Shannon Rogers Guess Richardson of New Boston, Texas, originally called the Federal Bureau of Investigation claiming that her husband had sent the [ricin] letters, officials said. The investigators found that she had sent the letters herself, they said. Richardson is an actress with minor roles on television shows like The Walking Dead and the Vampire Diaries, and was arrested in Arkansas on charges that will be filed Friday afternoon ...Ricin mailing in the US has set a grotesque and unusual standard in the US during the last sixty days. The firsts: Two out of the three cases are implicated in attempts to frame acquaintances. J. Everett Dutschke, as outlined in a grand jury indictment handed down earlier this week, sent ricin letters as part of a plot to frame Paul Kevin Curtis. And now Shannon Richardson is added to the list. There has also never been any time in American history when so much castor powder ricin-tainted mail was sent to gain attention. It's never happened before. In fact, it's never happened anywhere globally, as far as I know, ever. It is the first time in American history that a president, Barack Obama, has been sent, not one -- but three -- letters tainted with ricin. Ricin mailing (not powder hoax mailing) is a phenomenon recent in American life and three poison letters to the president, from three different people -- in Mississippi, Washington and Texas, is another dubious global standard setter. This never happens anywhere else. In fact, it has never happened to any other president. Coincidence? Yeah, sure. Our country has a small number of ricin crackpots. And what's one of the first things they've thought of when concocting their schemes? Sending mail to Barack Obama! And it's all been just serendipity, the idiosyncratic flights of fancy in perturbed minds. Right. Our ricin mailers say much about American society in 2013. And what it says people don't like to talk about much, that's for sure.
From her Facebook page, did Shannon Guess Richardson not like her husband and the President?
Ricin will never be a good weapon. But because of the war on terror millions of Americans believe just the opposite. And to this day, many counter-terror experts with zero practical knowledge in biochemistry continue to tell anyone who will listen that it is easy to make. Castor meal, or what results after castor seeds are ground are about five percent protein. A five percent nitrogen content in castor meal comes with the protein and that is why it was used as fertilizer when the US still had a large castor farming and milling business. Of the protein content in castor seeds, some is ricin. This is easily illustrated using SDS gel electrophoretic analysis of castor powder samples. (Which is just what a national bioterror defense lab in Maryland does when it receives samples recovered in ricin cases.) Here is what a sample recovered from a ricin case looks like, analytically.
Examples from a ricin domestic terrorism case in the US begin in the lanes to the right of the clear lane. The single band lane to the left is a lab ricin standard. And the arrow denotes ricin component in the crude mixture from castor seeds.
The above shows a crude but complex mixture, of which ricin is only one part. Active ricin exists within it but it is far from pure.
And this is why the recipes on the Internet are irrelevant except as lures and news items to be gawked at. They don't do anything practical in the sense of a biochemical purification process.
No pure ricin is ever produced in domestic ricin case. It's way beyond the capability of those who've been caught doing it.
Occasionally, someone departs from the script that ricin is easy to make and attempts to find someone who can really explain the nature of it.
Today, from the small newspaper, The Mining Express of Houghton, Michigan:
Sarah Green, chair of the Tech chemistry department, said ricin stops all cell activities of the organism it attacks. However, ricin is effective as a weapon against humans only under certain circumstances ... In order for ricin to be effective as an airborne substance, Green said it would have to be a very fine powder and a huge quantity, perhaps tons, would be needed to make it a weapon of mass destruction ... Despite its possible toxicity, Green said only someone with a training in chemistry could make ricin an effective weapon. "It takes quite a bit of purification," she said..People who actually know the protein chemistry business realize that production of "tons" of ricin is a ludicrous proposition. Decades ago the US military tried to make a weapon out of ricin. It even filed a patent, one which became a contentious matter after 9/11. But the patent, which I described many years ago here, was developed by those operating in the dark on the true nature of ricin. Because of that, their work actually degraded ricin. And there has never been any compelling evidence that this old US military work on "weaponizing" ricin was effective. Despite all this, the US mainstream media will never get with the program. It's too complicated a story. And that means less eyeballs for the website page. The damage wrought is irreversible. The lore on ricin is deeply dug in and we will always have a small number of very suggestible, angry and disturbed people who pound castor beans, a first among western nations.
Related: A general history of ricin cases during the war on terror. (Many pages long.) Originally published at Dick Destiny blog. About the author. George Smith has consulted in domestic and foreign ricin cases.]]>
Shannon Guess Richardson of New Boston, TX, a ricin babe?
The FBI detained Nathaniel D. Richardson of New Boston on Thursday after his wife , Shannon Guess Richardson, tipped authorities that she'd found a suspicious material in Tupperware in her refrigerator as well as searches for ricin on the home computer.
The FBI picked up Richardson for questioned and dispatched its mobile evidence and WMD units to the Richardson household, which was flipped.
