" with Al Qaeda will come to the fore. In fact the groundwork is already being laid. Blair, no less, said ominously in a speech last month that although "the conventional view is that Iran is hostile to Al Qaeda: we know from our own history of conflict that, under the pressure of battle, alliances shift and change." So as the confrontation with Iran builds, watch out for leaked reports from anonymous security officials about dastardly Iranian-Al Qaeda conspiracies. <br>Plucked from the database: 'Al-Qaeda' boogeymen all share a common past, hidden in plain sight<br>Source: Awoken Research Group<br>URL Source: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://valis.cjb.cc/">valis.cjb.cc/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Abdullah Azzam fought for the CIA in Afghanistan. <br><br>Abu Abdel Aziz 'Barbaros' fought for the CIA in Afghanistan & Bosnia. <br><br>Osama bin Laden fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Gulbaddin Hekmatyar fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Muhammad Jamal Khalifa fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi fought for the CIA in Bosnia <br><br>Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his three brothers, Zahed, Abed, and Aref fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Ayman Zawahiri (Version 1.0) <br><br>Ayman Zawahiri's brother fought for the CIA in Kosovo. <br><br>Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also fought for the CIA in Bosnia <br><br>Hambali fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Wali Khan fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Ramzi Ahmed Yousef fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Mohammed Haydar Zammar from Hamburg, fought for the CIA in Afghanistan & Bosnia <br><br>Abu Omar, aka Hassan Osama Nasr fought for the CIA in Afghanistan & Bosnia <br><br>Abu Hamza al-Masri fought for the CIA in Afghanistan & Bosnia <br><br>Ahmed Said Khadr fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Jose Padilla & Mohamed Hesham Youssef fought for the CIA in Kosovo <br><br>To be continued...<br>[Research by BlackJade]<br>[Note: It wasn't us, but 'Able Danger' that found the Atta connection to a CIA network in Brooklyn] <br><br>Also see: The CIA's Jihad - New Yorker Magazine - 03/17/95 <br><br>*<br>"Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially-induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear." -- General Douglas MacArthur <br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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The London Bombers

Postby antiaristo » Sun Apr 16, 2006 8:34 pm

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Quote:<br>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>British investigators have determined that 7/7 was not the work of al-Qa'ida anyway. <br>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br>The unlinking of the 7/7 london events & al-Qa'ida only occurred in the last 3 weeks (March 06) with an article on the front page of the UK Observer. Jack Staw (UK Foreign Secretary) was VERY quick to draw the connection, saying The attack bears all the hallmarks of al-Qa'ida" on the day (or day) after 7/7/05.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><br>Byrne,<br>Hear hear!<br><br>The point is that the "al Qaeda" connection had served its purpose.<br><br>Blair has passed a whole raft of legislation on the back of the "al Qaeda connection to 7/7".<br><br>The last was the new Terrorism Act, passed a few weeks ago. But there were plenty of others.<br><br>So the link was no longer required.<br><br>The British did the exact same thing with "The Ricin Ring That Never Was", when they created an al Qaeda poison factory out of thin air. I can post the story if it is of interest.<br><br>Scotsman Colin Powell used that "al Qaeda poison factory" during his address to the United Nations.<br>A day that lives in infamy. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: The London Bombers

Postby Byrne » Mon Apr 17, 2006 9:55 am

Anti,<br><br>Yep, the UK 'Ricin Plot' & the <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Al Qaida</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> plot to bomb a Manchester United-v-Liverpool football game at Old Trafford were two events where <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Al Qaida</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--></strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> was used to 'terrorize' the British Public. Both incidents have been shown to be completely false (These non-plots were covered in the UK Channel 4 Dispatches programme - Spinning Terror, broadcast on Monday 20th February 2006 - Info here -<!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.cps.org.uk/pdf/pub/430.pdf" target="top">www.cps.org.uk/pdf/pub/430.pdf</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> which is a PDF <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Use and Abuse of Terror, The construction of a false narrative on the domestic terror threat by PETER OBORNE</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->), the programme maker - he discusses both the Ricin & Old Trafford (fake) incidents.<br><br>If you have info on the Ricin Plot -post it.<br><!--EZCODE HR START--><hr /><!--EZCODE HR END--><br>Regarding the origins of Al Qaida, from Kurt Nimmo<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Al-Qaeda the Database Unbound <br>Saturday November 19th 2005, 9:12 am</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br>In a lengthy excerpt posted on Wayne Madsen’s site, Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence, explains the origins of the word “al-Qaeda.” As previously noted by British Foreign Secretary <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1523838,00.html" target="top">Robin Cook</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--></strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, “al-Qaeda” has nothing to do with a terrorist organization, as the neocons and the corporate media tell us over and over, ad infinitum, but is in fact a database. “In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements,” Bunel explains. “It was decided to use a part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.” Files associated to the database were called “Q eidat il-Maaloomaat” and “Q eidat i-Taaleemaat” in Arabic. “Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for ‘base.’” <br><br>Because of the presence of ‘rogue states,’ it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the ‘rogue states’ used to fight. And the ‘rogue states’ included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages…. Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property. <br><br>In short, “al-Qaeda” was in essence an email designation and had nothing to do with the “American agent in Afghanistan,” Osama bin Laden. In fact, “al-Qaeda,” the terrorist organization, is a creation of the United States government and the corporate media. <br><br>Pierre-Henry Bunel concludes: <br><br>The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US................... <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=byrne@rigorousintuition>Byrne</A> at: 4/17/06 8:17 am<br></i>
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The Ricin Ring that Never Was

