In followup to an earlier posting, Gale Nettles was convicted for allowing the FBI to help him plot to blow up the Dirksen Federal Building. The man is obviously ill.
Chicago Tribune | Would-be courthouse bomber sentenced
A 67-year-old ex-convict will likely spend the rest of his life in prison under a sentence handed down today for plotting to blow up the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago.Prosecutors labeled Gale Nettles, a lifelong criminal with a history of mental problems, a terrorist bent on mass murder.
Nettles used the nickname “Ben Laden” as he pursued a plot to detonate a truck filled with fertilizer outside the courthouse, at 219 S. Dearborn St.
But his plan was tracked all along by FBI agents, and everyone who assisted him, including a man he believed to be a member of Al Qaeda, was in fact a government agent or informant.
As I wrote at the time:
Terrorism sting begs the question: would Gale Nettles, with his history of mental illness, have gone as far as he did without the assistance of the FBI? Probably not, which is why sting operations are a bit troubling. I mean, nobody wants buildings to blow up, but when you enable mentally ill people to accumulate information and materials in pursuit of terrorist acts or violence, you run the risk of letting events escape from your control. Luckily, that didn't happen in this particular instance
