Austin Plane Crash: Suicide or Terrorism?

By Evan Perez 

February 19, 2010, 1:18 PM ET

Wall Street Journal

 

 

Was the suicide plane attack on the Austin, Texas, office building housing the IRS a terrorist act?
U.S. national security officials say the label doesn’t matter, but have highlighted the fact that there are no known connections between the pilot, Andrew Joseph Stack, and international terrorist groups.
Some have criticized the terminology law enforcement officials have used to describe the incident; the terminology appears aimed mostly at reassuring Americans about wider security risks.
Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said: “I consider this a criminal act by a lone individual.” In the hours after the incident, as TV outlets showed images of the blazing building, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security assured that there wasn’t any “nexus to terrorist activity.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the lead investigator, said: “There is nothing discovered so far to indicate a larger conspiracy or international influence.”
Authorities said they recovered two bodies from the building where hundreds of Internal Revenue Service employees worked.
Still, the astonishing incident and the fact that Stack was striking out at the U.S. government begs the question: what makes him different from others classified as terrorists, such as Oklamoha City bomber Timothy McVeigh, or the alleged Christmas Day airline bombing suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab?
In a lengthy manifesto posted on an Internet site, Stack lashed out at IRS, who he blamed for causing him financial problems and declared: “Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
On jihadist Web sites, Stack’s attack was being celebrated.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) told reporters that he considered the attack “domestic terrorism.”
Patrick Rowan, former chief of the Justice Department’s national security division, says the classification doesn’t make a difference in the investigation. “It is kind of a silly semantic game to argue about whether or not it is terrorism,” he said.  “It is a version of domestic terrorism. It doesn’t really matter except maybe for agencies keeping statistics.”
The terminology does come into play in the partisan politics of Washington, where Republicans have accused President Barack Obama of being weak on national security.
Some criticized the administration for not classifying Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan as a terrorist after he allegedly carried out a mass shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas. The FBI and the Pentagon decided the matter was more appropriately handled by the military judicial system, rather than by terrorism prosecutors.
At a conservative gathering in Washington, D.C., today, the attack was joke fodder. In remarks introducing antitax activist Grover Norquist at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Human Rights editor Jed Babbin quipped that Norquist has been “getting a little testy” recently. “And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building.”