Al Qaeda wanted to kill a large number of people in the first London attack — to send a big propaganda message to the G8 summit. Today’s bombs, on the other hand, may have been intended primarily to disrupt. If and when they start hitting electrical substations and telephone exchanges, we’ll know our junior league terrorists are starting to get the hang of it.
Back to Main
July 21, 2005
WB: London, Again
Comments
There is no knowing what terrible events await citizens of this nation. I do draw solace from one aspect of any future disasters though. Roughly half of those suffering whatever calamity befalls them voted for Bush. That’s enough to allow a little smirk as I sit in the same shit they squirm in.
Posted by: steve duncan | Jul 21 2005 19:54 utc | 1
Next to the Global Guerrillias concept site John Robb runs a personal blog too.
Worth a daily look.
Now a few $0.50 fire crackers are sufficient to shut down the London tube completely. That is a very fine economic “payoff”.
This is an attack on Business.
Expect Blair to come out fighting……… because he has been told to do so.
Disrupt London………. when the IRA started to lob mortar shells they got to the negotiating table. Clever bastards are doing the insurgency in London. Of course, there’s the Lavon Affair, a conspiracy, KOS should note.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jul 21 2005 20:25 utc | 4
“b”, $0.50 firecrackers would shut down a lot of things in this country too. An envelope full of white powder will empty out an entire skyscraper, the Pentagon or Congress. A poor flight plan will panic thousands and empty much of working D.C. from their desks. Going up the down staircase in an aiport will cause evacuation of the entire terminal. Take more than 1 roll of film of any major bridge or bldg from various angles and 3 FBI offices will be tied up for days looking into which ship your relatives landed ashore on in 1689. It’s all good farce and fodder for observers of the supremely absurd.
Posted by: steve duncan | Jul 21 2005 20:34 utc | 6
I’m surprised that Billmon is still picking at the AlQaeda myth, or meme or whatever it turns out to be. Loads of evidence is already in to show that London was an inside job, as was 9/11 and several others. So what’s the point of hanging on to this AlQaeda thing except to distract from the ugly truth?
This WB entry is based on…air, and therefor any “analysis” is worse than worthless.
Sorry, I’m usually not this contrary here but this one pushed my button the wrong way.
Posted by: rapt | Jul 21 2005 20:47 utc | 7
One thing that doesn’t seem to be getting a mention anywhere is that London has one of the highest CCTV camera/square meter ratios of any city in the world. The four bombers on this occasion had the bright idea of running away instead of blowing themselves up. More and better information will soon be available — unless the Americans get to them first and whisk them out of the country, that is.
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 21 2005 20:56 utc | 8
Those CCTV cameras can fail on command, as you may have noticed.
Posted by: rapt | Jul 21 2005 21:00 utc | 9
rapt: I’ve had the same thought myself about it being an inside job, but there’s one piece to the puzzle that I haven’t yet worked out. Janice, Jimmy, Elvis … who’s the fourth bomber?
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 21 2005 21:07 utc | 10
Jason Burke is very good on the evolution of Al Qaeda from a loose VC-style or franchise-style operation (something that Robb also has experience in) to something that’s more like the copycat fried chicken shops that dot London. That is, they borrow from the original brand, but they’re not part of its operation.
In a way, that’s much more dangerous.
Posted by: ahem | Jul 21 2005 21:11 utc | 11
there was a certain telecommunications link in lower Manhattan that, if hit, would basically take down the system used to clear international banking transactions
That would be 60 Hudson Street a major carrier exchange point.
Lots of national and international connections (all sold as “redundant” but don´t bet on that). There are some other sweetspots around that area.
I’m surprised that Billmon is still picking at the AlQaeda myth, or meme or whatever it turns out to be. Loads of evidence is already in to show that London was an inside job, as was 9/11 and several others.
Well, rapt, if you’re going to talk like that, you really ought to share YOUR vast right-wing conspiracy theory with us.
Posted by: Billmon | Jul 21 2005 21:24 utc | 13
I’m surprised that Billmon is still picking at the AlQaeda myth, or meme or whatever it turns out to be. Loads of evidence is already in to show that London was an inside job, as was 9/11 and several others.
