Poison! Al-qaeda! Save yourselves!

Scotland Yard has recently been credited with foiling yet another sinister plan hatched by the nefarious Al Qaeda (the Arabic Emmanual Goldstein, for those living in a box for the last few years). Al Qaeda Poisons Seen Sowing More Panic than Death (Reuters). A literal read of the title indicates that the threat wasn’t so bad, but it includes the words “poison”, “panic” and “death”, so they still get an A for effort. The first sentence of the article cranks it up a notch further, getting everyone’s favorite terrorist organization in there:

“The cracking of an al Qaeda poison plot in Britain lends credence to longstanding warnings from police and security services that militants would attempt an attack using toxins.”

Pity the police that tries desperately to convince an unheeding public that mortal danger lurks around every corner. The people, it seems, refuse to believe it, living lives free of fear and full of hope instead. Am I right? Isn’t that how people react to this stuff?

OK…we lied about the poison

So, cracking the case wide open has proven the scaremongers right and its time to open wide for the police state. That’s the idea a casual browser of the newspaper would get. A more thorough read would get to these lines:

“While no actual poison was found, police discovered recipes and ingredients for making ricin, cyanide and other toxins. Toxicologists said ricin, extracted from castor beans and fatal even in doses of less than a milligram, could easily be made in an ordinary kitchen.”

Dammit! I hate when that happens. I have a bunch of household chemicals for cleaning my bathroom and my bike and stuff. Some of it doesn’t smell so nice and makes me lightheaded. I’ve got some apples and some nail polish remover. I have a broadband, always-on connection to the internet. My apartment, in other words, satisfies the conditions discovered by the police in this nefarious apartment.

But you see how no poison was actually found? You see how this isn’t a story? They arrested some more brown people, just like they do every day. This time they figured they’d also get a lesson or two in:

1. Stay afraid. Danger is all around you.
2. Nebulous warnings about attacks will eventually come true.
3. Believe every word the government says or you will die.
4. Brown people are dangerous and cannot be trusted.

They didn’t even bother to invent a cover story that made sense. Apparently, ricin is “unsuitable for killing large numbers” and that the plan to rub it on car door handles “would have failed, because ricin is poorly absorbed through the skin”. The last time ricin was even in the news was when it killed someone in 1978.

What a terrifying weapon of destruction.

Other experts chime in to list all of the biotoxins and chemical weapons that it is suspected that Al-Qaeda has, including “poisons such as botulinum and ricin [and] may have bacteria like anthrax and plague”. Amazingly, Al-Qaeda, nefarious to a man, has, until now, completely and entirely restrained itself from using any of these weapons. At all.

But the threat is there! Do not be swayed by wishy-washy thinking. If “authorities” say the threat is there, it is there and you will be afraid and you will hand over power of your life and society to them. For your own good.

OK…we lied about Al-Qaeda

Now that we’ve chatted a bit about Al-Qaeda, let’s let …imagining huge poison terror ring by John Lettice (The Register) dispel that connection. In fact, a British court of law found that “the security forces’ case for an al-Qaeda link had been discredited … and a further eight individuals claimed as co-conspirators were cleared or had charges against them dropped.”

Oopsie. Did you notice that retraction in the Reuter’s article? I read the headline about Al-Qaeda and poison, then read halfway through the article that there was no poison, but never saw the part where Reuter’s lets me know that there is no Al-Qaeda in the case either.

Explain to me again why these people are going to jail? Oh yeah, they’re not. Just the one guy, for killing a police officer. But one guy going to jail for murder doesn’t sell papers and it sure as hell doesn’t further any political agendas or increase a police state’s stranglehold. So it needed a little pep.

A really scary story

A story that needs no pep, but that also has seen relatively little reporting (judging by the paucity of results in Google News, the poor man’s Lexis Nexis), is that covered in Q&A: Asian Flu scare. It tell how “A company from the US has sent more than 3,700 labs across the world testing kits containing samples of Asian Flu.” This is a pretty big deal because this is the strain from the “Asian Flu pandemic in 1957-8”. No one has antibodies for it and there are no vaccines to be had.

“Klaus Stohr, of the World Health Organisation, has warned if one person is infected it will spread very quickly as few people have the antibodies to fight the virus.”

That said, “the risk of the flu escaping … is considered very small because of the containment measures [in a lab].” However, let’s play a little game, a thought experiment, if you will. Imagine a Chinese or Cuban (insert your favorite nefarious country here) company had sent this virus to almost every western country. I bet that would have gotten a weensy bit more coverage than this story. At least some local news companies have given more of an effort to stir up fear with “Scientists around the world are racing to prevent a flu pandemic”. Now that’s what I call scaremongering! Doesn’t quite jibe with the BBC tone, but what the hell.

The Q&A goes on to answer the question of why labs even have this virus.

“Labs across the world will have samples of the virus, as they would other viruses such as smallpox which have also been eradicated, just in case it reappears and they need to develop a vaccine.”

I see. Very convincing, but, if there was another outbreak, wouldn’t it be pretty simple to just get a sample from one of the victims? The only point to keeping around viruses no one can protect themselves against is to develop weapons. So, it’s not surprising that this company is in the States, because that’s where a lot of biological weapon research takes place.