Dallas: Would-be bomber said he’d die for bin Laden, gets 24 years (video)

via FBI: Would-be bomber said he’d die for bin Laden.

DALLAS (AP) — Before he pushed the button that he hoped would blow up a 60–story office tower and kill thousands of people, Hosam Smadi did two things that still bother FBI officials 13 months later.

An undercover agent posing as an al–Qaida terrorist offered Smadi ear plugs. He declined, saying he wanted to hear the explosion. Then he used his cell phone to secure a ghastly souvenir — a final picture of the building before it blew.

The inside story of the investigation, compiled from court documents and interviews with FBI officials in Dallas, is a tale of how the FBI stayed ahead of the would–be terrorist, giving him a decoy bomb and preventing him from harming anyone.

FBI officials offer a different portrayal of the meek, mild and apologetic young man who spoke politely to the judge during his two day sentencing hearing, which ended Tuesday with Smadi receiving 24 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

“He absolutely believed he had found al–Qaida, was committing an act on the scale of 9–11 and that he was going to get away with it,” Tom Petrowski, the supervisory agent who led the FBI operation, told The Associated Press (News – Alert). “He loved (Osama) bin Laden more than his parents. He said he would die for him, intended to die for him, expected to die for him. He believed to the core that this was his destiny.”

The 20–year–old Jordanian man was arrested in September 2009 after Smadi left what he thought was a truck bomb in a garage beneath the Fountain Place building in downtown Dallas.

In his plea agreement, Smadi said he parked the truck, activated a timer connected to the decoy provided by undercover FBI employees, then rode away to watch the building fall.

When Smadi dialed a cell phone number from the roof of a nearby parking garage, he thought he was setting off his truck bomb. But it was the FBI’s final trick. Instead of blowing up the building, the call alerted tactical agents hiding in a stairwell, who swarmed the rooftop and arrested the teenager.

“It went like clockwork,” said Robert Casey, the special agent in charge of the Dallas division.

“At the first in–person, he really blew us away. His gut level of commitment was amazing,” Petrowski said. “When he left that day, there was no question he was real. He had an ice–cold, unhesitating commitment to commit mass murder.”

The bureau discussed simply deporting Smadi, whose visa paperwork was not in order. It would have been a simple and inexpensive solution, certainly less complex than trying to covertly monitor a teenager in small–town Texas.

But Smadi explicitly told undercover agents that, had he not met them, he would have continued his search for al–Qaida sleeper cells. And the FBI’s behavioral analysts also predicted that Smadi, if sent home, would try to connect with terrorists.

So the FBI tried something else: talking him out of it. The undercover employees told Smadi there were many ways he could commit jihad that didn’t involve killing Americans. If Smadi had any “hesitation, doubt or fear … we would depart now as friends and brothers in Islam without any anger at all,” an agent wrote.

But Smadi said he wanted to cause “an attack that shakes the world,” he wrote. The harder the FBI tried to talk Smadi out of it, the more firm he became.

There’s another question that still bothers agents.

“How many Hosam Smadis are out there that we don’t know about?” Petrowski said. “If a person like that lives in Italy, Texas, where are the others?”

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From our previous posts: Al Jazeera reported that Smadi is the son of the Director of the Department of the Ministry of Agriculture in Ajloun, Jordan (70 km) north of Amman.