The ricin ring that never was

The ricin ring that never was

This article was removed from The Guardian http://politics.guardian.co.uk/attacks/comment/0,1320,1459178,00.html _____________________________________________________

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.

· Duncan Campbell is an investigative writer and a scientific expert witness on computers and telecommunications. He is author of War Plan UK and is not the Guardian journalist of the same name

A MULTINATIONAL FEDERATION WITHOUT A DEMOCRATIC BASIS

Advocates of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe contend that in the new Union it would establish, the Member States would still have primacy of authority because it is they that would have conferred powers on the Union, under the so-called "principle of conferral"(Art.I-11). They forget that this is how classical-type Federal States have historically developed: by smaller political units coming together and transferring powers to a superior, e.g. 19th century Germany, the USA, Canada, Australia. This contrasts with Federations that have been formed by originally unitary States adopting federal form and devolving power to provinces or regions, e.g. post-War Germany, Russia, Austria, India, Nigeria. Where else after all could Brussels get its powers if not from its Member States, just as the Federal States whose capitals were 19th century Berlin, Washington, Ottawa and Canberra did before it? In the latter cases however the political units that came together to form a Federal State belonged wholly or mainly to one nation, with a common culture, language and history. This gave these Federations a popular democratic basis, and with it a natural legitimacy and authority, in total contrast to the EU Federation-in-the-making, with its many nations, peoples and languages. Therefore the provision of Article I-11 of the EU Constitution: "The limits of Union competences are governed by the principle of conferral", does no more than state the obvious.

Once power is conferred on the Federal level under the EU Constitution, however, there is no provision for a Member State to get it back short of withdrawing from the Union. The EU Constitution would indeed allow for this(Art.I-60), as the Constitutions of other Federations have done before it. Joseph Stalin's 1936 Constitution for the USSR contained a provision permitting states to leave it. The southern Confederate states of the USA thought they possessed a right of withdrawal until their attempt to exercise it in practice precipitated the 1860s American civil war. It is hard to find historical examples of individual provincial states exercising a constitutional right of withdrawal from a Federal State. Much more common is for the multinational Federations themselves to break up, so that everyone leaves, as it were, e.g. the USSR, Czechslovakia, Yugoslavia, the West Indies Federation. The historical tendency seems to be for multinational, multilinguistic Federal States to break up, as the international community of States continues to increase. The number of States in the world has gone from some 60 when the United Nations was established in 1945, to nearly 200 today, and the 21st century will certainly see many more new States formed out of existing multinational ones as the process of Nation State formation gets under way in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.

Those seeking to play down the fact that the proposed EU Constitution is envisaged by its drafters as the fundamental law of another multinational Federation point to the provision of Article I-11 that "Under the principle of conferral, the Union shall act within the limits of the competences conferred upon it by the Member States in the Constitution to attain the objectives set out in the Constitution." They claim that this puts real restraint on Union power. But again this provision does no more than state the obvious: that the Constitution lays down that the Union and its Member States should respect their mutual powers and functions, as should the authorities of all States governed by law. The real political issue is who would interpret what the EU and Member State powers are? Who would decide in the event of disputes between the Federal and provincial state levels as to their respective fields of competence? The answer is the European Court of Justice, that supranational body that would be the new Union's Supreme Court. A Constitution means what the Supreme Court established to interpret it says it means. The European Court of Justice has been notorious for decades for seeking to expand European supranational power to the utmost through its case-law. The experience of the USA and other Federations has shown that historically their Supreme Courts have exercised an enormous federalizing influence by imposing common legal standards on their different political sub-units. There is no comfort for concerned democrats or "sovereignists" in Article I-11.

Nor is there in the further provision of the same Article: "Competences not conferred upon the Union in the Constitution remain with the Member States". Again this states the obvious. It is very similar to the 10th amendment to the American Constitution, adopted in 1791, which provides that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." This 10th Amendment has not prevented the USA from becoming a fully-fledged Federal State, although in several respects it is less centralised than the present EC/EU. Article I-11 offers no reassurance against similar further centralisation in the new European Union. The defining characteristic of Federations as compared with Unitary States is precisely the division of law-making, executive and judicial powers between Federal and provincial state levels, with the former being constitutionally primary or superior, but with each level supposed to respect the competences of the other - as the Constitution lays down for the proposed new European Union.

There is no reassurance for concerned democrats either in Article I-5.1, which requires the Union to respect the "national identities" of its Member States and "their essential State functions." "Identity" is not the same as independence and is not a justiciable category. A people keeps its identity in servitude as well as freedom - Kurds, Chechyns and Palestinians for example. As for "respect (for) essential state functions", again any law-governed Federation and its constituent states should naturally respect the governmental functions carried out at its different levels. So this provision is another tautology, without potential for practically affecting the actual distribution of powers between the Union and its Member States should the Constitution come into force.

.