While castor seeds were found in Nathaniel D. Richardson's car, under questioning he amazingly claimed they were not his and that it was the wife who had sent the poison letters to the President and Mayor Bloomberg. The FBI released Richardson yesterday, although he remains a suspect.
Richardson's wife has now come under suspicion.
Shannon Guess Richardson had been married three times prior to Mr. Richardson. And with five children from the priors, plus another on the way, the marriage is headed for divorce. (Coincidentally, accused ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke has been married three times.)
Of course, the upshot is that as in the case of J. Everett Dutschke, this is more dual use ricin mail, poison letters to frame someone you wish to be rid of, and for officials. But who is the framer and who the framed? Or is it a husband-and-wife ricin-mailing team that has now fallen into scapegoating?
This is what the FBI is attempting to sort.
Can haz castor seeds?
Note blobs of castor powder containing ricin and oil stains on Bloomberg letter.
Reprinted:
It then proceeds to explain what constitutes various tier threats.
The Stuxnet virus, which the report coyly declines to mention was developed and deployed by the United States, was a Tier 4 threat. The Agent.btz worm/malware, a piece that circulated worldwide in 2008, is given the same rating.
Which I and others would call inflated but which left a lasting scar on the US military because it demonstrated that DoD was no better at keeping viruses off its networks than anyone else.
Agent.btz is never actually named in the Advanced Cyber Threat report. Instead the authors reference only the problem contained by "Buckshot Yankee," which means nothing to laymen because it is not explained in the edition released to the public audience.
Buckshot Yankee was the name given to the operation aimed at neutralizing Agent.btz.
As an illustrative example of what constitutes a past Tier 6 threat, the DSP report comes up with the spying IBM Selectric typerwriter, machines that were altered by the Soviets to collect and transmit what was typed on them. The spying typewriters were put into US embassies in Moscow and Leningrad.
A newer Tier 6 threat is what I call the Subversive Chip of Cyber Doom.
The subversive chip would work normally in US computing and weapons systems until triggered by conditions or an outside signal. At which point it could transmit compromised information or destroy the processor and operating system.
So let's not outsource all computer manufacturing to China. Oh, wait...
Other parts of the document discuss growing the US capacity for offensive cyberwar and establishing a "resilient" cyber force, a potentially immense open-ended project that is said to be of the utmost urgency.
It was legitimate homespun country music, credible cover versions of Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up" on the B-side, a rendition of another standard, "Pass Me By (If You're Only Passing Through)" on the A.
Billed as Bruce Ivins & the Country Boys, the record is credited to Nashville Recordings, "a record-making plant that did a lot of small pressings in the 70s and 80s," the collector told me. "Most likely a couple hundred or so were done ..." (The single is archived on the web here.)
In the earlier part of the last decade another man who came under a cloud of suspicion after purchasing castor seeds was Robert Alberg of Kirkland, WA.
Alberg purchased five pounds worth, apparently with the intent to make ricin. After his arrest, the court recognized he was profoundly impaired and granted release under a five year parole guideline. Alberg promptly went back to trying to obtain castor seeds and was jailed.
A local editorial cartoon from the time describes Alberg's plight: "When Seattle lonely heart and autism sufferer Robert Alberg wasn't writing songs about sand and being utterly alone, trying to sell DIY hydrogen gas kits on the Internet or placing wife wanted signs about town, he was busy making the deadly toxin ricin and sending e-mails threatening to wipe out all of humanity before blasting off in a rocket ship ... He was arrested by the FBI before he could secure a recording contract," it reads.
Alberg's very forlorn acoustic music is archived on YouTube and he, or friends, have sold it as a CD here.
Like Alberg, J. Everett Dutschke stands accused of making ricin. Unlike Bruce Ivins, the anthrax mailer, recent American history has shown that castor bean pounders kill and sicken no one.
The reason for that is easy to understand: Pounding castor seeds into a powder produces only something crude, a mixture which contains some ricin and many other things, not enough to pose any hazard to people who get the letters or handle the mail. What has been shoveled into letters in the case of J. Everett Dutschke, and a new incident this week in Spokane, WA, is not pure ricin. Pure ricin has never been recovered in any US terror investigation.
Crude castor powder containing ricin, you see, is simply not poisonous enough.
Decades ago the US had a thriving industry deriving oil and fertilizer from castor seeds. As a result, the country had mills that produced dusts and powders as waste, which was not a significant health hazard although it was known to cause allergies and asthmatic conditions in susceptible individuals.
Over time this common and prosaic knowledge was lost, replaced with the modern mythology of terrorism, one that trained Americans to believe ricin was easy to make simply by bean pounding.
No one can really say what attracts a few unusual American men to it.
Pure madness and mental dysfunction, social anomie, or just a bad itch, one scratched by making what they believe to be a secret deadly powder?
