'Tractor Man' Gets Six Years in Prison

Source from:  By DERRILL HOLLY Associated Press Writer 06/24/2004

A tobacco farmer dubbed "Tractor Man" was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison in connection with a March 2003 incident that brought traffic in the nation's capital to a standstill. Dwight Ware Watson, 51, of Whitakers, N.C., was handed the prison time for his conviction on charges of making a false threat to detonate explosives, and destruction of federal property. "The city regarded you as a one-man weapon of mass destruction. You did terrify this city," U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson told Watson. [img border=0 hspace="4" vspace="4" align="left" src=http://www.tobaccochina.com/english/picture/NY11506231556-small.jpg] On March 17, 2003, Watson drove his tractor into a shallow just west of the Washington Monument. For the next 47 hours he sat there, claiming to have "organophosphate bombs" in a metal box attached to a flatbed trailer that he towed to the scene. U.S. Park Police closed several blocks of Constitution Avenue as Watson continued the standoff. Over four consecutive rush hours, traffic was backed up for miles in the District of Columbia and neighboring northern Virginia. A search of Watson's vehicles turned up a pair of aerosol insecticide cans and a practice grenade incapable of exploding. Watson, who already has spent 15 months behind bars, stood silently and accepted the sentence from Jackson. That time will be credited toward his sentence. The incident began on the same day that the Department of Homeland Security elevated the terror threat level to orange - three days before the start of the U.S. led war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. During a February hearing, Watson apologized. He also recounted a jailhouse conversation he had with a federal probation officer after his conviction. "I told her I was here to start a revolution on behalf of tobacco farming families," said Watson, who contends that changes in U.S. tobacco policy over the past two decades ruined him financially. For more than a century, Watson's family farmed grew tobacco on as 1,500 acres of North Carolina farmland. At the time of his arrest, Watson was farming just a few dozen acres and was threatened with foreclosure. Enditem