Fwd: psychoceramics: Fighting back against the Government

[Alan Olsen <alan@clueserver.org>]

This is an interesting spin doctoring of Jim Bell's situation.  I picked
this up off the psychoceramics list.  Why it was there is unclear...

>>From http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/971117/17weap.htm

>Terrorism's next waveNerve gas and germs are the new weapons of choice
> BY DAVID E. KAPLAN
>
>Jeff Gordon thought he had seen it all. A veteran IRS investigator,
>Gordon's job since 1988 had been to probe threats and assaults against
>his fellow agents. There was no shortage in recent years--stabbings,
>fires, mortar attacks, and big unexploded bombs outside IRS offices in
>Los Angeles and Reno, Nevada. But in the first months of this year,
>Gordon found himself working on the strangest case of his career. From
>an informant, he had learned of a Portland, Ore., man named James Dalton
>Bell. Bell owed some $30,000 in back taxes and served as a juror in a
>local "common law court." Dozens of these self-appointed tribunals have
>issued "fines" and even death sentences against public officials.
>Bell was also active in antigovernment forums on the Internet, where he
>had posted a dark scheme threatening murder of troublesome federal
>agents. Participants could send encrypted messages to each other, Bell
>proposed, offering donations to whoever "predicted" how long a targeted
>official would live. The winner, presumably the assassin, would be
>rewarded with electronic fund transfers from anonymous donors, 
>hesuggested.
>Gordon checked further. Bell, it turned out, was an electronics engineer
>at a nearby circuit board manufacturer. He was also an MIT-educated
>chemist who had been arrested eight years earlier for making
>methamphetamine, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. According to
>court records, Bell had once told a friend: "The first thing to remember
>is: Never make a chemist angry at you."
>In February, the IRS docked Bell's wages and seized his 10-year-old car.
>Inside the vehicle, Gordon found instructions for making bombs and
>molotov cocktails. There was also far-right literature, a printout
>listing large amounts of cyanide, and detailed information on
>fertilizer, a key ingredient in the Oklahoma City bomb. But with no
>evidence that Bell had hurt anyone, Gordon could not move.
>A burning stench. Four weeks later, on a Monday morning in March, IRS
>officials encountered a terrible nose-burning stench as they arrived at
>their building in Vancouver, the Portland suburb where Bell lived.
>Investigators traced the smell to a welcome mat dosed with propanethiol.
>The chemical is used by utilities in minuscule concentrations to give
>natural gas its noticeable smell. "It's Bell," Gordon told his boss.
>"I'm sure of it." Bell had attempted twice to buy propanethiol from a
>chemical-supply company in Milwaukee, Gordon then learned. Worried that
>the stink bomb was a trial run for something much worse, on April 1,
>authorities raided Bell's home. They seized five computers and three
>semiautomatic assault rifles, then opened his garage door. Before them
>stood dozens of containers filled with chemicals. There were volatile
>solvents, explosives ingredients, sodium cyanide, nitric acid, and
>diisopropyl fluorophosphate--one of several ingredients that, if
>properly mixed, form nerve gas--all in a residential neighborhood. "The
>level and type of chemicals were extremely unusual," said Leroy
>Loiselle, who managed the cleanup for the Environmental Protection
>Agency. "You don't need nitric acid to keep aphids off your flowers."
>On Bell's computers, Gordon found two other items: the names and home
>addresses of over 100 public officials--IRS employees, FBI agents, local
>police officers--and a 169-page document, The Terrorist's Handbook, with
>detailed instructions for making chemical weapons and high explosives.
>Bell's friends told investigators that he had tried using green beans to
>make botulin toxin, which causes botulism, and that he claimed to have
>successfully made sarin, the nerve gas used by Japanese cultists in
>their 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway.
>Bell was arrested. In July he pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction
>of IRS agents and use of a false Social Security number, and also
>admitted to the stink bomb attack and the cyberassassination scheme. He
>faces up to eight years in prison and $500,000 in fines. Bell declined
>to comment, but he contended earlier that he is merely "a chemical
>hobbyist" and the assassination scheme only an abstract proposal. "I'm a
>talker, not a doer," he said. The IRS's Jeff Gordon remains wary.
>According to court records, after his arrest Bell boasted to a friend
>that police never found his most dangerous chemical weapons. Gordon
>believes they could include a secret stockpile of sarin.
>New generation. Characters like James Dalton Bell are giving federal
>officials fits these days. Bell, they believe, is one of a new
>generation of tinkerers and technicians, of college-educated extremists
>threatening to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons to
>achieve their goals. Since the Aum cult's Tokyo nerve gas attack, FBI
>officials say the number of credible threats to use these weapons has
>jumped from a handful in 1995, to 20 last year, to twice that number
>this year. Among the incidents was the 1995 mailing of a videotape to
>Disneyland, showing two hands mixing chemicals and a note threatening an
>attack on the theme park. Despite a major investigation, the sender was
>never caught. Just last April someone sent a petri dish labeled anthrax,
>an animal disease deadly to humans, to the B'nai B'rith headquarters in
>Washington, D.C. That proved to be a hoax.
>But other threats appear to be quite real. Four militia members in
>Minnesota were convicted recently of planning to assassinate federal
>agents with a biological toxin. In Ohio in 1995, a white supremacist
>pleaded guilty to wire fraud in illegally obtaining three vials of
>bubonic plague bacteria. Investigators have found biochemical agents in
>the hands of political extremists, extortionists, murderers, and the
>mentally ill. U.S. News has learned that the FBI has 50 current
>investigations of individuals suspected of using or planning to use
>radiological, biological, or chemical agents. Bureau officials say a
>major attack in the United States no longer seems unlikely. "The
>consensus of people in the law enforcement and intelligence communities
>is that it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's when," warns
>Robert Blitzer, head of the FBI's terrorism section. "We are 
>veryconcerned."
>To prepare, federal agencies have scrambled to set up new
>counterterrorism strike forces (story, Page 32). Behind all this is the
>very real fear that the world has entered a new stage in terrorism.
>Widespread technical education and high-tech communications have vastly
>increased the number of people with knowledge of how to synthesize
>chemicals and culture bacteria. Books and videos on creating these
>substances--and turning them into weapons--are now available on the
>Internet, at gun shows and survivalist fairs, and through the mail.
>While its effects would be the most destructive, a nuclear incident is
>actually the least likely scenario, according to security experts. More
>likely, they say, would be a biological weapon attack; a chemical attack
>is the next likely possibility. The impact could range from the
>poisoning of an individual to sophisticated attempts at mass murder. So
>far, the majority have been limited efforts by loners or small groups.
>Most worrisome to officials is the possible involvement of more
>established, state-sponsored terrorist organizations--such as
>Hezbollah--with international reach.
>While the number of terrorist attacks, both in the United States and
>abroad, has gone down since the end of the cold war, there is a flip
>side. Individual acts themselves have grown more deadly, as illustrated
>by the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings. In its annual
>terrorism report issued last April, the State Department sees a trend
>"toward more ruthless attacks on mass civilian targets" and the use of
>more powerful weapons.
>Threshold crossed. Until this decade, biological and chemical weapons
>were the province of superpowers or renegade states like Iraq and North
>Korea. But all that changed with Aum Supreme Truth, an obscure sect of
>New Age fanatics based at the foot of Mount Fuji, 70 miles outside
>Tokyo. Recent court testimony from sect members shows how the cult's
>young scientists produced not only anthrax and botulin toxin but also
>various nerve agents, including the sarin used on Tokyo's subway. Later
>attacks were planned for New York and Washington, D.C.
>Still, it is one thing to produce deadly agents and another to use them
>effectively. Aum's attack killed only 12 people of the thousands in the
>subway system, and on seven other occasions, attempted Aum attacks were
>dogged by equipment failures and human error. "Trying to produce 100,000
>casualties is much more difficult than is often stated," observes
>Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
>Tucker notes that problems abound with delivery systems, meteorological
>conditions, and the agents themselves. Still, he warns that even crude
>weapons can easily cause mass disruption. Aum's nerve gas, for example,
>was full of impurities, yet it sent thousands to the hospital.
>What worries police is growing evidence that others share similar
>ambitions. In 1993, two years before the Aum attack, Canadian border
>agents stopped an American electrician named Thomas Lavy and searched
>his car. They found four guns, 20,000 rounds of ammunition, 13 pounds of
>gunpowder, neo-Nazi literature, and $80,000 in cash. Lavy also had
>recipes for biological and chemical weapons and a plastic bag filled
>with white powder. Had the agents opened the bag, they likely would have
>died of respiratory failure and paralysis. Tests showed the substance to
>be ricin, a lethal toxin extracted from the castor bean plant. (Ricin,
>dabbed on a tiny pellet fired from an umbrella-gun, was used by Soviet
>agents to murder a Bulgarian in London in 1978.) The poison is 6,000
>times more toxic than cyanide, and there is no antidote. Lavy had a
>quarter pound of the stuff.
>In 1995, a man named Larry Wayne Harris was arrested after he obtained
>vials of the bacteria that cause bubonic plague (Page 28). Harris is an
>Ohio microbiologist and recent member of the white supremacist Aryan
>Nations. He says his friends will strike at government officials with
>biochemical weapons, if provoked. "If they arrest a bunch of our guys,
>they get a test tube in the mail," he told U.S. News. And, he says, far
>worse could come. "How many cities are you willing to lose before you
>back off?" he asks. "At what point do you say: `If these guys want to go
>off to the Northwest and have five states declared to be their own free
>and independent country, let them do it'?" Authorities take Harris's
>comments seriously.
>The recipes for such poison cocktails are available from underground
>publishers and on the Internet. One popularizer is an Arkansan named
>Kurt Saxon. Through books and videotapes, Saxon has been putting out
>ricin recipes for at least nine years. Convinced that the U.S. will be
>invaded and that the federal government can't be trusted to defend the
>country, he has fashioned various homemade explosives and poisons,
>including cyanide grenades and ricin applicators. In one segment of a
>$19.95 video, Saxon performs like a sinister Julia Child, blending salt
>water and solvents with castor beans. ("Pour in about 4 ounces of
>acetone," he says, "and shake it up nice.") "Uncle Fester," another
>near-legendary figure in the chem-bio underground, has authored such
>family classics as Silent Death, Improvised Explosives, and a guide to
>methamphetamine and LSD manufacture. Fester claims degrees in chemistry
>and biology, and his Silent Death describes how to produce poison gas,
>botulin and shellfish toxins, and ricin.
>Similarly, entire manuals for making homemade explosives--TNT, plastic,
>napalm--can be downloaded from the Net, as well as plans for building
>triggers, fuses, and timers. At least 11 online vendors offer books with
>recipes on biological or chemical weapons, including Silent Death and
>Kurt Saxon's The Poor Man's James Bond. All are based in the United
>States. Adding to the problem, many of the chemicals used to make nerve
>gas and other agents have perfectly legitimate uses and are readily
>available. "The genie has always been out of the bottle," says one
>intelligence analyst. "People are just discovering it."
>The genie is also loose in the Middle East. According to intelligence
>sources, notebooks and computer files recently seized from Hezbollah,
>the Iranian-backed Islamic militia, contain information on how to
>produce chemical agents. Hezbollah has also taken delivery of protective
>gear, including gas masks and bodysuits, and obtained Katyusha rockets
>able to deliver chemical warheads to Israel from their base in Lebanon.
>Hezbollah's interests are shared by at least one other Islamic
>terrorist, Ramzi Yusef, a trained engineer and reputed mastermind of the
>1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yusef's organization researched making
>sarin and reportedly planned to assassinate President Clinton in the
>Philippines with phosgene gas. The trade center bombers also packed
>cyanide into the charge that rocked the building; the chemical
>apparently evaporated in the explosion.
>Some analysts believe there have been other, unnoticed, attacks in the
>United States. "It's almost certain there have been uses of biological
>agents that have gone undetected," says Seth Carus, a proliferation
>expert at the National Defense University. "Most cases are known because
>they came to the attention of law enforcement through informants, not
>because of medical authorities." Health officials, for example, were
>mystified by a mass outbreak of salmonella poisoning in Oregon in 1984.
>The cause--an attack by a nearby religious sect--went undetected until
>the cult's demise a year later.
>Exotic poisons are attracting not only terrorists but also murderers and
>extortionists. Several recent trials have featured ricin as a murder
>weapon. Product tamperers, too, are increasingly turning to biological
>agents. Says Lori Ericson of Kroll Information Services: "We're seeing
>E. coli, cholera, salmonella, HIV." In one British case, microbiologist
>Michael Just threatened to contaminate the products of five food
>companies with dysentery-causing bacteria. To make his point, he sent
>the firms test tubes filled with the pathogen.
>Society can likely tolerate the occasional murderer or extortionist
>wielding biological or chemical weapons. The greater challenge
>undoubtedly will come from those with broader grievances, from
>terrorists steeped in extremism and political hatred. Perhaps scariest
>of all are the criminally insane, who may bring technical ability, but
>little judgment, to their homemade laboratories. Last April, authorities
>raided the house of one Thomas Leahy in Janesville, Wis. Leahy, who
>takes medication for schizophrenia, was obsessed with creating "killer
>viruses" to stop his enemies, both real and imagined, according to
>police. He pleaded guilty to possessing ricin, but a search of his home
>also found animal viruses and vaccines, staph bacteria culture,
>fungicides, insecticides, hypodermic needles, and gas masks. As Leahy
>reportedly told his wife, you can "never have too many poisons."
> With Douglas Pasternak and Gordon Witkin
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