assasination Posts

The bullets and bombs have finally found their mark. It is no surprise to learn of yet another assasination attempt against Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Details are still sketchy and conflicting but the only thing we really need to know is that this attempt was successful and that Bhutto is dead less than two weeks before Parliamentary elections that might well have brought her into power for the third time.

Pakistan is a country who's top government scientist exported atomic bomb-making across the world for decades. It still hosts Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan's Taliban are still more-or-less headquartered in its Western provinces. The standoff with India has spawned war after war over the decade, now nuclear-enabled should either country get so emboldened. Billions of dollars of United States money has left Washington for Islamabad since 9/11 and a popular politician can't even campaign there without deadly assassination attempts. Pakistan is one of the world's hot spots, a nexus of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism. It is a very sad day today indeed.

In case any of you were getting lazy on national defense, back in the news comes Ricin. Someone recently mailed some of this bean-based poison in an envelope to the U.S. Senate . No one's been hurt but the T.V. is showing a lot of stern-faced Senators putting on a brave front.

Readers of Nonviolence.org will remember back in June when the Bush Administration announced they had discovered the raw materials for weapons of mass destruction in iraq. The raw materials? Castor beans. The weapon? Ricin. Indeed, this is a WMD and a terrorist threat that doesn't ever seem to kill anybody:

[The U.S. military] claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiled a few hundred bags of castor beans to use to make a biological agent called ricin. In my post US: iraqis Planned Operation Fart and Stink I pointed out that the supposed weapons worked on the well-documented principle that beans can produce gas and indigestion--ricin just works especially well and concentrates the effect enough to kill someone in a particularly messy way.

Here we have another instance of a senior US official claiming an easily-disprovable claim of iraqi weapons of mass destruction, just weeks after the now-infamous Niger/iraq forgery appeared in the President's State of the Union address. Powell and others in the U.S. have trotted out the ricin threat repeatedly yet it's hard to make a weapon out of the stuff. It's really only ever been used for a ridiculous James Bond-like assasination in 1991, when a Bulgarian agent is supposed to have killed a dissident in London using a ricin-filled pellet fired from an umbrella tip (one is reminded of Austin Power's Dr. Evil: "I'm going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death"). As one site points out The current wisdom among biological defense experts is that ricin is more likely to be used as a tool in assassinations than as a weapon of mass destruction.

Ricin isn't anthrax. One health official told the Washington Post that "There is essentially no human experience with the inhalation of ricin." The reason is that its only lethal when you ingest it or inject it (this is why it was laughable when the Bush Administration called a hill of beans a WMD).

The Bean Defense... Readers might remember the field day I had a few weeks ago when US occupying forces announced they had uncovered a cache of beans. They claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiled a few hundred bags of castor beans to use to make a biological agent called ricin. In my post US: Iraqis Planned Operation Fart and Stink I pointed out that the supposed weapons worked on the well-documented principle that beans can produce gas and indigestion--ricin just works especially well and concentrates the effect enough to kill someone in a particularly messy way.

What I didn't do was Google ricin and Iraq. Today I did and found this fascinating article that I missed at the time. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed an Iraq/ricin connection before the House International Relations Committee back in early February:

"The ricin that is bouncing around europe now originated in Iraq -- not in the part of Iraq that is under Saddam Hussein's control, but his security forces know all about it," Powell said.

european intelligence sources quickly discredited this claim, pointing out that it was obvious the european ricin was home-made and not Iraqi. The French were "stunned" that Powell would make such a obviously-wrong statement, and the British flatly stated they were "clear" that that ricin found in London wasn't produced in Iraq.

Here we have another instance of a senior US official claiming an easily-disprovable claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, just weeks after the now-infamous Niger/Iraq forgery appeared in the President's State of the Union address. Powell and others in the U.S. have trotted out the ricin threat repeatedly yet it's hard to make a weapon out of the stuff. It's really only ever been used for a ridiculous James Bond-like assasination in 1991, when a Bulgarian agent is supposed to have killed a dissident in London using a ricin-filled pellet fired from an umbrella tip (one is reminded of Austin Power's Dr. evil: "I'm going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death"). As one site points out The current wisdom among biological defense experts is that ricin is more likely to be used as a tool in assassinations than as a weapon of mass destruction.

There is a clear pattern of the Bush Admininstration deliberately mis-interpreting Iraqi threats to make the case for war. These are purposeful deceptions with only the thinnest escape clause to wiggle through when the lies are exposed. Colin Powell isn't stupid enough to make this kind of repeated mistake and a year of disproven ricin alerts is a mark against the Administration's integrity.