Last Straws And Loose Ends

Joe Stack played in several bands in Austin. One was called "Last Straw." In an AP article carried by the New York Times and others we learn of Simone Wensink who was the singer of the band and had flown with him to New Mexico. "I felt like totally safe with this man,'' she said.

In a Los Angeles Times article entitled Austin pilot 'was always even-keeled' we learn of bandmate Billy Eli who had this to say of Stack: "Anger was not even 1% of what that man was," Eli said. As for politics and policy, "he wasn't passionately married to any of that stuff."

From another AP article:

Stack's daughter from his first marriage, Samantha Dawn Bell, said the Web manifesto didn't sound like the father she knew.
"It's not him. The letter itself sounds like it's coming from a different person," she said in an interview from her home in Norway.

But meanwhile on Fox news, the sense of bewilderment is replaced with unfurled flags and the adoration of the American hero who used his ladder to save trapped people from the massive towering inferno strangely created by a small single engine plane.



You have to smile a little as the newscaster says things like "a guy who happens to work for a glass company, who happens to be on the scene of chaos, and climbs up HIS ladder, to rescue five people out of a burning building. Robin Dehaven joins me now on camera. Robin, what a pleasure to lay eyes on you." Notice how she remembers to squeeze in that he is a 'father' and 'served in the military' at the end. Reminded me a little of Kimberly D. Munley, the hero of Fort Hood. This is the manner in which she was described previously in a Daily Mail article:

Mother of one Sergeant Kimberley Munley confronted gunman Nidal Malik Hasan and, despite being wounded in both legs, brought him down with four shots.
One of the shots cut an artery in her leg, leaving blood pumping out but she still managed to keep firing before collapsing.
Medic Francisco Delaserna applied a tourniquet to Sgt Munley as she drifted in and out of consciousness because of blood loss.
'I cut her trousers open, tied a tourniquet around her thigh and stopped the bleeding. But she had already lost a lot of blood,' he said.


Only later did we find out that according to a witness it was someone else who actually shot and brought down Hasan, as covered in this New York Times article.
Well, I guess she brought down Hasan about as much as Jessica Lynch went down fighting (her rifle jammed) with the Iraqis, which is good enough for the Army. Dehaven sounds honest enough and his story plausible though so let's move on for now.

Back to the Fox video. Big fire in the background isn't it? I guess it's just in the luck of the draw since sometimes it ends up like this:


That photo is from this article about another less explosive crash. In fact a piece on KXAN of Austin below shows that experts are questioning how so much fire was caused by such a small plane. So now there is mention of a possible 'fuel drum' aboard the plane.



A new audio has surfaced on youtube, which is unverified, but seems to show the audio recording of Mr. Stack speaking with the control tower before his last flight.



Here is what some claim is his voice mail.



Another Los Angeles Times article also mentions an interesting fact:

Despite his financial ups and downs, Stack did well enough to indulge his interest in flying. He obtained his first pilot's license in 1994 and had owned a costly Velocity Elite XL-RG plane in addition to the Piper.

One is listed here on the web as selling used for $119,500. His 1979 Piper Dakota N2889D already posted on Political Friendster might have also have cost him as much. See price list.

In his 'Manifesto,' another thing confounds me. In a tone of slight hysteria, he seems to claim that after 9/11 his business prospects were down the drain.

Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.

How can this be since from his client list and our last post we know he was working to a large degree for defense contractors?

Have a look at a what a defense expert says of the industry within which Stack was operating and how it fared after 9/11.

The defense companies are sitting extremely well right now. They have just come off nine years of tremendous growth, they all have great balance sheets, and they all have been buying back their own stock and are sitting on a ton of cash. With the projections going from 30,000 troops in Afghanistan at the beginning of 2009 to 100,000 over the next six months, Afghanistan is going to grow while Iraq is going down in terms of the number of troops. So overall funding and appropriations are going up for the defense group, which is a positive.

And finally Prison Planet and many others are reporting that from the code of the Microsoft word file of the Manifesto it can be clearly seen that the document was revised 27 times in two days, having started the Manifesto on the 16th of February. This seems to clearly contradict with the Manifesto itself which says he worked months on it in the third sentance.

The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken.