In June 2006, the FBI arrested seven men from the poor, predominantly black neighborhood of Liberty City, in Miami, on charges no less than attempting to wage war on America. In a boastful press conference, then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales, outlined an ambitious, chilling plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower, to launch a “full ground war against the United States”, and to support al-Qaida.
The case against the Liberty City Seven was weak from the outset; even at the press conference, officials offered few specifics or concrete evidence for a terror plot the deputy director of the FBI, John Pistole, described as more “aspirational than operational”. The men, members of an obscure religious group called the Seas of David, had no actual connection to al-Qaida, no weapons, no explosives, no reconnaissance on the Sears Tower, no consistent ideology of violence. The evidence against them – words of intent considered, in the years of fear post-9/11, to be overt acts of terror – were prodded and encouraged by a paid informant in an elaborate game of pretend.
