Metal Sludge Gossip Board

Man Arrested in Plot to Blow Up Federal Reserve Bank
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/nyreg ... nted=print

Federal authorities on Wednesday charged a 21-year-old Bangladeshi man with conspiring to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan, after he tried to detonate a van filled with what he believed to be explosives.

The entire plot was in fact an elaborate F.B.I. sting.

The man, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, came to the United States in January and reached out to people he believed were Qaeda sympathizers, officials said, but one of the people he contacted was an F.B.I. informer who introduced him to an undercover agent.

The defendant ultimately told the agent that he wanted to blow up something in New York that would cripple the United States economy, officials said. The man initially considered targeting the New York Stock Exchange but later settled on the Federal Reserve Bank, a giant limestone landmark near Wall Street.

That's not really a Paulbot but I'm sure many Paulbots would applaud his efforts.

Paulbot? Where?

My sister was a Vice President at the Fed. Always interesting going in there when I was meeting her for lunch. You have to go directly to a phone on the wall, call the person's extension, then they come down to sign you in. From there you go through a metal detector and your belongings go through an x-ray machine. On one side of the lobby is a large window that stretches almost across the entire wall (there's a door at the end) and on the other side of that glass is a room filled with cops.

And that's how tight security was before 9/11.