Deterritory

An interesting piece from the Irish Times on the WMD claims regarding Iraq and al Qaeda...

Scare stories about terrorist threat blown away

Evidence prosecution lawyers tried to link to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda
in trials of terrorist suspects has been shown to be false.

by Duncan Campbell

04/15/05 "The Irish Times" - - Colin Powell does not need more
humiliation over the manifold errors in his February 2003 presentation
to the United Nations. But on Wednesday 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.

Wednesday's verdicts on five defendants, and the dropping of charges
against four others, made it clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the
"ring" make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with
the British public. 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 Wednesday's acquitted defendants. It was not.

The third plank of the al-Qaeda/Iraq poison theory was the link between
what Powell labelled the "UK poison cell" and training camps in
Afghanistan. The evidence the British government wanted to use to
connect the defendants to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda was never put to the
jury. That was because last autumn a trial within a trial was secretly
taking place. This was a private contest between a group of scientists
from the Porton Down military research centre and myself. The issue was:
where had the information on poisons and chemicals come from?

The information - five pages in Arabic, containing amateur instructions
for making ricin, cyanide and botulinum, and a list of chemicals used in
explosives - was at the heart of the case. The notes had been made by
Kamel Bourgass, the sole convicted defendant. His co-defendants believed
that he had copied the information from the internet. The prosecution
claimed that it had come from Afghanistan.

I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant
exploring Islamist websites which publish Bin Laden and his
sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on
how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the
gun lobby. The experience of being an expert witness on these issues has
made me feel a great deal safer on the streets of London. These were the
internal documents of the supposed al-Qaeda 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.

It was the discovery of a copy of Bourgass's notes in Thetford in 2002
which inspired the wave of horror stories, and government announcements
and preparations for poison-gas attacks. It is true that when the team
from Porton Down entered the Wood Green flat in January 2003, their
field equipment registered the presence of ricin. But these were
high-sensitivity field detectors, for use where a false negative result
could be fatal.

A few days later, Dr Martin Pearce, head of the Biological Weapons
Identification Group, found that there was no ricin. However, when this
result was passed to London, the message reportedly said the opposite.

The planned government case on links to Afghanistan was based solely on
papers which a freelance journalist working for the Times had scooped up
after the US invasion of Kabul. Some were in Arabic, some in Russian.
They were far more detailed than Bourgass's notes. Nevertheless, claimed
Porton Down chemistry chief Dr Chris Timperley, they showed a "common
origin and progression" in the methods, thus linking the London group of
North Africans to Afghanistan and Bin Laden. The weakness of Dr
Timperley's case was that neither he nor the intelligence services had
examined any other documents which could have been the source. We were
told that Porton Down and its intelligence advisers had never previously
heard of the "Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, containing recipes for ricin
and much more". This document, written by veterans of the 1980s Afghan
war, has been on the internet since 1998.

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-Qaeda claims.

The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaeda 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-Qaeda 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-Qaeda-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."

© The Irish Times