Must Love Cats; no Jihadis

Today I read something interesting. The wife of gay Muslim terrorist Omar Mateen–according to a news headline–may be arrested for failing to report him to the FBI as a terrorist threat.

I was surprised when I read that, because I sat through three years of law school, and I had no recollection of anyone telling me I had a legal duty to inform. You can’t conspire to commit crimes, and you can’t help people commit crimes, but as far as I know, you have no duty to warn people that crimes will be committed.

I have done about five minutes’ worth of sloppy Internet research, so I could be wrong, but I found no sites suggesting anyone has an obligation to inform the FBI of threats of terrorism. I found a site about lawyers which said the closest thing we have to such a law involves “misprision of felony,” which makes it illegal (under federal law, not state) to fail to report a felony to authorities.

This law was used to convict one of Timothy McVeigh’s pals.

The article says:

However, misprision of felony requires more than just a failure to warn. Keeping quiet about criminal plans isn’t enough. To be convicted of misprision, there must also be proof of a positive act to cover up the crime, like lying to the FBI, hiding evidence, or harboring the criminal.

She probably didn’t lie to the FBI, since she didn’t talk to them at all. She probably didn’t hide evidence. We don’t have any reason to believe evidence was hidden. So what’s the most likely problem? “Harboring the criminal.”

Can a housewife be said to be harboring a criminal because she shares a home with a husband who is a terrorist?

I have doubts about this. Is it harboring to fail to try to throw someone out of his own house? I’ll bet it’s not. And she may not have known he was a terrorist until after the crime. Knowing he wanted to kill people isn’t the same as knowing he was a criminal. If you conspire with other people to commit a crime, you break the law. It looks like Mateen didn’t conspire, so what crime did he commit prior to the murders? I’m not sure, but planning to kill people, all by yourself, probably isn’t a crime. We jail people for attempted murder, but has anyone ever been convicted of planning to murder, without acting, without partners?

If the FBI knows it can’t convict this lady, what’s going on?

One possibility is that they simply want to look good. They don’t apply realistic, useful scrutiny or restrictions to Muslims who are likely to commit crimes, preferring instead to take the ineffective, politically correct approach, putting the entire population under surveillance. Mateen and his crazy dad fell through the net. Now the FBI has a PR problem. Arresting the wife could make them look like they’re really trying, even though we know they are not.

Another possibility is that they’re trying to scare the hell out of this woman so she’ll talk. It would be unethical to file charges you know are bogus, but law enforcement people do things like that. They did it to George Zimmerman.

She should definitely be investigated. She may be a trove of useful information, and she may be an accomplice, like the wife of Syed Farook. I don’t know if slamming her with ineffective charges will help.

Or I could be wrong, and she may be guilty of violating some law I don’t know about. I’m not a criminal lawyer. But the McVeigh case suggests I’m right. If they had had anything else on Michael Fortier (McVeigh’s friend), they would have used it. Presumably, the same set of laws is at work now.

People are jumping on Trump, who said he appreciated people telling him he was right. Trump has been saying we need to restrict immigration from certain Muslim countries. One clever person said Trump’s idea would not have helped, because Mateen was born in the US. That may sound smart at first, but it’s not. Mateen is a great example of a non-assimilated Muslim with loyalties to other countries, even though he was born here. The mass of Muslims who come here necessarily includes a number of people like him. We can’t deport people who were born here, but it certainly makes sense to vet Muslims we don’t have to take in. Mateen makes Trump’s case stronger, not weaker.

It’s depressing to see leftists using this as an excuse to pimp gun control. Passing laws against semiautomatic rifles would be silly. Terrorists will always have guns. Terrorists aren’t legally allowed to have commercial jets full of kerosene and hostages, but they had them on 9/11.

It seems like the public hates gun control, so I don’t think the new push will accomplish much. Mass shootings (which are getting rarer) make people want to buy guns for protection. Leftists haven’t figured that out yet.

The world is getting so crazy. The preppers look smarter and smarter all the time. The more time passes, the more my ambitions lean toward finding a snug burrow in the country where I can hole up and be left alone until I die.

In a world like this, one of the best defenses is to be invisible. So of course I blog. One day I should probably rethink that strategy.