Postby antiaristo » Mon Apr 17, 2006 10:38 am

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Comment <br><br>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><!--EZCODE FONT START--><span style="font-size:small;">The ricin ring that never was</span><!--EZCODE FONT END--> <br><br>Yesterday's trial collapse has exposed the deception behind attempts to link al-Qaida to a 'poison attack' on London <br><br>Duncan Campbell<br>Thursday April 14, 2005<br>The Guardian <br><br>Colin Powell does not need more humiliation over the manifold errors in his February 2003 presentation to the UN. But yesterday a London jury brought down another section of the case he made for war - that Iraq and Osama bin Laden were supporting and directing terrorist poison cells throughout Europe, including a London ricin ring. <br>Yesterday's verdicts on five defendants and the dropping of charges against four others make clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the "ricin ring" make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with us. Until today, the public record for the past three fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat occupied by some of yesterday's acquitted defendants. It wasn't. <br><br>The third plank of the al-Qaida-Iraq poison theory was the link between what Powell labelled the "UK poison cell" and training camps in Afghanistan. The evidence the government wanted to use to connect the defendants to Afghanistan and al-Qaida was never put to the jury. That was because last autumn a trial within a trial was secretly taking place. This was a private contest between a group of scientists from the Porton Down military research centre and myself. The issue was: where had the information on poisons and chemicals come from? <br><br>The information - five pages in Arabic, containing amateur instructions for making ricin, cyanide and botulinum, and a list of chemicals used in explosives - was at the heart of the case. The notes had been made by Kamel Bourgass, the sole convicted defendant. His co-defendants believed that he had copied the information from the internet. The prosecution claimed it had come from Afghanistan. <br><br>I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant exploring Islamist websites that publish Bin Laden and his sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the gun lobby. <br><br>The experience of being an expert witness on these issues has made me feel a great deal safer on the streets of London. These were the internal documents of the supposed al-Qaida cell planning the "big one" in Britain. But the recipes were untested and unoriginal, borrowed from US sources. Moreover, ricin is not a weapon of mass destruction. It is a poison which has only ever been used for one-on-one killings and attempted killings. <br><br>If this was the measure of the destructive wrath that Bin Laden's followers were about to wreak on London, it was impotent. Yet it was the discovery of a copy of Bourgass's notes in Thetford in 2002 that inspired the wave of horror stories and government announcements and preparations for poison gas attacks. <br><br>It is true that when the team from Porton Down entered the Wood Green flat in January 2003, their field equipment registered the presence of ricin. But these were high sensitivity field detectors, for use where a false negative result could be fatal. A few days later in the lab, Dr Martin Pearce, head of the Biological Weapons Identification Group, found that there was no ricin. But when this result was passed to London, the message reportedly said the opposite. <br><br>The planned government case on links to Afghanistan was based only on papers that a freelance journalist working for the Times had scooped up after the US invasion of Kabul. Some were in Arabic, some in Russian. They were far more detailed than Bourgass's notes. Nevertheless, claimed Porton Down chemistry chief Dr Chris Timperley, they showed a "common origin and progression" in the methods, thus linking the London group of north Africans to Afghanistan and Bin Laden. <br><br>The weakness of Timperley's case was that neither he nor the intelligence services had examined any other documents that could have been the source. We were told Porton Down and its intelligence advisers had never previously heard of the "Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, containing recipes for ricin and much more". The document, written by veterans of the 1980s Afghan war, has been on the net since 1998. <br><br>All the information roads led west, not to Kabul but to California and the US midwest. The recipes for ricin now seen on the internet were invented 20 years ago by survivalist Kurt Saxon. He advertises videos and books on the internet. Before the ricin ring trial started, I phoned him in Arizona. For $110, he sent me a fistful of CDs and videos on how to make bombs, missiles, booby traps - and ricin. We handed a copy of the ricin video to the police. <br><br>When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaida link claims. But it seems this information was not shared with the then home secretary, David Blunkett, who was still whipping up fear two weeks later. "Al-Qaida and the international network is seen to be, and will be demonstrated through the courts over months to come, actually on our doorstep and threatening our lives," he said on November 14. <br><br>The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaida manual" into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to produce in the 2001 New York trial for the first attack on the World Trade Centre. But it wasn't an al-Qaida manual. The name was invented by the US department of justice in 2001, and the contents were rushed on to the net to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act. <br><br>To show that the Jihad manual was written in the 1980s and the period of the US-supported war against the Soviet occupation was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book called the Poisoner's Handbook, by Maxwell Hutchkinson. <br><br>We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an Al Qaida-trained superterrorist. An Asbo might be appropriate.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>
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The D-Notice

