Two days after the January 5th search of the Wood Green "poison cell" flat, and well before the outbreak of war with Iraq, the chief scientist advising British anti-terrorism authorities, Martin Pearce -- leader of the Biological Weapon Identification Group at Porton Down, had finished lab tests which indicated the ricin finding was a false positive. "Subsequent confirmatory tests on the material from the pestle and mortar did not detect the presence of ricin. It is my opinion therefore that toxins are not detectable in the pestle and mortar," wrote Pearce in one document.
But in an astonishing example of sheer incompetence, another employee at Porton Down charged with passing on to British authorities the information that the preliminary finding of ricin was in error, turned around and did the opposite, informing that ricin had indeed been detected.
At the time of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, expert sources in this matter within the UK government surely knew that no ricin had been recovered from the Wood Green group of alleged terrorists, men included by the Secretary of State as part of the US government's rationale for going to war with Iraq. Whether Powell, the Bush administration or U.S. intelligence also knew is unknown. Whatever the case, it was another example of the United States' horrendous intelligence on weapons of mass destruction...
The alleged existence of ricin and "the UK poison cell" in January 2003 would subsequently play a part of Colin Powell's presentation as rationale for war against Iraq. In his speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, Powell purported to show how a web of terrorists including the UK cell, was interconnected with Muhamad al Zarqawi, who was said to be directing terrorist plots from the safe refuge of Iraq.
There was a theory and allegedly intelligence on the UK cell and the Wood Green ricin within the US government.
On February 12, for example, CNN reported that Colin Powell had contended the British ricin had actually come from Iraq in a story entitled "Europe skeptical of Iraq-ricin link."
"The ricin that is bouncing around Europe now originated in Iraq -- not in the part of Iraq that is under Saddam Hussein's control, but his security forces know all about it," Colin Powell was alleged to have said.
An anonymous source in the UK disagreed: "... British authorities 'are clear' that the [ricin] was 'home-made.'"
Hundreds of news articles appeared in the coming months on the Wood Green terrorists and their toxin.