Well, rapt, if you’re going to talk like that, you really ought to share YOUR vast right-wing conspiracy theory with us.
Posted by: Billmon | Jul 21 2005 21:24 utc | 14
Oops. My mistake. Hit the wrong button.
That would be 60 Hudson Street a major carrier exchange point.
Yeah, that’s the one, as I recall.
Posted by: Billmon | Jul 21 2005 21:25 utc | 15
Rapt says:
…was an inside job, as was 9/11…
Billmon says:
Well, rapt, if you’re going to talk like that, you really ought to share YOUR vast right-wing conspiracy theory with us.
I ask:
I haven’t heard much comment on it around here, but “Crossing the Rubicon” by by Michael C. Ruppert sure convinced me that there was conscious facilitation for the success of the 9/11 attacks starting with Vice President Dick Cheney. Scroll down to the review of the book for starters.
Has anybody here read this book and if so will you explain where my naivety occurs?
Posted by: Juannie | Jul 21 2005 22:37 utc | 16
If the bombers, and their breathren, are in fact adapting their attacks to maximize disruption, then in the near future watch for a coordinated bombing of many major oil refineries.
World oil production is already at 100% of refining capacity. What if US refining capacity was suddenly reduced by only 10%? Universal chaos.
Posted by: Filofax | Jul 21 2005 22:53 utc | 17
as far as i am concerned the story is still out on 9/11. my reasons. if it walks like a duck you’re half way there. too many opportunities for the administration on this one. i think it’s unlikely they just rolled the dice w/”pearl harbor like incident” and got what they needed, perfect timing also. they already had the energy meetings all wrapped up. they quashed warnings.
this is without considering all the theories out there on how it could have transpired. and the total absense of focus on saudi arabia. it would have had to have been an incredible stroke of good fortune for the cheney admin for it to have come down the way it did, when it did, that in itself points to complicity. in a few years , looking back at it, this will be clearer. we were all so in shock we didn’t see the obvious. and that leads me to believe there’s something big we are not supposed to know. IMHO
Posted by: annie | Jul 21 2005 23:01 utc | 18
Billmon says
This is depressing enough — it means the war against terrorism is even more likely to become a perpetual, endless struggle, like the war against bathroom mildew.
My response to that would be on the rare occasions bathroom mildew has annoyed me enough to warrant intervention, I found like Billmon that one can spend the rest of one’s existence spraying ‘exit mould’ or whatever chemical around the joint and just like in the song ‘the cat comes back’. But if one examines the cause of mildew ie dampness and takes steps to reduce that eg flow thru ventilation and extractor fans, then the mildew never gets to the level where it annoys me sufficiently to warrant treatment.
No this ain’t ‘MoA Makeover’ but the parallel is bleedin obvious as the english would say. That is don’t be annoying people to the extent where they can crank kiddies up to go out and murder your citizenry. Ventilating your bathroom isn’t “appeasing mould” it’s taking the correct steps to ensure that you and mould bump into each other as rarely as possible.
As far as the “was it them or us” discussion goes I really can’t get too worked up about that because a/ we”ll never know b/ no ordinary citizen has any means of effecting control over ‘them’ or ‘us’, c/it is doubful the bombers REALLY know who they were working for and d/the outcome will be exactly the same (urban panic increased restrictions on individuals) no matter whoddit.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 21 2005 23:23 utc | 19
Even beyond all the detailed evidence that 911 was a government job is the simple fact that it is completely ludicrous to entertain the notion that a terrorist group could penetrate the defense system of the mightiest military power in the world. It’s just pure reasoning here. It has no markings at all of the MO of such a terrorist group. It is so obvious it astounds me. The world I live in. That all of this can pass without a whimper. It truly is like the Village of the Damned. Unreal.
Posted by: jm | Jul 21 2005 23:30 utc | 20
Even beyond all the detailed evidence that 911 was a government job
Gee, I thought the Martians did it.
