Police release Charles Bishop suicide note (15 yr old Tampa plane suicide, Osama sympathizer)

ap yahoo news ^ | 02.06.02 | AP

[Registered]

	1-5-01 Kid didn't know it was '02 yet. I have prepared this statement in regards to the act I am about to commit. First of all, Osama bin Laden is absolutely justified in the terror he has caused on 9-11. He has brought a mighty nation to its knees! God blesses him and the others who helped make September 11th happen. The U.S. will have to face the consequences for its horrific actions against the Palestinian people and (illegible, could be Iraq?) by its allegiance with the monstrous Israelis who want nothing short of world domination! You will pay - God help you - and I will make you pay!
Tampa, Fla., Police Dept. officials released the two page note found on the body of Charles Bishop after he crashed a Cessna 172 R plane into the Bank of America Building Jan. 5, 2002 in Tampa. The note states Bishop sympathized with Osama Bin Laden. (AP Photo/ho)

[Reeses]

Charles Bishop is the first American suicide bomber in history.

I remember there was the guy who flew a small plane into the Clinton White House lawn. He had been drinking and missed the building. I hope this wasn't what inspired Osama, but might very well have been. Osama probably ordered, "no drinking!"

[Don Joe]

"He is an arab (or part arab). Apparently his family changed their name to Bishop from Bishara."

That's what I thought too, until I saw the father interviewed on the news. He is no more an Arab than I'm a Russian or Hungarian. I think it was his parents or grandparents (or further) who came from the old country.

Now, that said, I've seen what I'll term perhaps a pathological "ethnicity" mindset among children of 100% American parents. I knew a guy (decades ago) who was the son of a guy who grew up in Scotland. The guy's father -- aside from his thick brogue -- was an American, no hyphenation.

The kid, however, when he was in his late teens, decided he was going to get into the Scotsman thing, bigtime. Bought a kilt (and the rest of the costume -- and I use that term because that's what it amounted to for him), a bagpipe, went to court to change his name to something less American-sounding, and went around babbling about finians and orange this and that and take no prisoners, fear the pipes, blah blah blah, like he was some footsoldier in a war a thousand years ago.

In reality, he was a spoiled rich kid, no more "Scotish" than my tuxedo cat is Fred Astaire.

I've seen some other examples, including my sister who in her late 40s decided she was going to "embrace her Jewishness" -- which translates into annoying the crap out of anyone who gets within earshot about her concerns about Israel, how everyone at work looks at her funny because she's the token Jew (wrong -- they look at her funny because she's the token nutcase -- but since she's a social worker, it's par for the course), going to "festivals" (i.e., street fairs), etc., etc., etc.

Of course, she remains a pork-eating atheist, but hey, why quibble about details?

Anyway, it looks from the known evidence to date that this idiot kid was doing the same thing, i.e., "embracing his Arab identity".

The frightening thing is that we have to wonder how many others like that can be out there? Burned out kids with normal parents, who -- on the basis of really nothing more than the spelling of their last name -- will "identify" with the terrorists, and carry out freelance acts of terror.

[Reeses]

I think it was his parents or grandparents (or further) who came from the old country

I've heard that genetics leap frog, i.e. you may be more like your grandfather than your father. I'd say this is true for me. You've heard about bald guys having fathers with hair but grandfathers without? I don't know the mechanics of this myself but have heard it many times. It may be worth studying his grandparents's mental health to see if there's a genetic connection.

[archy]

Charles Bishop is the first American suicide bomber in history.

I remember there was the guy who flew a small plane into the Clinton White House lawn. He had been drinking and missed the building. I hope this wasn't what inspired Osama, but might very well have been. Osama probably ordered, "no drinking!"

I suspect that what *inspired* Osama- or more likely, the tactician charged with planning the best combination of likely successful activities capable of causing the highest headline-grabbing casualty numbers- happened ling before Charles Bishop or Bill Clinton were born:

B-25 Bomber Crashes Into the Empire State Building
July 28,1945

Colonel Smith lowered the landing gear of the B-25 thinking he was about to land in Newark when through the fog he saw that he was heading directly for Radio City Music Hall. Quickly he began to raise his landing-gear tilting his nose up almost to a stall veering just past the buff-colored Salmon Building.

They say one of the secretaries in the Catholic War Relief Office on the 79th floor of the Empire State Building could see Colonel Smith's Clark Gable mustache as the cockpit filled up with limestone and chrome mullions from around the building's windows. Streams of molten high-octane fuel cascaded down the side of the building. The GIs on the deck of the troopship on the Hudson shouted, The Japs are bombing New York with V-2s!

When the bomber hit, the left engine separated from the fuselage shot diagonally through the thick walls to the shaft of the G bank of elevators to slice through six braided steel lifting cables the size of wrists the engine rebounding off the steel fire wall to fall in flames down the shaft.

The Number Six elevator of the G shaft with Betty Lou Oliver alone at the controls begins to fall with the exploding engine plummeting down towards the car's roof.

Betty Lou Oliver, her last day. Said bye-bye to Mr. Needleman with the belt business on the 79th floor. Her husband Oscar soon back from the Navy. She'll wave at the pier. He'll be sate from Kamikaze. Got a new blue dress with blue-and-white spectator pumps. Meet her sister at the Russian Tea Room for farewell lunch. Slides the big brass handle all the way back to close the elevator door. She lands on her behind grasping the brass handle, belting out, St. Louis Blues at the top of her lungs. When you get your own empty elevator to sing in without people making funny faces, and this the last day, you simply must sing grasping that brass handle shutting the door and moving the elevator down for coffee break.

