A Bit Hasty.

A lot of people were no doubt flashing back to September 11th, 2001 when they heard a plane crashed into the Austin office of the US Internal Revenue Service yesterday.  But local and US federal authorities were quick to claim it wasn't an act of terrorism, doing so within a short period of time after the attack.  I'd love to know how they came to that conclusion.  The dead perpetrator, Joseph Stack, did leave in effect a suicide note online before setting his own house on fire and flying his plane into the building.  He'd had a long dispute with the IRS.  But there is no way the authorities could have determined so quickly that Stack was merely a lone nut.  Opposition to taxes and the IRS in particular has long been a rallying point on the fringe right, so it's not hard to imagine Stack having links with such groups.  Although suicide attacks haven't been a tactic of US domestic terrorists there's nothing stopping them from using them, or encouraging allies to do so.  Somehow I doubt that if all the details of the attack were the same except one, that the attacker had been someone with a "Middle Eastern" name, they would have been so quick to claim it wasn't terrorism.