Kamikaze Kid Cover-up in Tampa?
by Daniel Hopsicker
January 22--Tampa Florida
"The 15-year-old student
pilot who crashed a stolen plane into a Florida office building earlier
this month had no alcohol or drugs in his system when he died, according
to medical examiners. Nor was there any sign the teen had taken Accutane,
an acne medication that carried a label warning it might cause depression
and suicide."
Monica Lothrop was working
in her law firm office in downtown Tampa. It was a typical Saturday afternoon.
Then the plane hit.
"Suddenly you're looking
out into the open air, the blue sky, 28 floors up," she recalled.
"I thought 'Oh my gosh, it's
happening again, and they're targeting the Bank of America building, the
plane is going to explode, and there's more planes coming, and we have
to get out of here!’"
It was a moment of terror
she will never forget. Neither will Joe Formoso, head of the Tampa air
traffic controllers union. He was on duty when Bishop's small plane passed
just 1,000 feet above a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 that had taken off
from Tampa International Airport moments earlier.
"It was only by the grace
of God that the Southwest pilots saw it," Formoso says, shaking his head.
When "troubled teen" Charles
Bishop stole a plane and flew it into the 28th floor of the Bank of America
in downtown Tampa—leaving behind a suicide note praising Osama bin Laden—he
catapulted himself into the middle of the mystery surrounding the Sept
11th terrorist attack.
That mystery has only deepened
in the two weeks since.
Charles Bishop is the first
American suicide bomber in history. Two weeks after his death authorities
have finally ruled out acne as the explanation for his act of terrorism.
"Very little safe ground
so far."
A few things are known for
sure:
MacDill Air Force Base—the
center of operations for Operation Enduring Freedom—had no interceptors
on hand. So Tampa was a pretty safe place to do something stupid in a plane.
A Cessna does not have anywhere
near the same destructive potential as a jumbo jet.
If you crash into a mostly
deserted building, the person you end up killing is yourself.
The mainstream press quickly
concluded that Charles Bishop's kamikaze flight had no connection to terrorism,
a judgment some thought a little cavalier.
Improbably, his suicide was
instead adjudged to have been acne-induced. Or so said the Washington Post,
ABC News, and the Associated Press, which all ran stories blaming Bishop's
suicide mission on Accutane, the powerful acne pills produced by Hoffman-La
Roche.
This made little sense. But
what else should we expect in a surreal tragedy which saw Mohamed Atta
use a passport from the "Republic of Conch," which doesn't exist, while
boarding his fatal flight?
Alone among the major morning
news shows, the MadCowMorningNews questioned this finding, and devoted
all newsroom resources—TeamMadCowCoverage—to investigating questions
about Bishop's suicide hanging in the soft Gulf breezes which roll into
the port city of Tampa, Florida.
Our diligence has been rewarded.
This week the chief toxicologist
with the Tampa Medical Examiner's office told reporters the results of
tests on Bishop's blood for a range of substances, including opiates, antidepressants,
stimulants, marijuana, PCP and cocaine.
All came back negative.
The toxicology tests showed
no sign at all of Accutane, the acne medication that the press had a week
earlier linked to suicide and depression.
"Suicide by zit" could now
officially be ruled out.
But if acne hadn't impelled
young Bishop to do it..what had? What motivates a 15-year old Young Republican
to fly a plane straight into a skyscraper on a balmy Saturday afternoon?
Since the authorities refuse
to release the crucial evidence, the answer is we may never know.
"Nothing to see here. Move
along."
The Tampa police have still
not released the contents of the boy's suicide note. No one in the media
is protesting very loud.
This pronounced lack of curiosity
is vindication—of a sort—for the pat response a Tampa police spokeswoman
gave over and over to questions about the suicide.
"We may never know," she
repeated patiently. She did not sound dismayed when she said it.
"We may never know."
In Charles Bishop's two-page-long
suicide note there had been "some (other) things in there that we
prefer not to talk about [since] the investigation is still ongoing," Tampa
Police Chief Bennie Holder told a news conference. "But everything in the
note mentioned things that occurred on Sept. 11 and his support of bin
Laden and al-Qaida."
"Everything in the note."
Media critics sometimes
accuse the press for being responsible for the increasingly short national
attention span.
After each new item is served
up it has a brief ‘half-life’ in the news, goes this reasoning, and
then disappears... Afterwards Americans are encouraged to assume that the
matter is settled...
Even when it isn’t.
The night the Kamikaze Kid
piloted his plane into a 28th floor office the local Fox news anchors had
whipped themselves into an absolute frenzy over the question they asked
breathlessly during every local commercial break..
"Was there a connection to
Osama bin Laden? We'll tell you at ten!"
Two weeks later they no longer
seem to care as much at ten.
The kamikaze kid’s flight
instructor, Robert Cooper, observed out loud that the media tornado
had disappeared as abruptly as it had arrived.
"The news media has a short
memory," he said. "They're on to the next hot thing."
For the past two weeks Julia
Bishop has been kept under tighter wraps than any female witness since
Marina Oswald. She has spoken a total of just two words to the press:
"Get" and "out."
Reporters waited for a word
from her to no avail in front of her home in Palm Harbor, a wealthy suburb
north of Tampa consisting of gated communities stretching almost as far
as the eye can see... cluster after cluster of white-stucco homes on silent
palm-fringed cul-de-sacs.
