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Show Friday, Feb. 19, 2010 Page 2 WorldeiNatiOn Utah State University • Logan, Utah • www.aggietownsquare.com OarifyCorrect The policy of The Utah Statesman is to correct any error made as soon as possible. If you find something you would like clarified or find unfair, please contact the editor at 797-1762 or TSC 105. Angry man crashes plane into IRS building AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service launched a suicide attack on the agency Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, setting off a raging fire that sent workers fleeing for their lives. At least one person in the building was missing. A federal law official identified the pilot as Joseph Stack and said investigators were looking at a long anti-government screed and farewell note that he ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Bristol apparently posted on the Web earlier in the day as an Palin's lawyer is seeking permission to explanation for what he was about to do. subpoena im fig In it, the author cited run-ins he had with the IRS media outand ranted about the tax agency, government baillets such as LEVI JOHNSTON outs and corporate America's "thugs and plunderers." Playgirl maga- cHof112. 0GUE THE INTERVIEW "I have had all I can stand," he wrote in the note, zine and CNN Tat. INSIDE! dated Thursday, adding: "I choose not to keep lookto determine ing over my shoulder at 'big brother' while he strips how much '1,11 my carcass. money Levi Stack, 53, also apparently set fire to his house Johnston, the about six miles from the crash site before embarking father of her LEVI JOHNSTON on the suicide flight, said two law enforcement offichild, has made cials, who like other authorities spoke on condition of to calculate an appropriate level of child anonymity because the investigation was still going support. on. Attorney Thomas Van Flein filed a The pilot took off in a single-engine Piper motion seeking permission to conduct Cherokee from an airport in Georgetown, about 30 out-of-state depositions and obtain finanmiles from Austin, without filing a flight plan. He cial records from the magazine, CNN, flew low over the Austin skyline before plowing into Entertainment Tonight, Vanity Fair, the the side of the hulking, seven-story, black-glass buildNational Enquirer, Star magazine and ing just before 10 a.m. with a thunderous explosion Insider. that instantly stirred memories of Sept. 11. It could take a judge weeks to decide Flames shot from the building, windows explodon the request by Palin, the teenage ed, a huge pillar of black smoke rose over the city, daughter of former Alaska Gov. Sarah and terrified workers rushed to get out. Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidenThe Pentagon scrambled two F-16 fighter jets from tial candidate. Houston to patrol the skies over the burning building before it became clear that it was the act of a lone pilot, and President Barack Obama was briefed on the crash. "It felt like a bomb blew off," said Peggy Walker, Flight diverted to SLC an IRS revenue officer who was sitting at her desk. "The ceiling caved in and windows blew in. We got after bomb threat up and ran." SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - An Stack was presumed dead. At least one person airliner that was diverted mid-flight who worked in the building was unaccounted for because of a bomb threat was being and two people were hospitalized, fire officials said. scoured by investigators at Salt About 190 IRS employees work in the building. Lake City International Airport on Gerry Cullen was eating breakfast at a restaurant Thursday. across the street when the plane struck the building Airport spokeswoman Barbara and "vanished in a fireball." Gann said a flight attendant found a Matt Farney, who was in the parking lot of a nearnote while the 757 was en route from by Home Depot, said he saw a low-flying plane near Denver to San Francisco and turned it some apartments and the office building just before over to the pilot. it crashed. "The note was threatening enough "I figured he was going to buzz the apartments or for the pilot to feel like he should he was showing off," Farney said. "It was insane. It divert," Gann said. didn't look like he was out of control or anything." Gann said the passengers and Sitting at her desk in another building a half-mile crew were taken to the international from the crash, Michelle Santibanez said she felt terminal, where the FBI interviewed vibrations from the crash. She and her co-workers passengers while trying to figure out the note's origin. Celebs&People ■ PLA 'RL HUGH T CARL LEO & ERIC PInK-11D ARTIST Nat'/Briefs Mistrust surrounds USCuba immigration talks HAVANA (AP) - The last time U.S. diplomats traveled to Havana, they held secret talks with their Cuban counterparts that were hailed as the most significant in decades. Almost nothing has gone right for U.S.