Posted by: Zev | Jul 21 2005 23:46 utc | 21
I was listening to the Beeb last night and there was a discussion regarding new British measures to combat terror financing proposed by Home Secretary David Blunkett.
What one of the commentators said is something I never heard before. Similar to Claire Short’s statment that Al Qaeda actually meant “The Database” in reference to the list of Mujahadeen fighters that was kept in an electronic file and used to provide the list of the willing to move on from fighting the Soviets to fighting the West in general and the US in particular.
What was said was that the 9-11 attacks cost about $500,000 dollars. It is remarkable and I never thought about that before. That is quite a bit of money, a huge investment and a huge risk. It is clear that they put all their marbles into this. Then when commentating on the London Bombings, the person said those likely cost no more than $2000. The individual also went on to say that every attack since 9-11, from Instanbul, to Morrocco, to Madrid and now to London were all carried out internally, with little cost and no international cooperation and exchange i.e. no need for international funds transfers, external coordination and cooperation and the like. And this was in compared to the Embassy bombings and the Cole bombing that involved international cooperation and networking.
It is a scary proposition when you think about it, that terrorism is becoming cheaper to excute, more isolated and more decentralized. That individually acting autonomously without coordination from some evil Goldfinger can mastermind attacks that kill tens to hundreds, practically at will (as long as there are those willing to carry them out). It is almost like terror acts as a free market with the dead the externalities.
Posted by: Bubb Rubb | Jul 21 2005 23:47 utc | 22
two threads going on here on this thread:
annie,
I am probably the only person I know who purposely hasn’t seen and didn’t watch any of the 911 infotainment. On Tue. Sept 11, 2001 when I signed on to my internet provider I saw the headline that the first tower had been hit. I said “Oh shit” and signed off and went to work. Hours later a friend dropped by and started to fill me in and my mind immediately said, “where the fuck were the interceptors”. As a USAF veteran I knew that an automatic, standard operating procedure for fighter jet interception that had operated remarkably efficiently and well for decades had to have been circumvented.
The answer came to me when I read Rupert’s book. Cheney had taken control of that function in May of 2001 and Cheney was directing the war games that fucked up the standard procedures. At the very very least the man is guilty of gross incompetence and dereliction of duty but IMO that is giving him far too much latitude based on the documented facts.
To avoid the verdict of conspiracy surrounding the events of 911 is, again IMHO, falling into our cultural denial syndrome when it comes to judging leaders who are supposed to imbue the minimal of human virtue.
The inconsistencies and events I have read surrounding the London bombings does not in my mind prove a conspiracy but my credulity is taxed to the maximum to not believe some complicity on the part of both the British and Israeli governments and probably the US as well
We have all been so spooked for so long for fear of being labeled conspiracy nut cases that we are culturally intimidated to not call a spade a spade and speak the obvious.
Posted by: Juannie | Jul 21 2005 23:53 utc | 23
Well, we won’t get harmed for seeing the truth. And so far, for discussing it. I can’t imagine what’s got people paralyzed.
Posted by: jm | Jul 22 2005 0:09 utc | 24
Take more than 1 roll of film of any major bridge or bldg from various angles and 3 FBI offices will be tied up for days looking into which ship your relatives landed ashore on in 1689. It’s all good farce and fodder for observers of the supremely absurd.
Good point Steve. I think it says something about inherently self-defeating approaches (i.e. the top heavy, lumbering, unintelligent Security State vs the small fast-moving mammals). The unwieldiness of the Security State approach with its massive bureacracies and its pathetically anal-retentive, control-freak attitudes to “safety” (particularly well-developed in total-safety-obsessed middle class Amurka) makes it more vulnerable to disruption than a more decentralised, localised, less restrictive society. It can easily be provoked — like the lumbering American military machine — into chasing its own tail, shooting itself in the foot, squandering its resources on snipe hunts, smearing egg on its own face, and so forth.
There’s also something rather eerily ironic about the notion of Al-Qaeda-like groups mimicking Ray Kroc’s recipe for success.
