psychoceramics: Fighting back against the Government (what more can a poor whiteboy do?)

["Johannes Scmidt" <redskul @ hotmail.com>]

>From http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/971117/17weap.htm
mentions Larry Harris ready to strike against government 
withbioweapons..(?)-

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
***********************************************************************
BIOWAR-L Biowar/Bioterrorism/Toxins Mailing List
To unsubscribe or subscribe: send a message to m--@l--.sonic.net
with the following text: unsubscribe biowar-l or subscribe biowar-l 
(letter

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com