-Cuba relations in the five long months since. When State Department officials sit down with Cuban leaders for immigration talks Friday, the encounter will take place under a cloud of mutual mistrust and dashed hopes. Last year's hopes that the election of President Barack Obama could mean quicker progress toward ending a halfcentury of U.S-Cuban enmity now seem a pipe dream. LateNiteHumor A FIREFIGHTER ON A LADDER works on putting out a fire at a seven-story building after Joseph Stack crashed a small private plane into the building that houses the Internal Revenue Service in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, Feb. 18. AP photo ran to the windows, where they witnessed a scene report his wife Sheryl's income. that reminded them of 9/11, she said. He railed against politicians, the Catholic Church, "It was the same kind of scenario, with window the "unthinkable atrocities" committed by big busipanels falling out and desks falling out and paperness, and the government bailouts that followed. He work flying," said Santibanez, an accountant. said he slowly came to the conclusion that "violence The building, situated in a heavily congested secnot only is the answer, it is the only answer." tion of Austin, was still smoldering six hours after "I saw it written once that the definition of insanthe crash, with much of the damage on the second ity is repeating the same process over and over and and third floors. expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I The entire outside of the second floor was gone on am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take the side of the building where the plane hit. Support beams were bent inward. Venetian blinds dangled my pound of flesh and sleep well," he wrote. from blown-out windows, and large sections of the According to California state records, Stack had exterior were blackened with soot. a troubled business history, twice starting software Andrew Jacobson, an IRS revenue officer who was companies in California that ultimately were suson the second floor when the plane hit with a "big pended by the state's tax board, one in 2000, the whoomp" and then a second explosion, said about six other in 2004. Also, his first wife filed for bankpeople couldn't use the stairwell because of smoke ruptcy in 1999, listing a debt to the IRS of nearly and debris. He found a metal bar to break a window $126,000. so the group could crawl out onto a concrete ledge, The blaze at Stack's home, a red-brick house on where they were rescued by firefighters. His bloody a tree-lined street in a middle-class neighborhood, hands were bandaged. caved in the roof and blew out the windows. Elbert The FBI was investigating. The National Hutchins, who lives one house away, said the house Transportation Safety Board sent an investigator as caught fire about 9:15 a.m. He said a woman and her well. teenage daughter drove up to the house before fireIn the long, rambling, self-described "rant" that fighters arrived. Stack apparently posted on the Internet, he began: "If "They both were very, very distraught," said you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, Hutchins, a retiree who said he didn't know the fam`Why did this have to happen?'" ily well. "'That's our house!' they cried. 'That's our He recounted his financial reverses, his difficulty house!'" finding work in Austin, and at least two clashes with Red Cross spokeswoman Marty McKellips said the IRS, one of them after he filed no return because, the agency was treating two people who live in the he said, he had no income, the other after he failed to house. In Dubai attack, signs o Mossad shadow war JERUSALEM (AP) - The death of a Hamas operative in Dubai at the hands of a squad of burly hit men conjures up images of the string of killings that followed the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and a bungled attempt to poison a Hamas leader in Jordan 13 years ago. Israel's Mossad spy agency - the prime suspect in the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last month in Dubai - has known both triumph and embarrassment in decades of covert warfare, and the latest episode would appear to include elements of each. The killers, whoever they are, got their man and escaped. But they were caught on video and left behind what appears to be significant evidence: A Dubai police force that proved competent perhaps beyond the agents' expectations found that at least seven of them used the names of real Israelis with European passports. The Mossad is suspected of several violent incidents in the Mideast in recent years, such as the killing of a top Hezbollah officer in the heart of Damascus in 2008. But its reputation - particularly in the Arab world where it is often seen as an ominous force behind unexplained events - goes back decades. In 1972, a group of armed Palestinians raided the rooms of Israel's Olympic team in Munich, killed two athletes and took another nine hostage. A botched rescue attempt by German police ended in the deaths of all of the Israelis in a wild shootout at a nearby military airfield. Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister at the time, ordered the Mossad to kill those responsible, partly as revenge David Letterman, Feb. 17, 2010 Top 10 Surprising Facts About Curling 10. Every year it's watched by dozens of people. 9. Consistently ranked the world's number one broom-related sport. 8. It's a lot like hockey, minus the speed and excitement. 7. No number seven, the writer fell asleep while researching curling facts. 6. Not to be confused with Norwegian sport "Carling" where you push a guy named Carl across ice. 5. Longest match ever: unknown, because no one ever stays till the end. 4. No number 4 - writer still asleep. Damn, curling is boring. 3. Mickey Rourke making film about washed-up curling legend who comes back for one last big curl. BULLET HOLES AND SIGNS OF THE STRUGGLE, in this April 10, 1973 2. Thing they slide down the ice is called file photo, scar the bedroom of Fatah spokesman and leading Arab Poet Kama! "Thing they slide down the ice." Nasser in Beirut, Lebanon, one of three simultaneous operations carried out by Israel's Mossad. AP photo 1. No one cares. and partly to deter future attacks. That directive launched an unprecedented covert offensive that saw a string of Palestinian operatives - many of them not directly connected to the Munich massacre - gunned down or blown up across Europe and the Middle East. Basil al-Kubaisi, for example, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was approached by two men as he left the Cafe de la Paix in Paris one night in April 1973. He had time to yell "Don't do this" in French before the men, assassins from a Mossad outfit known as Caesarea, shot him dead with silenced 0.22 pistols. That was on a Friday. The following Monday, after long preparations by Mossad agents, Israeli commandos landed in rubber dinghies on the Beirut beach near the Sands Hotel. One of the commandos was Ehud Barak, a future prime minister and the current defense minister, who was disguised as a woman with a brunette wig and makeup. The assassins killed their targets, three high-ranking Palestinian Liberation Organization men, before fleeing back to their boats. A number of civilian bystanders were also killed. Other Palestinian operatives were killed by bullets or bombs in Rome, Nicosia, Athens and elsewhere, and the myth of the Mossad- ruthless and skillful with unlimited resources and reach - was born. It has largely held, even in the face of embarrassing blunders. The Mossad places far more emphasis on special operations like assassinations than intelligence agencies in most other countries, said Ronen Bergman, author of a book on Israeli covert operations against Iran. "This emphasis is because of Israel's existential fears. This is not policy - it's mindset, the feeling that the Mossad is the final frontier for defending the national security of the state of Israel," he told The Associated Press on Thursday. That aggressive approach has led to a few very public errors. In July 1973, on a Saturday night in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, Mossad gunmen shot and killed a man they believed was Ali Hassan Salameh, a top Palestinian operative known as the Red Prince. The victim turned out to be an innocent Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki. Six of the agents were captured and put on trial in Norway for the bungled killing. It was six years before the Mossad caught up with Salameh himself, using a Volkswagen packed with plastic explosives to kill him in the middle of Beirut. The Lillehammer fiasco revealed an interesting aspect of Mossad operations: two of the captured agents were women. One, Sylvia Rafael, a South African-Israeli dual national who was imprisoned in Norway, later married her Norwegian defense attorney. In the Dubai killing last month, closed circuit TV cameras filmed a member of a surveillance duo whom Dubai authorities identified as an Irish national named Gail Folliard, and who is seen at one point entering a bathroom and emerging with her blond hair concealed under a black wig. Khaled Mashaal, one of Hamas' top leaders, was walking in Amman, Jordan in 1997, a time when the Islamic group was carrying out deadly bombings in Israeli cities. Two Mossad men reportedly using Canadian passports tried to kill him with a device that released a toxin into his ear, but the plan was disrupted by the Hamas man's bodyguard. |