Plot to topple Sears Tower not all it seemed

The alarming news flashed across TV screens on June 22: government agents had thwarted an al-Qaida plot, using home-grown US terrorists, to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago in a ghastly repeat of 9/11. When the dust had settled barely 24 hours later, a rather more modest version of events had emerged. The seven young black men arrested at a warehouse in Miami and Atlanta had never been in touch with al-Qaida, and had no explosives. Their "plan" to destroy the tallest building in the US was little more than wishful thinking, expressed by one of them to an FBI informant purporting to be a member of Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization. Even the FBI admitted as much. John Pistole, the bureau's deputy director, described the plan on June 23 as "aspirational rather than operational" and admitted that none of the seven (five US citizens and two Haitian immigrants) had ever featured on a terrorist watch list. In essence, the entire case rests upon conversations between Narseal Baptiste, the apparent ringleader of the group, with the informant, who was posing as a member of al-Qaida but in fact belonged to the South Florida Terrorist Task Force. At a meeting "on or about Dec. 16" according to the indictment made public as the men made their first court appearance in Miami, Baptiste asked his contact to supply equipment including uniforms, machine guns, explosives, cars and $50,000 in cash for an "Islamic Army" that would carry out a mission "just as good or greater than 9/11." In fact, the conspiracy seems to have extended little further than those words. By last month, it had all but fizzled out, amid squabbling amid the group. Even their religious leanings are in dispute. Neighbors say they were part of a group, called Seas of David, that mixes Christian and Islamic elements. That did not deter US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales from summoning a press conference in which he denounced an attempt to "wage war against America." But the threat, even he admitted, was not immediate–and those who posed it were in fact merely a few semi-unemployed men, most of them petty criminals, from Liberty City, a poor black neighborhood close to the center of Miami. Despite countless scare stories in the media, color-coded alerts from the Department of Homeland Security, and grim official warnings of al-Qaida sleeper cells in the country waiting to do their worst, the US has not suffered a single terrorist attack since 9/11.