Terrorists in the news

The problem with maintaining a narrative is that sometimes, the narrative doesn't exactly work out so well.

Remember these guys?

Federal authorities touted the arrests of nine members of a Michigan militia as a pre-emptive strike against homegrown terrorists, declaring at an initial court hearing that the suspects with "dark hearts and evil intent" wanted to go to war against the government.

Five weeks later, prosecutors are scrambling to regroup after a judge questioned the strength of their evidence by ordering the so-called rebels released until trial and saying they had a right to "engage in hate-filled, venomous speech."

If you read that carefully, you'll notice something. "Dark hearts," "evil intent," "hate-filled, venomous" and such are adjectives. And they are probably accurate adjectives in the case of these bozos. But for a crime to take place, you need verbs. I wouldn't argue that the Hutaree are harmless, but being a bunch of jerks still isn't it a federal crime per se. If it were, Fred Phelps would be in Supermax right now.

Meanwhile, in hate-filled, venomous Arizona, we have this:

The FBI will assist in the investigation of a suspicious envelope addressed to Gov. Jan Brewer that an employee at the Capitol opened Tuesday, sending the Executive Tower into one-hour lockdown after a white powder spilled from the envelope onto a computer.

I wasn't aware that the Hutaree had weighed in on the Arizona controversy.

And there's this:

Shahzad's behavior sometimes seemed odd to his neighbors, and he surprised a real estate broker he hardly knew with his outspokenness about President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

"He mentioned that he didn't like Bush policies in Iraq," said Igor Djuric, who represented Shahzad in 2004 when he was buying a home.

Djuric said he couldn't remember the exact words Shahzad used about Bush but "something to the effect of he doesn't know what he's doing and it's the wrong thing that he's doing."

"I don't know if he mentioned 9/11," Djuric said, "but something like that, Iraq has nothing to do with anything."

That was pretty much the conventional wisdom, right down the line. Go figure.