We have all been so spooked for so long for fear of being labeled conspiracy nut cases
you know, after jm’s comment i almost posted ‘i don’t want anyone to think i’m a wingnut’ and canceled it. i didn’t watch all the stuff either. and i wasn’t plugged into a computer yet. we have a lethal enemy of the people in power, i put nothing past them. nothing.
Posted by: annie | Jul 22 2005 0:18 utc | 26
Actually Bubb, we couuld say that terrorism is just laissez-faire freemarket violence, whereas conventional armed forces are for socialised Statist violence. The US armed forces purchasing, requisitions and base construction economy constitutes the largest command economy left on the planet since the collapse of the FSU. Presumably the Turrists buy their weapons on the open market, rather than at jacked-up subsidised prices. In a way they should be the darlings of the rightwing neolibs — proving all the advantages of the free market…?
(afterthought) “lean and mean” as you might say. downsized, outsourced, transnational. using low-cost temporary help too (real temporary in some cases, certainly no problem with health benefits or old age pensions for suicide bombers).
Actually Bubb, we couuld say that terrorism is just laissez-faire freemarket violence, whereas conventional armed forces are for socialised Statist violence. The US armed forces purchasing, requisitions and base construction economy constitutes the largest command economy left on the planet since the collapse of the FSU. Presumably the Turrists buy their weapons on the open market, rather than at jacked-up subsidised prices. In a way they should be the darlings of the rightwing neolibs — proving all the advantages of the free market…?
Posted by: DeAnander | July 21, 2005 08:20 PM | #
That is an interesting analysis and certainly worthwhile. My thoughts weren’t so clearly spelled out, but my reasoning is that the classical liberal market model is supposed to create goods cheaper and more efficiently. Clearly as terrorism is evolving, it is acting in an extremely similar manner. The top-down “command and control” (as the neo-cons like to say) Al Qaeda economy has quickly evolved into a decentralized market of individual actors looking to fulfill the same end objectives. Except in the case of the market economy, the objectives are money and in the case of the Al Qaeda economy, the objective is… I really actually don’t know; perhaps violence, destruction, who really knows anymore.
Here’s a new slogan, “Terror: Faster, Cheaper and More Efficient”. Maybe we could call it “Terror 2.0”?
Posted by: Bubb Rubb | Jul 22 2005 0:59 utc | 29
@De:
Presumably the Turrists buy their weapons on the open market…
Yup, and they were just talking about it on Sixty Minutes last Sunday.
Posted by: catlady | Jul 22 2005 1:50 utc | 30
@Bubb Rubb when you say
but my reasoning is that the classical liberal market model is supposed to create goods cheaper and more efficiently. Clearly as terrorism is evolving, it is acting in an extremely similar manner.
one could say that that is evidence that the ‘terrarists’ and the capitalists operate in similar ways, from there one can get to the conclusion that they are probably similar types of people (the ones in control that is) which is just one more reason for us to not spend too much time in worrying who it was that did the dirty deed.
One or other group of sociopaths will continue to attack innocents in Bagdhad or Britain as long as ordinary people in either place don’t make it plain that any attack on innocents no matter what the justification, is intolerable. Anything else just continues the cycle of fingerpointing (“see they kill kiddies in Bagdhad/Britain”) and violence (“it’s an unfortunate fact that if you live your life in a community that harbours terrarists/invades other nations you can be subject to ‘collateral damage'”).
The only people that we as individuals can hope to exert any influence on is those within our own cultural reference. Citizens need to make it plain that any civilian casualties are intolerable no matter the ‘justification’. If we do there is a much better chance that the ‘other’ sociopaths will be unable to justify to kiddies that violence against our society is condonable.
There is another even more urgent reason for inspiring our ‘leaders’ to quit their murdering and wanton beat-ups of the ‘other’ sides murdering.
That is, nothing like every sociopath in the world is a Muslim fundamentalist. Those other fame seeking, sewer inhabiting egoists must already be getting pretty hot under the collar about the amount of ‘ink’ devoted to muslim terrarists.
How long is it gonna be before every weak minded fool that lives on resentment; works out that this sort of terrarism is quite easy AND that it is even easier if you aren’t a Muslim.
