In the UK, Possession of the Anarchist's Cookbook Is Terrorism 602
Anonymous Terrorist writes "Back in the midsts of time, when I was a lad and gopher was the height of information retrieval I read The Anarchist's Cookbook in one huge text file. Now it appears the UK government considers possession of the book an offense under the Terrorism Act 2000 and is prosecuting a 17 year old boy, in part, for having a copy of the book. 'The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000. The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year. The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.'"
Amazon.co.uk (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Am I the first person who gets to say... (Score:5, Informative)
Freedom of expression
Re:Terrorism or Suicide? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:He was making explosives (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cue the knee-jerk reaction (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No it isn't, thank you very much. (Score:3, Informative)
No, it is not clearly banned. The law on purpose was made so vague that it allows the government to claim almost anything as being in violation of the law, and leave it to the court to sort out whether or not they think it's ridiculous. Lets really hope the courts actually have the sense to reign this in (one of the redeeming factors of the UK legal system is that in the face of power hungry politicians there is a history of judges that are willing to blatantly look for loopholes to reinterpret the laws more narrowly than they were intended).
To show just how confusing this situation in, notice that this boy was charged, but as someone else has pointed out the book is for sale at Amazon.
Poor Man's James Bond (Score:4, Informative)
Uncle Festor's Silent Death looks fun:
http://www.unclefesterbooks.com/book_sd.html [unclefesterbooks.com]
Any book on pyrotechnics manufacture likely has multiple uses as well.
rec.pyrotechnics FAQ:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pyrotechnics-faq/ [faqs.org]
All kinds of fun:
http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/ [textfiles.com]
So basically.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:He was making explosives (Score:4, Informative)
If he indeed went to Pakistan and had contacts with some sort of indoctrination organisation there, one would expect that they would have pointed him to some proper documentation with recipes that actually worked or didn't blow up in your face.
Based on the little information leaked, it seems to me that he's some kind of wannabe that just wanted to get noticed.
Re:Yes (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.thisisbournemouth.co.uk/mostpopular.var.1717690.0.seized_by_the_police.php?s=s [thisisbournemouth.co.uk]
Re:Terrorism or Suicide? (Score:4, Informative)
I found the text fascinating as a curiosity, but it's not the sort of thing you'd actually try, if you value all your body parts remaining arranged in the proper order.
Re:Quit sensationalizing everything (Score:3, Informative)
Zonk, honestly, I'm not on the flame bandwagon of most around here, but I find myself frequently just skipping every article with your name attached to it. Enough with the bait and hook already - a common theme throughout at least 80% of your submissions.
Slashdot is reading more like the Enquirer these days.
Re:Terrorism or Suicide? (Score:5, Informative)
The book contains nothing about anarchist political beliefs or history. There is no mention of Lao Tzu [wikipedia.org], Kropotkin [wikipedia.org], Bakunin [wikipedia.org] (yes, that's the name they used for the guy with the Russian accent on Lost, but I'm talking about the original), Proudhon [wikipedia.org], Emma Goldman [wikipedia.org], Alexander Berkman [wikipedia.org], Murray Bookchin [wikipedia.org], the Anarcho-Syndicalists [wikipedia.org] of the Spanish Revolution [wikipedia.org] (specifically, the anarcho-syndicalist organization and administration of Catalonia [wikipedia.org]), or Food Not Bombs [wikipedia.org]. There is no mention of the centuries of anarchist thought and political philosophy [wikipedia.org]. There is no mention of the Haymarket Affair [wikipedia.org], which was used to give anarchists the image of bomb-throwers, nor of the fact that of the eight Haymarket anarchists (labor leaders), four were executed and one killed himself in his jail cell before Illinois Governor John Altgeld [wikipedia.org] pardoned the three survivors when he investigated and found that there had never been any proof of the guilt of the "Haymarket Anarchists," and that the jury had been stacked to guarantee a conviction even in the absence of evidence. Altgeld's Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab [pitzer.edu] is worth reading. Follow the link and you can read it free.