Of course, bean pounding never stays secret. What use is it to make such secret poison powder if others never know how clever you have been? Secret poison powders yearn to be lessons. The maker must tell friends or acquaintances or they are no good.
And so they occasionally emerge as news, something to send to others in letters so as to make fear and sensation.
In the years prior to what the FBI says was his buying of castor seeds on eBay, J. Everett Dutschke pursued musical dreams.
"There's Delta blues, Chicago blues, Texas blues, Piedmont blues and Jump blues, to name a few, but Everett 'Dusty' Dutschke is taking the blues to new places," reads a promotional piece on the net from three years ago, also mentioning one of the four Robodrum albums, Guitar Czar, here.
A promotional piece, in snapshot, of accused ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke & Robodrum. Dutschke has maintained he is not guilty of the charge and the case is before a grand jury.
A 2011 interview with J. Everett Dutschke, conducted by a local web DJ named Vinny Bond, is here.
Advance to the 67 minute mark and you'll hear the accused ricin mailer speaking about Robodrum becoming a blues disco hip-hop act.
Indeed, there are videos of this in performance, one in Tupelo, Mississippi, in the summer of 2012, shortly before Dutschke began the ricin caper that would result in the arrest of an innocent man who was the target of a framing.
"College students are going to eat this up," said Dutschke at the time. "Isn't it exciting?"
Dutschke averred he was a "workaholic" who got only two or three hours of sleep a night. "If I hadn't been writing music for tv and movies for the last six months or so, I would have starved."
A famous TV and music composer? Certainly it was within the realm of faint possibility. But J. Everett Dutschke was an embellisher and we can find no evidence of it.
However, the summer of 2012 had J. Everett Dutschke and Robodrum in St. Louis, competing to win a Budweiser Light Battle of the Bands.
It resulted in what's now the one and only example of an American accused of bioterrorism in a ritzy promotional video sponsored and paid for by the King of Beers.
In make-up, glitter and sunglasses, Dutschke sings he doesn't need any fancy women, he just needs his guitar because he'll blow your house down in "Big Bad Wolf," a song from a Robodrum album of the same name. "Enjoy Responsibly" reads the big beer vendor's subtitling on the video.
It was at the same time that Dutschke was beginning to attract notice from authorities in Tupelo.
As the Washington Post put it, for a recent feature:
Check the key line: "Intelligence officials said last month that cyberattacks and cyberespionage have supplanted terrorism as the top security threat facing the United States, and military officials sounded the alarm as well."
The top security threat faces the majority of Americans is economic failure in this country. It's austerity, a stumbling economy, and the stunning growth in inequality leading to ever great social polarization and division.
Now, back to the Pentagon's new report on China. What about the benefits of all that cyberespionage?
In terms of what's actually happening, for example, China has not made any obvious great leap in generating a carrier battlegroup-centered navy.
On the other hand, we certainly do know that the US private sector, our multi-national corporations, are intimately involved in business relations with China. That's hardly news.
Indeed, it is safe to say that the strapped American middle class would have next to nothing if all its household consumer electronics and dry goods of Chinese origin were taken away.
If, for example, Chinese cyberwarriors are stealing Apple's secrets, what does it matter? Is Apple stopping its majority manufacturing through China?
America's electric guitar and rock amplifier companies make the majority of their mainstream goods in China. If Chinese cyberwarriors have stolen plans from Fender Musical Instruments or many other American companies, so?
The entire American industry of pop music instrumentation manufacturing, excepting custom shop artisan work, was sent to China and other countries to increase profit margins and decrease labor costs.
American business ceded its property to the Chinese industrial base for immediate profit in pursuit of the very cheapest unprotected manpower. Quite frequently, it gives property away just for access to lucrative foreign markets and labor.
This was done long before Chinese espionage became an issue the national security megaplex decided to exploit for the purpose of rent-seeking.
Who are you going to find on the street who cares if Chinese cyberwarriors from a building in Shanghai are into American businesses? They've already lost their jobs or much of their earning power. And their access to the Internet is a smartphone made in China.
Take a day off from the propaganda and the memes. Corporate America isn't hiring, haven't they heard? It's not because of mass Chinese cyber-spying.
And here's one more figure from the direct American experience, furnished to again put Chinese cyberespionage/cyberwar efforts in perspective:
You can really tell how Chinese cyberespionage/cyberwar is taking away our futures, right?
Of course, cybersecurity and management of its risk globally, is a huge problem. But it is far from the United States' most pressing security issue. The most pressing things are on the pages of the news everyday. It's national decline brought about by profound failure in economic policy and practice. That failure directly impacts hundreds of millions of Americans each day.
And cyberespionage has nothing to do with it.
Kenneth Pollack, then a very important person. Now a symbol for the time.
Originally published at Dick Destiny blog. About the author.
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