Tweet
A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service plowed his small plane into an office building housing nearly 200 federal tax employees on Thursday, officials said, setting off a raging fire that sent workers fleeing as thick plumes of black smoke poured into the air.
A U.S. law official identified the pilot as Joseph Stack and said investigators were looking at an anti-government message on the Web linked to him. The Web site outlines problems with the IRS and says violence “is the only answer.”
Per the Austin American-Statesman, it appears, thankfully, Stack failed to kill anyone.
There is not a credible definition of terrorism that does not include the act of flying a plane into a building filled with civilians as a political statement. Stack is evidently not religiously motivated, but that does not change the definition at all. If he acted alone, then he’s what the Department of Homeland Security has recently taken to calling a lone-wolf extremist.
I suspect that the Austin police are saying — as this photo caption indicates — that this isn’t an “act of terrorism” as a shorthand to distinguish the attack from the work of al-Qaeda. And lord knows that “terrorist” and “al-Qaeda” have been conflated so often in the last nine years. But the distinction is important. Not every act of terrorism is religiously oriented. Some terrorism is the work of home-grown extremists who have nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with American foreign policy, and certainly nothing to do with Islam. Some of it, of course, will be. But that shouldn’t diminish from our ability to describe events as precisely as we can, especially if we’re going to continue to live in an age where the ubiquity of concerns about terrorism is the new Normal. And here the designation fits.
Update: More from Lady Z.
Update 2: At the risk of retreating to lexicography, the FBI’s definition of domestic terrorism would appear to fit this case:
Domestic terrorism is the unlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.
14 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
RSS/XML Feed
Actually Spencer, if you read this guy’s supposed “goodbye cruel world” papers that are all over the internet, he sounds like either a left liberal, or libertarian, that had enough of life in the United States. He didn’t sound much different than a majority of posters on FDL.
That’s really a disgusting thing to say. None of our posters, commenters or community has ever committed an act of violence remotely comparable. You should apologize for that.
Was he non-white? Because if not, that kind of undercuts your thesis, Spencer.
It’s kind of sad that we care about what is really a minor semantic point, but clearly the issue with whether or not this is terrorism is whether it was done “as a political statement” or for personal vengeance. That is, did he think the IRS was evil in general or that it had screwed him personally. (I always take suicide notes with a grain of salt–details that emerge later will be more important to making that determination.)
I’ve read his whole manifesto, it’s up at Smoking Gun now, and while I won’t compare his actions to anything anyone here has ever done, his words have a familiar ring. This was a person driven insane by a corrupt and rotten system that lacks representation: he hates the health care dithering and dealing, the bailouts for the well-connected, and the inability to make any impact whatsoever on our “representatives.”
Clearly anyone who takes his own life in this dramatic fashion has been driven insane, but his motivating factors are not unfamiliar. I predict there will be more of this in America going forward and not less.
Seems to qualify as terrorism…
the suicide note was pulled down by webhost–but I copied it off and it is up on seminal. It appears this person lived in San Marcos, just south of Austin.
have you read the suicide post? there are some themes in it that are indeed similar to topics here at fdl. and canadianbeaver is not saying anyone here would use, or condone, violence of this type.
But why is that a useful comparison? There are lots of populists of many varieties. There’s a huge chasm between those who use violence and those who don’t. Let’s keep this slope decidedly non-slippery.
Is it a chasm, or is it a tipping point? I honestly don’t have a handle on what is occuring with this process of radicalization we’re seeing, in both international and domestic terrorism. But I do feel it is more a process, than a wide gulf, or chasm.
I suspect you’ll see people say that this is different because it wasn’t a plot backed by a terrorist network… the same people who demanded that everyone call the Ft. Hood shootings terrorism, of course. There’s no difference between getting riled up by your anti-tax freedomland buddies and a radical Imam.
The post doesn’t say that the guy’s left, right, or otherwise. Just that it was politically motivated. It’s telling that your jumping to oppose something that wasn’t actually written.
Remember when Napolitano said that the underwear bomber was not part of a broader threat and the right flipped out, pretending not to notice the difference between saying that there’s no ongoing attack and saying that this isn’t the work of a terror network? Imagine how much they’d flip out if Obama came out hours after an attack by any Muslim saying it wasn’t terrorism.
or the attempted bombing a health clinic, also in Austin, or murder of a doctor. violence against civilian targets for political ends. Legally and in any other way I can think of, terrorism.
When do we get to start profiling engineers? We’re all thinkin it, I’m just sayin it–engineers are a threat to our American way of life.