Terry Eugene Peace, Brian Edward Cannon, Cory Robert Williamson will each spend the next 12 years in federal prison. They were sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Rome, Ga., after earlier pleading guilty to charges of conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction.



(L to R) Terry E. Peace, Brian E. Cannon, Cory R. Williamson.

“In this case, anti-government ideology and rhetoric morphed into dangerous extremism and led these defendants to arm themselves and travel to a meeting to pick up pipe bombs and other explosives intended for attacks,” U.S. Attorney John A. Horn, of the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement

The planned attacks, Horn said, “posed a serious threat to not only the safety of our public servants, but also all other members of the community.”

Court documents say the three Georgia men hatched their plot in early 2014, hoping to recruit other like-minded militia members in other states.

Their plan, documented in on-line chat room and telephone conversations, was to “start the fight” with the government by sabotaging power grids, transfer stations and water treatment facilities. They also discussed targeting law enforcement agencies, according to charging documents.

The would-be terrorists confessed to plotting to use pipe bombs and thermite devices to sabotage federally owned facilities operated by Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Administration,

If those acts of terrorism were successful, the defendants hoped “martial law would be declared [triggering] other militias to join the fight,” according to a superseding indictment returned late last year.

The FBI got wind of the plot when one potential recruit “grew concerned” about the terrorism plan and contacted law enforcement, court documents disclose. That informant, who isn’t publicly identified in public records, cooperated with FBI agents who made the arrests after monitoring and recording a series of conversations and delivering two inert thermite devices and a dozen mock pipe bombs to the plotters.