Wednesday's print column

Church, Chase & Betterly

If I had to pick just one anecdote from the ongoing NATO 3 trial as most illustrative of what a farce it appears to be, I'd pick the bow-and-arrow story.

According to the testimony of an undercover police officer, one of three men being tried for terrorism and other related offenses in Cook County, Brian Church, bragged to the officer about his proficiency as an archer and said he planned to attach a note to an arrow and shoot that arrow through a window at Mayor Rahm Emanuel's house.

This plan, if you could call it that, was pure nonsense — the idle, vain musings of a feckless fantasizer with an overheated imagination and undercaffeinated initiative.

Church and his co-defendants, Jared Chase and Brent Betterly, came to Chicago to get in on the anticipated radical protest action at the NATO summit in May 2012.

When police arrested them in a Bridgeport apartment on the eve of the summit and announced that they'd been making Molotov cocktails and otherwise been preparing to wreak serious harm on our city, many of us — well, I'll speak for myself, anyway — assumed canny law enforcement work had saved us from horrific acts of violence.

Instead, stories emanating from the trial suggest that police merely interrupted a real-life slacker misadventure: A trio of often-inebriated twentysomething stoners with inchoate anti-establishment leanings, fully baked brains and half-baked notions come to the big city and dream of spectacular capers.

Another one of their ideas was to vandalize President Barack Obama's campaign headquarters, according to the testimony of an undercover officer. Sound scary? Well, they were going to do it by using a slingshot and firing marbles at windows. But, darn their luck, they didn't know where the headquarters was located and failed in their effort to Google the address.

The officer testified that Church mused aloud about building a potato gun to fire at police, who would then be "dropping like flies."

Church constructed a 7-foot plywood shield bearing the slogan "Austerity ain't gonna happen," but abandoned it when he couldn't figure out a good way to get it downtown. He reportedly loved going on "recon missions" where he would scope out targets, but was too inert even to assemble addresses for all four police stations he hoped to target.

Molotov cocktails — lit, exploding bottles of flammable liquid — are serious weapons, yes. And police raided the trio's apartment in the midst of an assembly project. But how did the group come to begin making those devices?

"Dude, we got Molotovs — that's not whack," says one of the undercover cops on a recording played in court.

After Church suggests using vodka as fuel, the other undercover cop says, "You guys got anything? Should we make some? You got bottles?"

Egged on, Chase says "Let's do it," after which the officer says "Let's do it, c'mon."

The idea came up of using gasoline instead of vodka but Church didn't want to purchase it or allow them to siphon gas from his car, according to a recording played in court. So one of the cops said he had money and offered to walk with Church to a nearby gas station.

Were the NATO 3 dangerous? Church did at one point express hopes of seeing "a police officer on fire." But he also told the undercover officer that he wasn't going to take weapons to the protests because he didn't believe in "pre-emptive strikes."

I don't fault police for keeping an eye on these goofballs and making sure the nastiest of their notions, however farfetched, didn't turn into action. But based on every news report and every tweet coming out of the trial, I do fault them for trumpeting the arrests as significant, and I fault the Cook County state's attorney's office for confusing this sort of addled, inert bumbling with "terrorism."

The NATO 3 have become cause celebres not because they are heroes but because, in facing up to 40 years in prison on these overblown charges, they are poised to become victims.

In theater, a farce is a comedy marked by exaggerated, nonsensical plot twists and absurd characters.

But in court, if these men are convicted of the most serious charges against them, there will be nothing funny about it.