Postby antiaristo » Mon Apr 17, 2006 10:43 am

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE FONT START--><span style="font-size:small;">British Government Ordered Shutdown Of Fake Ricin Story</span><!--EZCODE FONT END--><br><br>Prison Planet | April 22 2005 <br><br>The British government has ordered a <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>D-notice</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> clampdown on details relating to the ricin terror ring story which was exposed as being fake last week.<br><br>Inside sources from the Guardian newspaper in London have confirmed that the reason the Guardian article 'The ricin ring that never was,' was removed from its website was due to a direct order from the government. Several other websites worldwide have also removed the article but it is still available on numerous websites, Rense.com being one. <br><br>What's next? Are the government going to create a Ministry of Truth and employ Winston Smith to change past newspaper articles and dispose of unflattering truths down the memory hole?<br><br>"Government pressure" forced the Guardian to pull the article says the source, and that a Ministry of Defence directive was in order that forbade naming of any Porton Down scientists.<br><br>Porton Down is a secretive government chemical weapons centre and military base in Wiltshire, England. It has been at the center of a scandal involving testing of sarin nerve gas on British soldiers after World War Two. <br><br>Porton Down was also responsible for the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001. A phial of the virus was released from Porton Down before the outbreak. This was blamed on 'animal rights protesters' who had somehow managed to sneak into a biosafety level four underground facility guarded by armed troops.<br><br>The British government knew of the outbreak weeks before they told the public, allowing the disease to spread so it could devastate the British farming community who were providing a bulwark of opposition to Tony Blair on numerous different political issues at the time. <br><br><br><br>Porton Down (pictured above) was also the birthplace of Operation Cauldron, a program which led to the testing of lethal plague bombs on the Scottish coast. It has also been linked with the development of race-specific bioweapons. The place is a haven for Mengele-like mad scientists with no moral fibre. It should be shut down immediately and charges brought against those found to have engaged in this barbaric pseudo-research.<br><br>The Guardian article is set to go back online with the scientists' names omitted. These Nazis dare not let their names see the light of day as hey skulk around like vampires in the shadows cooking up more death and misery for future generations at home and abhorrent chemical weapons to be rained down on broken-backed third world countries abroad.<br><br>The BBC, otherwise known as the Blair Broadcasting Corporation, is also complicit in the cover-up.<br><br>A Guardian article (which hasn't yet been removed and can be read here) entitled 'Row as BBC cuts Bafta speech' - explains how Adam Curtis, who won the factual series award for BBC2's The Power of Nightmares, was censored after he criticized the sensationalized threat of the fake ricin plot.<br><br>The acceptance speech was removed from BBC1's Bafta coverage when it aired two hours later because it "touched a nerve" according to Curtis.<br><br>"Reporting of the whole terrorist threat has either become exaggerated, distorted or in some cases a complete fabrication and they are beginning to realise this. They know they have to sort it out. It has touched a nerve and the fact they cut it shows that." <br><br>Curtis went on to add that reports of an "al-Qaida plot to poison Britain" that could have consequences "equal or greater to 9/ 11" were "massively exaggerated or a complete fantasy".<br><br>The British government doesn't want you to know that of the 500+ suspects it has arrested on grounds of terrorism, only two have been charged and only then on immigration fraud. Prime Sinister Phony Tony B-Liar needs to maintain the fallacy that there are terrorists running around everyone's back garden waiting to kill them. That way he can promise to 'protect' us and ensure a 3rd term of neo-liberal Straussian warmongering.<br><br>And anyone that rocks the boat in the process, like Dr. David Kelly, will be murdered.<br><br>However, this scrambling to cover-up the leaks betrays desperation in the establishment and a chink of light for freedom of the press that the Guardian would put this story out in the first place.<br><br>E mail the Guardian at reader@guardian.co.uk and get them to put the story back up!<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>
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D-Notice = PII = Treason Felony Act