"Opulent monotony," one reporter
called it.
No reporters spoke with Julia
Bishop. The only activity that could be seen at her luxury apartment was
a victim's advocate from the Sheriff's Office who came out periodically
to walk the family's dogs.
Rumor had Julia Bishop holding
out to tell her story to People magazine first. But when their Jan 21 issue
came out the story had not a single photo of the boy's mother, which means
we still don't know what she looks like.
Millions of Americans have
seen the mothers of several of the Arab terrorists. How, in freeway-close
Tampa Florida, has the mother of kamikaze kid pilot Charles Bishop been
so completely shielded from view?
Even Marina Oswald got her
picture in the papers.
"Remembered for his special
interest in environmental impact issues."
Julia Bishop’s only public
utterance concerning her son came in a statement read by the family’s
attorney:
"He cared about the world
his generation was inheriting and took special interest in environmental
impact issues, animal rights and endangered species laws, and the new world
of national politics which impacts all of these issues.''
Poor Charles Bishop. Is that
how a son wants to be remembered by his Mom?
Even stranger than the fact
that the boy's suicide note was being withheld from the media by the police
is that apparently Charles' Bishop’s own mother hasn’t seen it either.
The family’s lawyer Pamela
Campbell—who served as the absent Julia Bishop's mouthpiece—said Charles
Bishop's distraught mother still had no insight into the crash. Her client
hadn’t seen the note. Nor had the police read it to her.
Campbell said. "At this point
in time, she really doesn't know what to believe.'
If your child committed
suicide, wouldn't you want to read their suicide note right away?
"Nothing to see here. Move
along."
Charles Bishop’s "missing"
Dad is Charles J. Bishara, a half-Sicilian and half-Lebanese career criminal
who hails from Winchester, Mass., described by Bay State natives as a ‘Mob
town.’
He is currently wanted on
heroin charges.
News accounts had been at
pains to make one thing perfectly clear: "The boy's father has been out
of the mother's and son's lives for some time."
Bishara's organized crime
ties could thus have had nothing to do with young Charlie Bishop's bizarre
suicide, still the only authenticated act of Osama bin Laden-inspired terror
in America since September 11.
Julia Bishara had changed
her and son Charles' last names, from Bishara to Bishop. She told officials
she made the change because ‘Bishara’ is an Arabic name and the U.S.
was at war with Iraq, and subsequent news reports pointed to this as evidence
that young Charles had had no contact with his "missing" father.
Team coverage was clearly
the right way to go.
The MadCowMorningNews has
learned that this may not be the whole story. We had puzzled over why the
divorced woman hadn't reverted to her maiden name, Detore. She changed
her name instead to Bishop.
"The entire Bishara clan
in Winchester changed their names to Bishop," a long-time native of Massachusetts
told us. "They anglicized it."
Six years after "small time
hood" Charles Bishara had supposedly left his ex-wife and son's lives for
good, had Julia Bishop changed her name to match her ex-husband’s?
Mother Julia and son Charles
lived a rootless, nomadic lifestyle, moving from town to town and school
to school, news reports indicated, without saying why. Julia Bishop listed
five addresses in the Tampa Bay area. Charles had attended at least four
schools there. It was a virtual prescription for maladjustment.
Behind the walls of his gated
community, Charlie nursed a grievance.
One boy who lived on the
same cul-de-sac told a reporter he would see Charlie walking his dog. "I
said `Nice dog' a lot to him, but he never said anything back. I would
smile, but he wouldn't smile back.''
The collapse of the official
story of Charles Bishop's flight leaves troubling questions unanswered.
Where did the straight "A"
Kamikaze Kid get the crazy idea that flying a plane at 160 miles an hour
into a building after praising an Arab terrorist with a sideline in narcotics
trafficking was going to be just way cool?
Does the identity of the
Kamikaze Kid's father have anything to do with the manner in which the
son "acted out?" Does this help unravel the mystery of just who it was
that targeted innocent civilians for murder on September 11?
The FBI's new theme song
should be sung by former Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle:
"Our Lips Are Sealed."
When we found Bishara’s
million dollar penthouse condominium at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in
Naples, Florida, we thought: why can't the FBI find Bishara?
We spoke recently with a
grizzled McDill Special Forces Commander who had just come back Afghanistan,
and used the opportunity to ask him something similar.
"Does the Sicilian Mafia
or the Lebanese Arab Christian clans have a beef with the present Administration?
He allowed that they might.
Someone wrote to tell us
that on a whim they had entered www.bishara.com into their browser's address
line.
It turns out to be a subsidiary
of the Sultan of Oman.
This is probably just coincidence.
In another unrelated story,
officials announced that investigators from Treasury, Justice, and the
FBI have "finished the initial phase of their exhaustive effort to trace
the financial underpinnings of the attacks that killed about 3,000 persons
in New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11."
Despite repeated charges
from pundits and politicians, including President Bush, that Osama bin
Laden's Al Qaeda organization was aided and abetted by funds derived from
drug trafficking, the federal "investigators" did not mention illicit drug
profits as a source of funding for the attacks.
Huh. Imagine that.
Charles Bishop is the first
American suicide bomber in history. Two weeks after his death authorities
have finally ruled out acne as the explanation for his act of terrorism.
"Nothing to see here. Move
along."
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