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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (128827)	4/9/2004 11:15:20 PM
From: jttmab	Respond to of 281500

I would like to hear more about the Ricin incident. All right...one more story and then we have to go to sleep. <s> I'll preface by saying that I'm inclined to lean towards simple and benign explanations. If I took every odd event and developed some malicious explanation for it, I'd probably be on some island in the pacific with a very small population. The intern who was opening mail didn't notice any powder at the time, but only when he returned from class a few hours later. Not surprising. Most people don't notice a lot, particularly when we are talking about "dust". It was a big deadly deal to Frist until it became clear that any powder would have to have been planted, and the only ones with access were Frist and his staff. IF it was planted. I've seen some suggestions or claims that it may have been planted but no evidence that would lead me to come to that conclusion. If the Ricin was really part of paper lint, then some of the opened envelopes would show the same false reaction. Maybe. As I understand it, not all paper processors use the castor bean plant during processing. If there was an envelope[s]at a prior date that left a lint residue which would result in a false positive, those envelopes might be long gone by the time the intern noticed the lint. Then the envelopes that were tested may or may not also generate a false positive. Also, "false positives" may not be consistently reproducible. Theoretically, a sample that results in a false positive could be retested and result in a "true" negative. I don't know any details of the testing techniques for ricin, so I can't quantify or estimate the probability. jttmab