While Ashcroft dribbled spittle down his shirt front and rambled on "…we know our enemies will go to great lengths to lie in wait and to achieve the death and destruction they desire if at all possible", Israeli El AL'eda biological warfare experts were at the very same time busily pressing the first batch of Castor beans to arrive from Ethiopia, at their two bush laboratories in the Republic of Guinea.
It was going to be a very long job, because this time around the finished product would have to look, feel, smell, and kill in a manner entirely befitting evil Muslim terrorists with limited manufacturing facilities. There were to be no more stupid mistakes, like peppering Capitol Hill with weapons-grade Anthrax, later easily backtracked by biological signature directly to Fort Dietrich in Frederick, Maryland.
Two hundred tons of castor beans yield approximately one hundred tons of castor oil, which plays no part at all in biological warfare. Essentially a waste product in the weapons process, this oil will be distributed at very low cost towards the end of October, thereby allowing investigators to easily backtrack the supply to the two casually abandoned bush labs, which will then be found to contain two or three copies of the Koran, a couple of English-language publications on how to make bombs, a half-completed 'suicide note' left behind by one of the 'Al Qaeda pilots', plus of course several tiny traces of deadly Ricin on the abandoned presses and dryers. We do not know the names of the Boeing 727 'suicide pilots', because the Mossad has not yet captured and killed them in advance.
Out of the one hundred tons of castor bean mash remaining, the biological warfare experts will eventually produce approximately five tons of finished Ricin powder product, one of the most deadly substances in the world. Just one milligram is sufficient to kill an adult human, meaning that the five tons manufactured in Guinea would be theoretically capable of killing 5,000 million people. In practice this will not happen, because the #8 reserve tank in each Boeing 727 attack airplane can only hold 800# of the low density Ricin material, for a total combined warload on all five airplanes of 4,000#.
The method of delivery will also severely curtail the overall lethality of the product, because rather than being evenly distributed, each warload will be dumped overhead a population center in the exact same manner as a water bomber discharging its load. A remote-controlled high speed mechanism will discharge the entire 800# warload in less than three seconds through the modified rear baggage hold, leading to massive overkill in some saturated areas, but with surprisingly little effect one mile away from ground zero, especially upwind.
However, Ricin does not decay swiftly as in the case of chemical nerve gas, meaning that it can easily contaminate water and food supplies for months afterwards; in essence a similar process to the delayed-action radiation sickness and death experienced at Hiroshima after the end of the Second World War.
It would be difficult to dump 4,000# of Ricin on the American public without first reminding them how dangerous the substance is, thereby hopefully achieving maximum post-attack panic and obedience. One such reminder was created by the U.S. Federal Government on 28 July 2004, when authorities in California, Michigan and elsewhere suddenly found trace amounts of Ricin poison in jars of baby food.
After a very useful nation wide scare, federal officials claimed the amounts of Ricin inside each jar "were probably not sufficient to injure an infant". This of course was a flat-out lie, because two one-millionths of a single gram would be enough to kill any infant in seconds flat. "Low Grade Ricin" exists only in the minds of media manipulators, because it cannot and does not exist in real life. So, Mr and Mrs America, I think [but cannot yet prove] that you have just received your pre-attack Ricin wake-up call.