Original Posted By: Ben Charvet
Subject: Re: Pietenpol-List: Joe Stack's suicide noteChannel 8 in Austin had a UT Professor on. He made a lot of sense. Here is thelink.http://www.news8austin.com/content/your ... =267401the text is below:We've been asking visitors to the News 8 Austin Web site whether they think Thursdaysplane crash was an act of terrorism. As of Friday morning, about half answered yes and half answered no. One poll commentator named Sparks said, It was a criminal act by one person witha personal grudge. Save the terrorist tag for the political/religious groupswith a published agenda of violence.Another commentator named Angie said, It was an act of domestic terrorism. He hada political agenda. Criminal or Terrorism?We brought associate professor from the University of Texas Department of GovernmentAmi Pedahzur to the News 8 studio.To help us explore that question more in-depth, we brought associate professorfrom the University of Texas Department of Government Ami Pedahzur to the News8 studio. Ive been dealing with the studies of terrorism, suicide terrorism, trying to understandthe individual, organizational and social motivation behind the phenomenaas well as the response to such attacks, Pedahzur said.He said people are right to be unclear on how to define Thursdays situation becausethe definition of terrorism itself is unclear. Basically I think what we saw yesterday was a criminal act that incorporated elementsof terrorism, Pedahzur said.He went on to dissect the situation by saying the target, the IRS office, was highlysymbolic. He added the act was a copycat of the 9/11 attacks, and that theperpetrator clearly had some kind of political agenda.Pedahzur said it was hard to tell if pilot Joe Stack leaned more to the left orright. He said Stack seemed to have his own ideology. Having said that, Pedahzur said. It was not part of a bigger plan. He was not associatedwith any terrorist network. It doesnt seem he was a professional terroristas we would define it. Reports from previous friends and colleagues of Stack indicated he seemed to bea normal man, but Pedahzur read Stacks web page and said he could sense the angerhad been building up.Well, we read the manifesto and we see that the person has had some anger buildingup. The anger was directed at the government for various reasons. Sometimesits just the easy way out to find someone to blame, he said. But Pedahzur said he believes another event triggered the incident Thursday.It was building up, Pedahzur said. He was waiting for something to happen thatwould make him snap. Its clearly not something that was a decision that was madeyesterday morning. It was an ongoing process that came to a point of explosionyesterday.________________________________________________________________________________Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:10:43 -0500