Evidence prosecution lawyers tried to link to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in trials of terrorist suspects has been shown to be false, writes Duncan Campbell.
Colin Powell does not need more humiliation over the manifold errors in his February 2003 presentation to the United Nations. But on Wednesday a London jury brought down another section of the case he made for war - that Iraq and Osama bin Laden were supporting and directing terrorist poison cells throughout Europe, including a London ricin ring.
Wednesday's verdicts on five defendants, and the dropping of charges against four others, made it clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the "ring" make or have ricin.
Not that the government shared that news with the British public. Until today, the public record for the past three fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat occupied by some of Wednesday's acquitted defendants. It was not.
The third plank of the al-Qaeda/Iraq poison theory was the link between what Powell labelled the "UK poison cell" and training camps in Afghanistan. The evidence the British government wanted to use to connect the defendants to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda was never put to the jury.
That was because last autumn a trial within a trial was secretly taking place. This was a private contest between a group of scientists from the Porton Down military research centre and myself. The issue was: where had the information on poisons and chemicals come from?
The information - five pages in Arabic, containing amateur instructions for making ricin, cyanide and botulinum, and a list of chemicals used in explosives - was at the heart of the case. The notes had been made by Kamel Bourgass, the sole convicted defendant. His co-defendants believed that he had copied the information from the internet. The prosecution claimed that it had come from Afghanistan.
I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant exploring Islamist websites which publish Bin Laden and his sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the gun lobby.
The experience of being an expert witness on these issues has made me feel a great deal safer on the streets of London. These were the internal documents of the supposed al-Qaeda cell planning the "big one" in Britain.
But the recipes were untested and unoriginal, borrowed from US sources. Moreover, ricin is not a weapon of mass destruction.
It is a poison which has only ever been used for one-on-one killings and attempted killings.
It was the discovery of a copy of Bourgass's notes in Thetford in 2002 which inspired the wave of horror stories, and government announcements and preparations for poison-gas attacks.
It is true that when the team from Porton Down entered the Wood Green flat in January 2003, their field equipment registered the presence of ricin. But these were high-sensitivity field detectors, for use where a false negative result could be fatal.
A few days later, Dr Martin Pearce, head of the Biological Weapons Identification Group, found that there was no ricin.
However, when this result was passed to London, the message reportedly said the opposite.
The planned government case on links to Afghanistan was based solely on papers which a freelance journalist working for the Times had scooped up after the US invasion of Kabul. Some were in Arabic, some in Russian. They were far more detailed than Bourgass's notes. Nevertheless, claimed Porton Down chemistry chief Dr Chris Timperley, they showed a "common origin and progression" in the methods, thus linking the London group of North Africans to Afghanistan and Bin Laden.
The weakness of Dr Timperley's case was that neither he nor the intelligence services had examined any other documents which could have been the source. We were told that Porton Down and its intelligence advisers had never previously heard of the "Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, containing recipes for ricin and much more". This document, written by veterans of the 1980s Afghan war, has been on the internet since 1998.
All the information roads led west - not to Kabul, but to California and the US midwest.
The ricin recipes now seen on the internet were invented 20 years ago by survivalist Kurt Saxon, who advertises books and videos on the internet. Before the ricin ring trial began, I called him in Arizona. For $110, he sent me CDs and videos on bombs, missiles, booby-traps - and ricin. We gave a copy of the ricin video to the police.
When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaeda claims.
The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaeda manual" into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to produce in the 2001 New York trial relating to the first attack on the World Trade Centre.
But it was not an al-Qaeda manual. The name was invented by the US department of justice in 2001 and the contents were rushed on to the internet to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act. To show that the manual was written in the 1980s during the US-supported war against the Soviet occupation was easy.
The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book - The Poisoner's Handbook by Maxwell Hutchkinson.
We have all been victims of this mass deception. I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an al-Qaeda-trained super-terrorist. - (Guardian Service)
Duncan Campbell is an investigative writer and a scientific expert witness on computers/telecommunications. He is author of War Plan UK.