Tall stories: The plot to topple Chicago's Sears Tower was not all that it seemed

As the smoke begins to clear and the hype settles, it would appear that the stories of terrorists planning to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago were slightly overdone.

For instance, the seven young black men arrested had no explosives and the "plan" to blow up the building was little more than wishful thinking, which one them passed on to an FBI informant masquerading as a member of al Qaeda.

Even the FBI admitted as much. John Pistole, the bureau's deputy director, described the plan on Friday 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-Qa'ida but in fact belonged to the South Florida Terrorist Task Force.

At a meeting "on or about 16 December" according to the indictment made public as the men made their first court appearance in Miami, Mr 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.

Not that this stopped the US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, from calling a press conference and telling the world that these men were attempting "to wage war against America."

It now appears that this is another case of Gonzales hyping a story beyond it's true merits.

The precedent was famously set by his predecessor, John Ashcroft, who called a press conference during a visit to Moscow in 2002 to announce the arrest of Jose Padilla, the so-called "dirty bomber" said to be preparing an attack on Washington with a radioactive device.

Mr Padilla languished incommunicado in a navy brig without charge for over three years. He has been transferred to a civilian prison, and faces trial in Miami later this year on different, much vaguer, terrorist charges. An alleged sleeper cell was unearthed in Detroit, but those convictions were quashed in 2004 when it emerged that prosecutors had manipulated evidence. In December 2005, the trial of Sami al-Arian, accused of links with Islamic Jihad terrorists, ended in embarrassment for the government when the Florida university professor was acquitted.

The truth is that America has not suffered a single terrorist attack since 9-11, almost five years ago, but the wish to keep the people in a constant state of fear, means that these stories must be hyped for all they are worth.

The US State Department has attributed ten attacks world-wide to al Qaeda since 9-11. As far as enemies of democracy go, al Qaeda - in terms of the number of attacks they carry out - can hardly be described as the most prolific enemy we have ever faced.

Indeed, apart from the horrific attack of 9-11, what's followed has been the kind of attack that Brits became used to facing during the days of IRA activity on the mainland. Bombs. Bog standard bombs.

Not that I'd know that if I flicked my way through a newspaper. There, I read of "dirty" bombs and nuclear devices being exploded over American cities, attacks on our water supply and a thousand other ways that they may attack us.

It's almost as if they want us to be afraid.

It reminds me of the Two Minutes Of Hate in 1984:

The programmes of the Two Minutes of Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principle figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even - so it was occasionally rumoured - in some hiding place in Oceania itself.

The present US administration's attitude towards the public seems radically different from the one of Franklin D. Roosevelt who famously proclaimed, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

The Bush administration, like Big Brother, seem to imply that the only thing you have to fear is not being fearful enough.

A population driven by fear will always rally around their leaders. When I hear of yet another story being exaggerated beyond it's merits, I can't help thinking that this is exactly why they are telling us it.

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Tags: al Qaeda, Sears Tower, attack, plot, mastermind,