Since September 11th I’ve always been a bit wary of living in Chicago. I don’t know, it seems like the Sears tower just appears to be a massive target. I don’t know, I could simply be paranoid, but it seems like it.
Anyway…The news came out this week that 5 men were convicted in the plot to bomb the Sears tower.
The original story came out back in Juno of 2006. Several men were arrested in… Miami? Yep, in Miami. The men in question did not have connections to any known terrorist group, nor did they have explosives, and they didn’t have any specific plans to blow up the tower. It more seemed like a “wouldn’t it be cool if..” plan than anything.
Fast forward to 2009 and it turns out the men in question were convicted:
It took three trials, three juries and nearly three years, but federal prosecutors finally succeeded Tuesday in convicting five Miami men of plotting to start an anti-government insurrection by destroying Chicago’s Sears Tower and bombing FBI offices. One man was acquitted.
When the FBI swarmed the downtrodden Liberty City neighborhood to make the arrests in June 2006, the administration of President George W. Bush hailed the case as a prime example of the Justice Department’s post-Sept. 11 policy of disrupting potential terror plots in the earliest possible stages.
Yet hours of FBI recordings of terrorist talk contrasted with little concrete evidence of an evolving plot, triggering two mistrials because juries could not agree on verdicts against ringleader Narseal Batiste or five followers. One of the original seven defendants was acquitted after the first trial.
…
“Any cases that involve someone’s mental intent, their intention when they made certain statements, are always difficult,” said Matthew Orwig, former U.S. attorney in Texas who has monitored the Miami case. “It was a must-win for the government. They needed some vindication.”
I really don’t know much about this story, but I will say that it sound like we have a number of poor, almost homeless, disenfranchised Miami men being convicted of a thought crime. I’m sure one could find a bunch of young men in any city if one looked hard enough.
I fully support the governments efforts to protect the United States from threats, but this really looks questionable to me. Frankly, it almost looks as if these guys are sacrificial lambs. Kinda like the governments way of saying “Hey, if you are poor and disenfranchised, don’t even think about doing something stupid…”
