The tories have been using the “UK ricin plot” and the murder of DC Stephen Oake by Kamel Bourgass, a bogus asylum seeker, to justify their immigration policy. Charles Clarke and Labour have responded with talk about terrorism and ID cards.
The amount of misinformation about this case from US and UK politicians and from press hysteria in the run-up to the Iraq war is shocking. Colin Powell used the murder to paint a picture of al-Qaida sleeper cells spread throughout Europe, with links to Iraq and Afghanistan, secretly plotting deadly poison attacks. Even reading coverage today, you could be forgiven for having some serious misconceptions about the actual severity and nature of the threat, so allow me to dispel a few myths.
1. Ricin and other poisons were discovered in the Wood Green flat raid. As scientific expert witness Duncan Campbell explains in today’s Guardian:
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.
Nor were any other poisons found. According to Dr. Pearce, “All tests were negative”.
2. Recipes to “purify” deadly poisons were discovered. Recipes were discovered for ricin, nicotine, cyanide, solanine and botulinum poisons. Most of these recipes were neither sophisticated nor particularly deadly, according to globalsecurity.org. Ricin, for example, is found in castor beans. The ricin recipe effectively just involved mushing up beans, and does not purify the ricin in any way. When scientists followed the recipe they found that the activity of the resulting paste was 10 times less than the poison in the beans originally, ie 90% of the ricin was inactivated by the procedure.
Other reports in the press mention apple pips and cyanide. 30,000 pips would be required to produce one lethal dose.
3. The plot was an al-Qaida conspiracy. Firstly, only one man, Kamel Bourgass, was convicted —hardly evidence of an al-Qaida cell. No credible evidence exists to suggest that Bourgass was linked to al-Qaida. Mohamed Meguerba, under “interrogation” in Algeria, confessed that he and Bourgass had recieved special poisons training in a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. He later retracted the statement. Due to the reputation of Algerian “interrogation” techniques, this evidence would never have stood in court, so it was not used by the prosecution. The prosecution then planned to link the poison recipes to al-Qaida sources, before it was discovered that they were actually derived from american websites, as explained in detail by this globalsecurity.org article. Despite this, a leader in the Times yesterday claimed:
What is clear, however, is that the plot … was real, was linked to al-Qaeda’s assault on Western society and came dangerously close to success
4. That there was a threat of a poison attack on the London Underground. None of the poison recipes discovered could have been used to produce a poison anywhere near potent enough for a widespread poison attack on the underground. Kamel Bourgass was only convicted of conspiracy to cause a “public nuisance by using poisons or explosives to cause disruption, injury or fear”, not conspiracy to commit murder.
Anyone who saw the BBC’s excellent The Power of Nightmares will recognise what’s going on here. There is a self-delusional tendancy in parts of the intelligence community (encouraged by certain politicians for political ends) to see vast terrorist networks hiding amongst us, secret and sophisticated conspiracies to attack us, and bond villains directing operations from underground lairs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The true nature of the terrorist threat is often quite different. Kamel Bourgass is a murderer, having stabbed several police officers, resulting in one death. But he was not a highly trained superterrorist and neither was he acting as part of a shadowy underground terror cell taking orders from bin Laden. He was a dangerous individual, no doubt inspired by other Islamic terrorist acts, who was probably acting alone like the shoe bomber Richard Reid. The threat from him was nowhere near as great as implied by many parts of the press.
BBC refers to the Wood Green flat here as a “suspected chemical weapons laboratory”, and I switched over to newsnight this evening to catch Paxman mentioning biological weapons. I guess one could theoretically describe ricin as a chemical weapon and botulinum as a biological weapon, but the word “poison” would be far more suitable. By no stretches of the imagination are the described preparations weapons of mass destruction, as talk of “chemical and biological weapons” might suggest. Ricin has only ever been used for single poisonings. The recipes found in the flat could only be used to make relatively small quantities of poison (and Bourgass did not even manage that), and even then a fairly significant quantity would have to be ingested by the victim to result in death. That is why Bourgass was not convicted of conspiracy to commit murder.
Finally, one more thought from Duncan Campbell in his piece in the Guardian:
The experience of being an expert witness on these issues has made me feel a great deal safer on the streets of London.
—Update: It seems The Register and Chicken Yoghurt got there 12 hours before I did with this. Both excellent reads.