I don’t want to provoke a discussion about the ‘truth’ behind all the solo assasinations in the 60’s 70’s and 80’s but lets face it more than a few were just small men who wanted to be heard and had noticed that shooting someone famous made the shooter famous.
Acetone peroxide is a straightforward synthesis that certainly doesn’t require a PhD in Chemistry to construct. Incidentally has anything more been said/heard about that fellow in Egypt who it seems may just be more of the ‘collateral damage’. He got the Warholl regulation 15 minutes and he may not have done anything.
As usual I digress, any fool can make a bomb with or without the internet since public libraries have been providing this information to the self loathers since Andrew Carnegie first ripped $100 off the people and put $1 into ‘edjucashun’. So with all this free publicity these massacres create, it can only be a matter of time before someone on the fringe of Dwarf Lesbian Dolphins for Peace or Heterosexual Rednecks for War really lets one rip.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 22 2005 2:02 utc | 31
Billmon said, Well, rapt, if you’re going to talk like that, you really ought to share YOUR vast right-wing conspiracy theory with us.
This response disappoints me more than ever Billmon; it sounds rather defensive. The facts are right in front of your nose if you take the trouble to look them up. I don’t have to spell it out for you or for most of the participants here on MoA. Annie and jm get it, and many others too I am sure.
AlQaeda is a construct originating with CIA back in the day when OBL was needed to help bring down the Soviet regime in Afghanistan. If you want to argue that this vaguely defined Muslim organisation is responsible for 9/11 or for the London attacks, I would expect you to at least show some hard evidence that this is so. So far I have seen none, and I have searched hi and lo. Do you have some?
Posted by: rapt | Jul 22 2005 2:17 utc | 32
rapt,
That’s another thing that absolutely amazed me. With no evidence, it was concluded that Al Quaeda was responsible. That’s the game now. Accusation with no proof or even an attempt to lay it out. That’s part of the real perpetrators’ MO. To ramrod the guilty party into the minds of the people. And all these despicable acts are committed on this non evidence.
No one believes me when I tell them that this terror threat is a hoax. Terrorism has been used as a tactic forever and I can’t prove it, but I believe it’s happeneing in about the same amount as always. It’s just getting hyped now. It’s become a mythological monster masking the real story. It’s bullshit.
All you have to do is the usual… look at motive. For example, 911. Who stood to gain the most?
From what I can see, terrorist groups are usually defending their territory, not attacking superpowerful nations, for god’s sake. As if they could. Really.
Posted by: jm | Jul 22 2005 6:58 utc | 33
rapt, i didn’t hear defensiveness in billmons statement. it’s the sort of statement that can get lost in translation w/out voice thru this format. i heard the ‘YOUR’ as a challenge to come out w/it. and if hilary can say right wing conspiracy….
relaxxxx, don’t you start sounding defensive. there may be a few regulars that believe the hype, but at this bar, we’re safe.
Posted by: annie | Jul 22 2005 7:16 utc | 34
jm: The US as superhero myth. Why do you think that terrorists couldn’t have penetrated the defences around your superhero lair?
rapt: Your answer is essentially “if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.” It’s not very convincing.
My $.02. Anyone who wants grist from the right-wing conspiracy mill need only visit Mike Rivero’s site, anti-Mossad but not anti-semitic (IMHO). There’s plenty of material there to raise serious questions about the “official coincidence-conspiracy theory”, i.e.
Al Qaeda for conspiracy and everything else is just coincidence. Even if one discounts 85% of non-official conspiracy theory as wild conjecture, the remaining 15% is sufficient to legitimate disbelief of the government sanctioned legend. For example, the Odigo warnings, the Zim lease cancellation, and the Northern Shield defense exercises are documented, and though they prove nothing, they certainly justify more than a raised eyebrow.
As to DID’s
As far as the “was it them or us” discussion goes I really can’t get too worked up about that because
a/ we”ll never know b/ no ordinary citizen has any means of effecting control over ‘them’ or ‘us’, c/ it is doubful the bombers REALLY know who they were working for and d/ the outcome will be exactly the same (urban panic increased restrictions on individuals) no matter whoddit.
