Both the British government report on Iraq’s alleged WMD of September 2002 and the CIA report of October 2002 raised the poison ricin as a possible biological weapon Iraq could be producing. The issue of terrorism was also hyped at the same time, and both Iraq and the “war on terror” were directly linked as being one and the same thing. Tony Blair had deployed troops and tanks around Heathrow airport, and similar deployments were made in American cities – this was particularly ironic when you think that Iraq needed similar hardware to defend itself against a much more serious and real threat. A selection of media headlines gives the gist of the sensational coverage. Time magazine said, “A presumed al-Qaeda terror lab had been shut down”. A BBC headline from 7 January 2003 said: “Terror police find deadly poison”. Its first paragraph said, “Doctors have been warned to look out for signs of exposure to the potentially lethal poison ricin, after it was found by anti-terrorist police at an address in north London”.1 An Associated Press headline from the same day (7 January 2003) said: “Deadly Poison Ricin Found in Britain; Six Arrested”.2

Australian Prime Minster John Howard was interviewed on Australian TV on 10 January 2003, and the relevant excerpt is as follows: INTERVIEWER: …a ricin plant has been found in London in the past few days. Are we on alert for something similar here? Do we have the expertise, the technology, the raw materials for that sort of thing here? PRIME MINISTER: Well we are on alert, there have been no indications of that thus far and I hope that remains to be the case. I believe we are prepared and I don’t want to alarm people by you know over exaggerating the risk but those sorts of things are part of the new reality with which we must live and one of the reasons why you can’t leave a stone unturned in preventing weapons and capacity for mass destruction falling into the wrong hands.3 There is a clear reference to Iraq here.

The issue was raised when John Howard was interviewed on Australian radio on 28 January 2003: INTERVIEWER: I mean two weeks ago we were worried about a little bit of ricin. I mean, what horrors might be perpetrated with the Iraqi weapons which have gone missing since 1998?, PRIME MINISTER: Well this is the dilemma the world faces. I know everybody would wish we could turn our back on it and it would solve itself. Nobody wants military conflict.4 The reference to Iraq has become clearer.

US Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking of Saddam Hussein and his alleged terrorist allies, said on 10 January 2003: “The gravity of the threat we face was underscored in recent days when British police arrested ... suspected terrorists in London and discovered a small quantity of ricin, one of the world’s deadliest poisons”. Around a week later, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said, “When you read about people in London being arrested for possession of ricin, there clearly remain people in the world who want to inflict as much harm as they can on the Western world and on others”.

Colin Powell then raised the issue during his 5 February 2003 speech to the Security Council. In his discussion on Iraq’s supposed ties to Al Qaeda, Powell gave a long talk on the Musab al-Zarqawi character, who would become a major American-invented bogeyman once America invaded Iraq. Powell said that Zarqawi was working on ricin at his camp in northern Iraq. Powell also made hysterically scary statements about Ricin: that one pinch would cause death. He then referred to cells that had been uncovered around the world. Powell said a detainee had claimed the “plot also targeted Britain. Later evidence…proved him right”. He then said that Britain had “unearthed a cell” in Britain. After the invasion of Iraq, when US troops seized a camp in northern Iraq that was linked to Zarqawi, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN: “We think that’s probably where the ricin that was found in London came [from]. ... At least the operatives and maybe some of the formulas came from this site”.

Well it took until April 2005 for all these lies to be exposed. A trail of nine men arrested and accused of being part of the London “poison cell” was concluded in April 2005, and eight were found not guilty of a plot to use ricin. The most stunning revelation occurred when it was revealed that no ricin was found in the apartment. Further, this was known at the time of the discovery of the so-called “poison cell”. Chemical weapons experts confirmed within days that the initial result was a false positive and subsequent tests were negative for ricin.5

It should be noted that one of the nine original defendants was convicted of the lessor charge of a “public nuisance” involving the use of poison to cause “disruption, fear and injury”. He was acquitted of the more serious offence of conspiring to murder using poisons.6 The evidence rested on this person possessing a “recipe” for ricin downloaded from the Internet that was said to be from old unscientific publications available since the 1980s. The evidence was so weak that it would be like convicting someone for a “plot” to murder someone (not actually of murdering someone) because they had an Agatha Christie novel describing a murder plot using poisons. This leaves anyone possessing information even remotely linkable to weapons, poisons or explosives, even if it’s only for research or interest purposes, in danger from a Police State seeking phantom enemies in a paranoid atmosphere. What’s more extraordinary was the media coverage given to the “ricin terror trail” when it was made public in April 2005.

This can be clearly seen by the examples of the media headlines provided in endnote 6, which continues to push the terrorism line even though its been largely demolished by the facts. The fact that no ricin was originally found (in January 2003) was only mentioned as almost an after thought buried deep in the media articles. They failed to note that the media’s enormous hyping of the “poison cell” at the time in January 2003 was therefore false (based on government information). They fail to draw any lessons from how they once again have been shown to have willingly passed on government information that subsequently proved to be lies. They also failed to ask whether it was justified for the government to have generated its pre-war propaganda by this fake ricin find, just two months before the invasion of Iraq, a few examples of which was provided above.

The final report of the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Iraq’s work on ricin was unclear and no definitive conclusion was reached.7 Iraq did develop ricin before the 1991 Gulf War, but this was mainly small-scale work for assassinating individuals and was not linked to a military-scale biological weapons program. It was thus no worse than the many assassination techniques developed by the CIA over the years. The ISG said that a number of sources claimed that Iraq worked on ricin into the 1990s but that no “direct evidence of ricin work” was found. Some of this information came from a single Iraqi source whose reliability was in question.

The ultimate conclusion to this ricin affair is that it was all another custom-built government lie, passed on by the media, to scare people and generate support for the invasion of Iraq.