"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."