So there's a thud. The car shudders. It begins to drop. The red lights whiz past 73 72 71. The floors blur. She punches the Stop button. The car descends faster, vibrating. She grabs the phone dangling in front of her. She taps the hook several times. What can she say to the starter anyway? What can he do? Suddenly she feels her feet rising above the floor. Cables and flaming metal crash through the roof. Her body is separate from herself. A shriek fills the shaft. She is rising, floating, weightless.

When seventeen year-old Coast Guard apprentice medic Donald Molony climbs in the sub-basement of the G-shaft he does not expect anyone to be found alive but when he crawls through the small hole in the wreckage of car bumpers pushed through the car's roof she is there moaning. Thank God, the Navy's here. I'll be OK now, she says according to the New York Times but Molony only hears, Drowning... drowning... as the water from the firehose fills up the shaft.

They say it's a miracle she's alive. When they lift her face down into the ambulance with a rabbi and a priest on each side babbling in Hebrew and Latin she can feel it. She floats above herself, looking down, weightless and falling. A miracle, they say. But she keeps the sensation to herself. Oscar comes in a few days. By her bedside, tears in his eyes. He's the one back from the war, from danger. And the war almost over. Again she feels herself lifting from the bed. The sensation of falling yet rising. Like being caught in an endless moment of indecision. Between living and dying. She cannot remember the point of impact. Only that she is outside herself falling. She knows eventually she must hit the ground. What feels like permanent suspension is only the moment before everything changes. Oscar holds her hand. She knows she will have many children and will live to be a grandma. But that does not matter. She hears Walter Winchell announce on the radio that we dropped the Atom bomb on some city in Japan. She is floating towards the ceiling of the ward, failing, as the hospital drops towards the sun.

[Marysecretary]

I remember it like: Crazier than an outhouse rat.

[GussiedUp]

Didn't the "experts" say that hand writing which slants downward as it goes along, signify severe depression and/or anger? This kid's handwriting slants like the anthrax letters did.

[Don Joe]

Osama bin Laden is planning on blowing up the Super Bowl with an antiquated nuclear bomb left over from the 1967 Israeli-Syrian War.

You'll recall how unexploded and abandoned nukes were all over the place . . .

Yup. The Department of Nuclear Antiquities is so dang negligent!

[Don Joe]

If he did in fact meet Pretty Boy Atta, he may have.

[Don Joe]

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.

Well, that casts the old man in a different (and worse) light than he presented in the interview on the news, but it still doesn't cast him as anything resembling an islamist fanatic, so I still think the kid was doing the "I'm an ethnic" nonsense game.

[lewislynn]

The illegible word is clearly "Iraqis."

I think that's an oxymoron.

[Tennessee_Bob]

The last desperate act of a lonely, young, wanna belong.

[cactmh]

Didn't his GOD D--NED FAMILY SAY THAT IT WASN'T A SUICIDE?!

[anymouse]

Hoax alert. Kid read Tom Clancy's "Sum of All Fears" and did some fatal role playing.

This is a cry for help, that went farther than the kid's wildest dreams to come true.

Too bad he didn't have any real adult supervision or a trusted mentor to ground him into reality.

[anymouse]

Good question. I have yet to see a news story on this kamakasi kid saying anything about the where abouts of his father. You would think that even the most self-absorbed derilect father would want to get his 15 minutes of fame in front of the TV cameras and and an above the fold newspaper article. Conversely there has to be at least one reporter that wants the exclusive of the kamakasi kid's father saying "no comment." :)

[Travis McGee]

I wouldn't bet on it having been checked out already.

I still think that there are probably comparative studies which correlate cursive and print by the same writer. This might be a standard law enforcement tool for example.

[Travis McGee]

I further think that the bit about the super bowl might indicate that at some level he may have had a connection to a terrorist cell which gave him some "advance knowledge" on what turned out to be a terrorist rumor.

I would speculate so far that he may have known some of the 9-11 terrorists, and killed himself in a show that he was also "martyr" caliber material.

[bulldog905]

He is an arab (or part arab). Apparently his family changed their name to Bishop from Bishara.

Dylan Kleebold was Jewish (or part Jewish).

Does that mean the Jews are to blame for Columbine?

[anymouse]

Interesting quotes. Got a source to go with this?

Like to give you the benefit of the doubt on this, but there are some extraordinary claims in hear, that require some extraordinary proof to back it up.

[I_Love_My_Husband]

Great sleuthing! Here's my question. How did the mother support herself? Welfare or ex-hubby's money, or (shockingly) did she have a j-o-b?

[Beep]

Did the kid actually have the possessive of "it" punctuated properly, or did you tweak it? (I ask only because the incorrect punctuation of the possessive, "it," is a glaring error that I see repeatedly and, unfortunately, on a daily basis.) (I haven't looked, but I'm guessing that an incorrect punctuation of same probably can be found within the first 50 replies to your first post! I make a huge fuss about it most of the time, and yet I still manage to toss in an unnecessary apostrophe every now and then!) It's merely an annoying pet peeve of mine. I'll get over it! *VBG*

BTW, for anyone who may feel "left hanging" -- when writing the possessive of "it," there is no apostrophe. Not before the "s," not after the "s," and not anywhere near the "s!" *G* It is, plain and simply, spelled "its." (Without the quotation marks.)

Now I must be signing off before I make an "s" of myself! (Sorry! My diseased brain has a mind of its own!)

;-}