Liberty City Seven - Press Coverage of The Arrests

Press Coverage of The Arrests

The arrests were announced on 23 June at a high level press briefing in Washington D.C. by the Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, the Deputy Director of the FBI John S. Pistole, and an Assistant Attorney-General Alice S. Fisher.

At the press conference, the Attorney-General and the Deputy Director took questions from reporters:

Question: Did any of the men have any actual contact with any members of al-Qaeda that you know of?

Attorney-General: The answer to that is "No".

Question: Did they have any means to carry out this plot? I mean, did you find any explosives, weapons?

Attorney-General: You raise a good point... We took action when we had enough evidence.

Question: Was there anything against the Sears Tower other than this one apparent, just, kind of mention of the Sears Tower? It doesn't look like they ever took pictures or...

Deputy Director of the FBI: One of the individuals was familiar with the Sears Tower, had worked in Chicago, and was familiar with the tower. But in terms of the plans, it was more aspirational than operational.

He assured the public that the men posed no actual danger because their plot had been caught in "its earliest stages", and that the group's only source of money and weapons would have been the undercover FBI agent.

The following week the incident was featured on The Daily Show, where Jon Stewart quipped: "Now, I am not a general. I don't have any association with any military academy. But I believe that if you are going to wage a full ground war against the United States, you need to field at least as many people as, say, a softball team."

Democracy Now interviewed two community activists in Miami on 26 June who summed up local reaction to the indictments:

lot of show has been made about the militaristic boots that they had... t turns out... the FBI bought them the boots. If you look at the indictment, the biggest piece of evidence... is that the group may have taken pictures of a bunch of targets in South Florida. But the guys couldn't afford their own cameras, so the federal government bought them the cameras... The federal government rented them the cars that they needed to get downtown in order to take the pictures. In addition... the men provided the FBI informant with a list of things they needed in order to blow up these buildings, but in the list they didn't include any explosives or any materials which could be used to make explosives. So now everyone in Liberty City is joking that the guys were going to kick down the FBI building with their new boots, because they didn't have any devices which could have been used to explode...

In his afternoon speech, the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, cited the case to illustrate how his department's policies were working. He also made reference to the case of Kevin James, the Toledo terror plot, and the 2006 Toronto terrorism case.