Was the Texas Plane Attack 'Terrorism'?

(Feb. 19) -- A familiar debate has re-emerged following the premeditated crash of an airplane into an Austin, Texas, office building: How do we distinguish an act of terrorism from other, more commonplace crimes?

Authorities said Joe Stack deliberately flew his small plane into the Echelon 1 building, which housed an office of the Internal Revenue Service. Stack, who's full name is Andrew Joseph Stack III, and one person in the building were killed.

As with the case of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people during a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas, Stack's suicidal assault in Austin appears to have been politically motivated. Railing against government bank and auto bailouts, Washington politicians and the U.S. tax code, Stack chose to employ violence to make a statement.

"I know I'm hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand," Stack said in a statement posted Thursday on the Internet before he set his own house aflame and headed for his plane. "It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn't limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants."

Several news organizations were quick to try to allay concerns that the attack could indeed be considered terrorism.

"Our Homeland Security contacts telling us, this does not appear to be terrorism in any way that that word is conventionally understood," Fox News' Megyn Kelly said. "We understand from officials that this is a sole, isolated act."

Likewise, CNN's Jeanne Meserve reported that Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler believed the case involved "no nexus with criminal or terrorist activity."

Later in the day, however, another Fox News host offered a different assessment. "This appears to be, at this point, some kind of, I guess you would call it, domestic terrorism," Jon Scott told viewers.

For Rep. Lloyd Doggett, there was no question about what to term the event. "This was a cowardly act of domestic terrorism," the Texas Democrat said.

Writing at Salon, Glenn Greenwald reflected on the evolving meaning of terrorism. "All of this underscores, yet again, that terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon," Greenwald wrote. "The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor."

Officially, the Obama administration has termed the Fort Hood attack "an act of terrorism," in part because Hasan is said to have been in contact with a militant Muslim cleric with sympathies to al-Qaida, Reuters reported.

Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City has also widely been termed an act of domestic terrorism.

Though Stack's attack was in part inspired by 9/11, insofar as he chose to crash a plane into building, the solitary nature of the act seems, for the moment, to have disqualified this as terrorism in the eyes of DHS officials.

Though, as David Neiwert wrote on the blog Crooks and Liars, such distinctions are subject to interpretation. He argues that the only way Stack's actions could not be considered terrorism is if "the conventional understanding of the word 'terrorism' has been narrowed down to mean only international terrorism and to preclude domestic terrorism altogether."