Also, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook apparently knows nothing about the subjects covered. He (or they, if it's not really one author) apparently just copied stuff from a bunch of different sources. If you read the explosive section, you'll see a given explosive mentioned on one page as being relatively stable and safe, and on another page the same explosive will be described as being very unstable. It appears that a lot of the information was just copied from other sources without any analysis of what was being copied. Further, it appears that the chunks of text copied are sometimes incomplete. It may be that The Anarchist Cookbook is somebody's idea of a practical joke, making gullible kids do things ranging from goofy (like trying to smoke banana peels to get high) to deadly (like blowing off limbs or burning their skin and eyes with chemicals when trying to follow the explosive and drug recipes). It has been suggested that the book may have been put in the market by the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO [wikipedia.org] program. To me that seems a bit tinfoil hatty, but some of the things the FBI actually did in that program really were bizarre, and a person describing them without showing proof (and yes, the proof of some really scary stuff in COINTELPRO does exist) might sound like a tinfoil hat type.
So The Anarchist Cookbook may be nothing more than a sick joke, but even if the book actually contained any useful information, the idea of banning books about how to make arms is not new. Governments want that for the same reasons they want to ban firearms: to keep the people easier to control. The overblown "threat of terrorism," when you consider how few people are killed by terrorism each year, is just the tool governments an
Re:Quit sensationalizing everything (Score:2, Informative)
Only because it exists in digital form (Score:3, Informative)
Re:terror is a tactic, and we use it too (Score:1, Informative)
Any wonder why the US refuses to allow its citizens to be tried by the International Court?
Re:terror is a tactic, and we use it too (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Amen!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Quit sensationalizing everything (Score:3, Informative)
Re:He was making explosives (Score:3, Informative)
Calcium chloride is not blackboard chalk, though calcium sulphate is. Calcium chloride has a range of uses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_chloride) that don't seem to make it an obvious choice for storing under ones bed.
Possession of potassium nitrate isn't an offence in the UK but when I as a boy, making home-made-gunpowder, asking for it at the local pharmacy meant fibbing and saying it would be used in tanning squirrel skins, since they were wise to its possible uses. Posession of bomb-making equipment is an offence in the UK and I'm not surprised that without a good excuse, the rozzers took a dim view of this lad's home chemistry set.
You cannot be serious! (Score:4, Informative)
Clearly you have no clue.. traditional British food such as chicken tikka masala [wikipedia.org] or a fine vindaloo [wikipedia.org] is not bland in any way shape or form!
Re:Quit sensationalizing everything (Score:3, Informative)
Altogether, an estimated 250 police officers took part in the raid, in which Abdul Kahar Kalam was shot in the shoulder. The family had 25,000 pounds in cash in their flat.
Terror raid man is held over "child porn on computer". [timesonline.co.uk]
In its report on the incident, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said that the policeman who shot Mr Kahar had not acted recklessly or maliciously and should not be prosecuted or disciplined. The report said that forensic analysis had shown that he had accidentally shot Mr Kahar at a range of less than two inches during a confrontation on a dark, narrow half-landing.
Related Links
The officer, who is a member of an elite firearms unit, was the first of 15 officers into the home. He was wearing a protective suit and gloves, a helmet, ear protectors and a respirator. At the time of the shooting the safety catch on his gun was off. When the gun fired it was in an almost upright position, fastened by a sling and not a normal firing position.
The officer, code-named B6, said that as he went up the stairs in the house he shouted "armed police", but the respirator could have muffled his voice. He reached the half-landing and, the report said, "was aware of two figures approaching at speed. B6 states that he and the two figures came into contact and this caused him to lose his balance and come into contact with the wall."
Re:Cue the knee-jerk reaction (Score:1, Informative)
Oh my God! No way!
How to build a dirty bomb:
- Get some explosives. Something like some C4 would be good, but anything will do, even packed black powder.
- Get some radioactive material. Try to use something that's both highly radioactive and has a decent half-life. You can try lab supply companies, medical supply companies, scrapped medical equipment (You'd be amazed at what gets left on a scrap heap) or even get a couple of boxes and smoke-detectors and dismantle them. Consider buying a lead apron if you don't want to irradiate yourself too badly.
- Pack the radioactive material around the explosive charge.