Postby antiaristo » Mon Apr 17, 2006 10:51 am

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE FONT START--><span style="font-size:small;">Guardian pulls ricin terror debunk from website</span><!--EZCODE FONT END--><br><br>By John Lettice<br>Published Wednesday 27th April 2005 14:31 GMT<br>The Register<br><br>A Guardian story on "The ricin ring that never was" has been pulled from the newspaper's website, for what are said to be 'legal reasons'. The story, by Duncan Campbell (the investigative writer, not the Guardian journalist of the same name), analysed the collapse of the UK's 'ricin conspiracy' trial, and reported Porton Down evidence that had made it clear that claims of mass poisoning attacks had no basis.<br><br>Campbell's story, which is still widely available on the web (including here), covered similar territory to George Smith's pieces at GlobalSecurity.org (here and here). Campbell and Smith were both involved in the preparation of the defence case in the ricin trial, and what they and the Porton evidence had to say was essentially that ricin is a one-on-one poison, not a weapon of mass destruction; that Kamel Bourgass' efforts to manufacture it were amateurish and had left no sign of having been successful; and that the distribution of ricin by smearing it on car door handles was not feasible, because it is not absorbed through the skin.<br><br>Experiments undertaken by Porton Down had made this clear at the trial (subtext: no ricin terror campaign), but these tests did no more than support the generally known facts about ricin. The Guardian has not yet responded to a Register request for an explanation for the story's removal, but The Insider reports that it was told the article was "removed <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>from the archive for legal reasons</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->", and that a further request for clarification received the response: "The article was not removed because of any inaccuracy. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>It was to do with a PII certicate</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> [sic] protecting the identity of Porton Down [government weapons laboratory] experts who appeared as witnesses in the trial."<br><br>Campbell's piece had named a Porton scientist who had given evidence, but the names of Porton Down scientists are not a state secret. Or they weren't, anyway. A Public Interest Immunity Certificate is a relatively seldom-used <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>legal mechanism for placing restrictions on evidence</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. According to the Crown Prosecution Service "the government now considers that where government documents or information are material to legal proceedings, PII will only arise if disclosure could cause real damage to a genuine public interest."<br><br>If a PII did constitute the "legal reasons" it's difficult to see where the public interest in the action lies. The removal of the article does however mean that one of the very few correctives to widespread 'UK 911 poison terror scare' hysteria no longer exists in the mainstream press. Au contraire; the weekend after the end of the trial and the publication of the evidence, the Sunday Telegraph reported that we were/are faced with "chaos and panic in London's public transport system", and our security forces narrowly averted "our September 11, our Madrid. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>There is no doubt about it, if this had come off this would have been one of al-Qa'eda's biggest strikes</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->", a "senior officer at Scotland Yard" told the paper.<br><br>Having observed the trial and - one presumes - read and digested the Porton evidence the "senior officer at Scotland Yard" should surely have grasped that smearing ricin on the handles of the Heathrow Express was a complete non-starter. Security forces' 'discovery' of a 'map' of the train's route is meanwhile baffling; the train is non-stop, so either you're in it smearing away or you're not. But perhaps the terrorists intended to fling gobs of it at ventilation intakes as the train whistled by.<br><br>As for those tests showing there was no chance of mass poisoning, Porton Down took ten grams of castor beans, ground them down and rinsed them with acetone in accordance with the Bourgass recipe found at the flat, then tested the result for toxicity in a cell culture assay (more details at GlobalSecurity.org). It found that the process had destroyed 90 per cent of the ricin contained in the beans. The Bourgass recipe called for five grams of beans; Porton concluded this would produce sufficient ricin to kill if injected, but would only be likely to cause nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain if eaten.<br><br>According to claims made by Mohammed Meguerba, the informant currently detained by Algerian security, Bourgass intended to deliver the poison by smearing it on car door handles, while the Sunday Telegraph's latest version upgrades this to "hand rails and lavatories" on the Heathrow Express. Porton documents produced for the trial however state: "There is no reliable scientific evidence available... that suggests that ricin toxin can be absorbed across intact skin" and: "There is no evidence... that by dissolving the ricin toxin in the solvent DMSO (dimethyl sulphoxide) or lemon juice, this would produce a contact hazard."<br><br>In summary, according to the Government's own research scientists ricin is ineffective as a poison that could be absorbed through the skin, not massively effective taken by mouth, but can have a lethal effect if injected, as happened in the case of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident assassinated in 1978. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Whatever Bourgass may have believed, there is absolutely no justification for any security or government source to be claiming there was or is a danger of a 'British 911' from his direction. But a British PII? That's possibly another matter</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. ®<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>
antiaristo
 
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Re: Who is Al Qaeda, anyway?

Postby antiaristo » Tue Apr 18, 2006 9:49 am

This thread is worth reviewing on this subject<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://p216.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm10.showMessage?topicID=3005.topic">p216.ezboard.com/frigorou...3005.topic</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
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