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More on the Chicago plot
Law enforcement officials on Thursday arrested a man who they say was plotting to blow up the Everett M. Dirksen Federal Building with a truck bomb containing ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the same material used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney here, said the man, Gale W. Nettles, 66, had acted alone and had no connection to international terrorism. He did not have fertilizer that could have resulted in an explosion, Mr. Fitzgerald said. "Never did it come to a point where the building or the people here were in danger," Mr. Fitzgerald said in a televised news conference. "He was not involved with any terrorist group, foreign or domestic."

Still, Mr. Fitzgerald said, the threat was taken very seriously. "These are times of danger," he said. "We have to watch for people from overseas and we have to watch for people from our own country."

Mr. Nettles, who Mr. Fitzgerald said was embittered at the federal courts after being convicted here of counterfeiting, told a fellow inmate in a Mississippi prison of his plot last fall. The inmate alerted law enforcement officials, leading to months of intense surveillance and a sting resulting in Mr. Nettles's arrest.
As a police friend of mine likes to say, "if the bad guys were smart the jails would be empty."
In December 2003, just after he was released from prison, Mr. Nettles called a man he was told would supply him with the fertilizer, Mr. Fitzgerald said. The man was actually an undercover F.B.I. officer. Mr. Fitzgerald said Mr. Nettles started counterfeiting again to finance his plan and sold some of his fake currency to an informant for the F.B.I. By the spring, Mr. Fitzgerald said, Mr. Nettles had asked the informant to put him in contact with a member of Al Qaeda or Hamas. He was soon introduced to yet another agent, this one posing as someone with ties to a terrorist organization.

This week, the undercover agent Mr. Nettles had contacted when he left prison supplied him with 2,000 pounds of fertilizer. But Mr. Nettles could store only 500 pounds. On Thursday morning he sold the rest to the second undercover officer. Mr. Nettles told the second officer "he has a target in mind: the U.S. courthouse downtown," according to an F.B.I. affidavit. The Dirksen Building has federal courtrooms.

Mr. Nettles was arrested after the sale. Mr. Fitzgerald said Mr. Nettles, who expressed knowledge of bomb making, was fooled into thinking that the fertilizer he possessed could be used for a bomb when in fact, he was given a "nondangerous" type.

Mr. Nettles never had the materials the authorities said he needed to create the explosion he planned - one that would rock the building in the late morning, when he believed the judges would be around, officials said. If convicted, he could spend up to 20 years in prison.

Thomas J. Kneir, special agent in charge of the Chicago office of the F.B.I., said, "Some of the biggest attacks on the United States have been domestic, and obviously Mr. Nettles is one of those guys who absolutely hates the U.S. government."
Score one for the good guys.

Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-08-06
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=39846