Well gee, that was hard.Good British Food vs Bad British food (Score:3, Informative)
I was a carnivore the last time I was in Britain, and the meat dishes ranged from the above to really good. Now that I'm vegetarian, there's less of traditional English cooking that's interesting, but some of it's still good, especially the cheeses, and of course the best place in the world to get Indian food is London (though I tend to prefer the southern Indian cuisines which were less common there.)
Another poster put out a list of foods and asked which the bad ones were, with the desired conclusion of the two American dishes - hamburgers and hot dogs. Sorry, wrong answer, even though you're picking out German-American dishes as opposed to English-American. Hot dogs are pretty dreadful imitations of their German predecessors, but cooking them over fire helps, and I've had Chicken Tikka Masala that's almost as bad and bangers that are worse. And hamburgers can be cooked badly, but good hamburgers are hard to beat - with good meat cooked over fire (or even fried at the right temperature) on a good toasted bun with onions and optionally some decent ketchup.
Re:Terrorism or Suicide? (Score:4, Informative)
You would be correct to assume so. Apparently the author admits it, and even wants to take the book out of print, but unfortunately he doesn't have the means or rights to do so. As an ex-adolescent I have to admit that I purchased this book when I was younger, and still have it. It was an intriguing read, but even then I wasn't crazy enough to try any of them. Some of the plans didn't even sound like they would work. All the same, it was an interesting read and good brain food. Curiousity is a good thing, you just need to be able to recognize bad ideas and misinformation, and read between the lines.
http://www.righto.com/anarchist-cookbook-faq.html [righto.com]
For the lazy, here's the author's comments in full:
Dear Mr. Shirriff,
I have recently been made aware of several websites that focus on The Anarchist Cookbook. As the author of the original publication some 30 plus years ago, it is appropriate for me to comment. I would appreciate it if you would post these comments as part of your website on the Anarchist Cookbook. Please do not include my e-mail address. However, should you wish to confirm the authenticity of this message, please do not hesitate to contact me at the above address.
The Anarchist Cookbook was written during 1968 and part of 1969 soon after I graduated from high school. At the time, I was 19 years old and the Vietnam War and the so-called "counter culture movement" were at their height. I was involved in the anti-war movement and attended numerous peace rallies and demonstrations. The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in.
I conducted the research for the manuscript on my own, primarily at the New York City Public Library. Most of the contents were gleaned from Military and Special Forces Manuals. I was not member of any radical group of either a left or right wing persuasion.
I submitted the manuscript directly to a number of publishers without the help or advice of an agent. Ultimately, it was accepted by Lyle Stuart Inc. and was published verbatim - without editing - in early 1970. Contrary to what is the normal custom, the copyright for the book was taken out in the name of the publisher rather than the author. I did not appreciate the significance of this at the time and would only come to understand it some years later when I requested that the book be taken out of print.
The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this.
Apparently in recent years, The Anarchist Cookbook has seen a number of 'copy cat' type publications, some with remarkably similar titles (Anarchist Cookbook II, III etc). I am not familiar with these publications and cannot comment upon them. I can say that the original Anarchist Cookbook has not been revised or updated in any way by me since it was first published.
During the years that followed its publication, I went to university, married, became a father and a teacher of adolescents. These developments had a profound moral and spiritual effect on me. I found that I no longer agreed with what I had written earlier and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas that I had put my name to. In 1976 I became a confirmed Anglican Christian and shortly thereafter I wrote to Lyle Stuart Inc. explaining that I no longer held the views that were expressed in the book and requested that The Anarchist Cookbook be taken out of print. The response from the publisher was that the copyright was in his name and therefore such a decision was his to make - not the author's. In the early 1980's, the rights for
Re:Quit sensationalizing everything (Score:3, Informative)
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON'S UK SITE!!! (Score:2, Informative)
the collection or possession of information... (Score:3, Informative)
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Physics books...
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Chemistry books....
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English books (for preparing effective demands letters).
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Photography and arts (for preparing terrorist training materials
- Computing Science (for calculating the best mixtures)
- Human Kinetics (to learn how to carry the bomb).
(you might as well burn the libraries, too).Re:Terrorism or Suicide? (Score:2, Informative)
And, of course, more than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread [netrox.net].