I agree with point c/, refuse (irrationally perhaps) to accept a/ and b/, and respectfully beg to differ on point d/, at least assuming “the truth comes out”, which is something I do get quite “worked up about”. I find it encouraging that the 9/11 wives have now formally declared their dissatisfaction with the Kean-Hamilton-Zelikow 9/11 Commission report.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Jul 22 2005 8:43 utc | 38
ok, maybe that’s not the appropriate term to use.
billmon has a good new post.
Posted by: annie | Jul 22 2005 8:45 utc | 39
Colman,
It’s not heroism. It’s super spending, super building, super maintaining a strong system of defense that, of course, could be penetrated but not without extreme effort. The warning system alone. Planes flying off course unbothered? It doesn’t make sense to me. The response mechanism is ferociously rapid. If terrorists ever could get through, it wouldn’t have been like that. But they wouldn’t. They stick to what they do well.
I would think that if terrorists ever did penetrate the US defenses it would be from within. Trying to get through the air defense system is too hard. They’re too smart for that.
Posted by: jm | Jul 22 2005 8:47 utc | 40
The list of things that are suspect is so long and many of us have been through them many times. It’s just not complicated if you start with motive. Al Quaeda didn’t have one. They want us out of their territory, not to penetrate ours. They want to win.
Posted by: jm | Jul 22 2005 8:52 utc | 42
colman, the idea that you think any american here thinks of our government or our forces as superhero, really, who do you think your addressing? obviously we can be brought down, look at iraq. the scale of ineptitude that would have to have occurred in order to pull off what happened on 9/11 boggles the mind. if not the pentagon, if not the world trade center, what are all these grandiose apparatuses of defense for?
i don’t know what happened, but the likelyhood of it playing out the way its been spoonfed to us , well, this takes a willingness , a gullibleness that is certainly no less far fetched than imagining the complicity. 9/11 fit into their plans hand in glove.
it was perfect. perfect villan, perfect shock, perfect solution, for somebody. follow the money. i may be wrong, but i doubt it.
Posted by: annie | Jul 22 2005 9:14 utc | 43
So you’re willing to accept that they are willing to kill thousands of Americans for their own ends, but not that they’re willing to spend gazillions of dollars on bullshit defence measures in order to help out their friends and bribe their electors? Given the general competence of the US state (What have they done right recently? Name one thing.) – I don’t see what your point is meant to be.
All that 9/11 required was complacent defence forces together with inept leadership. Think you may have had both of those?
Debs,
Do you know about this story?
The ricin ring that never was
Yesterday’s trial collapse has exposed the deception behind attempts to link al-Qaida to a ‘poison attack’ on London
Duncan Campbell
Thursday April 14, 2005
The Guardian
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posted by: john | Jul 22 2005 12:38 utc | 46
Thanks annie. I dropped my defensiveness in the bushes on the way to work this morning. I feel a lot better now.
What still irks me no end though is how successfull this alQaeda scam has been. Whattrweall, idiots?
Posted by: rapt | Jul 22 2005 12:56 utc | 47
This is depressing enough — it means the war against terrorism is even more likely to become a perpetual, endless struggle, like the war against bathroom mildew.
Isn’t it nice that the terrorists plans work in tandem with the Cheney/Bush/Rove strategy of perpetual war? When will America realize that the number one beneficiary of the GWOT aren’t the swelling ranks of terrorists in the Mideast, but Republican political gains, and their attendant fascist tendencies, here at home?
Posted by: Phil from New York | Jul 22 2005 14:23 utc | 48
Hi
I noticed several error reports when an older page was referred from here. I make changes almost weekly and apparently I moved http://smokr.info/911/Towers.htm and someone linked to it here.
The new address of that page is WTC.htm and covers the entire complex of buildings.
The towers are also on separate pages now, as are thier collapses.
Sorry if anyone got lost looking for a downed page. Over a hundred bad requests so sorry again.