COPS: TEEN PILOT SUPPORTED BIN LADEN

Cops: Teen Pilot Supported bin Laden

Sources: Reuters | AP | AP U.S. | The New York Times | ABCNEWS.com

Sunday January 6 6:37 PM ET

By VICKIE CHACHERE, Associated Press Writer

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - The 15-year-old who crashed a small plane into a skyscraper wrote a note expressing sympathy for Osama bin Laden and support for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, police said Sunday.

The short, handwritten suicide note found in Charles Bishop's pocket said he acted alone, Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder said. The high school freshman had no apparent terrorist ties, Holder said.

``Bishop can best be described as a young man who had very few friends and was very much a loner,'' Holder said. ``From his actions we can assume he was a very troubled young man.''

Bishop crashed the Cessna 172R into the 42-story Bank of America building after taking off without authorization and ignoring signals to land from a Coast Guard helicopter that pursued the plane. Bishop was the only fatality.

Holder said there is no indication Bishop specifically targeted the building or ``had any intention of harming anyone else.''

Investigators on Sunday interviewed the boy's family and said they would search his personal computer for evidence.

Bishop, of Palm Harbor, was told to check the plane's equipment before the start of a flying lesson Saturday, police said. He took off without waiting for an instructor who was supposed to accompany him.

A Coast Guard helicopter crew motioned for the boy to land but couldn't get a response, and a pair of military jets scrambled to intercept the small plane arrived after the crash.

``There was no doubt he died on impact,'' said Fire Department Capt. Bill Wade.

Fire department officials said damage to the building was limited to the office where the plane hit and small areas of adjoining floors. Most of the building was expected to be open Monday, though there was concern about chunks of the facade falling to the sidewalk below.

Images of the plane blasting a hole in the side of a skyscraper were chilling reminders of the World Trade Center attacks. Until it was pulled in early Sunday, the plane's tail had dangled from the 28th floor of the building.

In Palm Harbor, police unrolled yellow crime scene tape Sunday outside the apartment complex where Bishop lived with his mother, while detectives and FBI agents interviewed family members.

Julia Bishop, the boy's mother, told a camera crew to ``get out'' when they attempted to film her as she opened her door for investigators.

Bishop's grandmother had taken him to the National Aviation Academy flight school at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport for a 5 p.m. flying lesson on Saturday, authorities said.

A Coast Guard helicopter caught up to Bishop over Tampa after he had traveled about 20 miles, and the crew signaled for him to land. Pilots said he ignored them, then crashed the plane into the building.

As a precaution, two F-15 fighter jets were scrambled from Homestead Air Reserve Base, 200 miles away, but they arrived after the crash, said Capt. Kirstin Reimann at the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

Only a few people were in the building at the time of the crash. None were injured.

Sheriff's Sgt. Greg Tita said there was no record of the ninth grader running into problems with the law in the past.

Derek Perryman, a classmate of Bishop's at East Lake High School in Palm Harbor, about 25 miles west of Tampa, said Bishop often talked about planes with a friend in their journalism class.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said, Bishop read a paper to the class. ``It was real expressive about how he felt, how disappointed he was,'' Perryman said.

Another classmate, Ross Stewart, 15, described Bishop as a ``teacher's pet.''

``I knew he was an honor student. He got straight A's,'' Stewart said. ``He seemed to like his classes. He liked school. He was a happy kid. He was never really down about anything. He smiled a lot.''

Neighbors said Bishop, who had moved from the Boston area a year earlier, kept to himself.

``He rode my bus to school. He sat in the front row. He always had sunglasses on for some reason,'' said David Ontiveros, 14. ``He never talked to anybody.''

Bev Pinkham, who lived near the Bishops in Norwell, Mass., said Bishop ``was just an ordinary quiet kid.''

``One day he came over and said my flower gardens were beautiful,'' she said. ``Other than that, he was very quiet.''

Michael Cronin, an attorney for the National Aviation Academy, said Bishop had been taking flying lessons since March 2001 and had logged about six hours of flight time.

He said the boy often cleaned planes in exchange for flight time and was very familiar with operations at the school. Cronin said students do preflight equipment checks on their own, then have their accuracy verified by an instructor. Bishop was a year shy of being able to fly alone and two years too young to earn a pilot's license.

President Bush was briefed on the incident and the White House officials had been in touch with Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and the Federal Aviation Administration, said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. Two other small planes had crashed Saturday, one on a Colorado hillside near Boulder, and another in a vacant field near Los Angeles.

Earlier Stories
Cops: Teen Sympathized With bin Laden (January 6)
Cops: Teen Pilot Supported Attacks (January 6)
Officials Interview Pilot's Family (January 6)
Fla. Workers Remove Plane Remains (January 6)
Student Pilot Crashes Small Plane (January 6)
Youth Crashes Plane Into Skyscraper (January 6)

Terrorism and zit medicine

Friday, January 11, 2002
By Debbie Schlussel

© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

A 15-year-old deliberately crashes a plane into a Tampa building, with a note supporting Osama bin Laden.

And the politically correct media blame it on pimple medicine.

Rather than examining Charles Bishop's Middle Eastern background and informing us that Bishop is half Arabic, the media relies on the old "Twinkie Defense." With a new twist: The acne medication made him do it.

Sticking to the absurd blame-it-on-Accutane story, very few media outlets reported other more relevant information, like Bishop's real surname: Bishara, an Arabic name which was legally changed to Bishop, according to the Australian Herald Sun. He thanked his teacher for calming anti-Muslim feelings in the school-building among her students, hinting that for all he knew, he could be part-Arab, the paper reported.

Why did it take Australia's Herald Sun, in a land far away, to investigate legal records regarding Bishara-Bishop and his father's foreign-status – believed to be Syrian? The New York Post later reported it, but few others did. FOX News Channel even featured Arab Muslim civil-rights advocates pointing to Bishara-Bishop as an example of non-Arab terrorism.

Strangely, while Court TV, C-SPAN and a gaggle of other broadcast news sources are fighting to televise terrorist Zaccarias Moussaoui's trial – and turn it into another O.J. spectacle – few media outlets are fighting for the release of the full text of Bishara-Bishop's suicide note.

Maybe because the conventional media wants you to believe that this was just another all-American suicidal teen-age loner, a patriotic kid with absolutely no ties to terrorists in the Arab world. But do we really know that?

According to Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder, Bishara-Bishop's two-page-long suicide note "had some other things in there that we prefer not to talk about [since] the investigation is still ongoing, but everything in the note mentioned things that occurred on Sept. 11 and his support of bin Laden and al-Qaida." Were this simply a copycat suicide, the mysterious contents of the note would be released, not kept confidential while "under investigation."

As for Bishara-Bishop's heritage, we don't know the extent of his contact with his father, whether the father has connections to terrorism, or even where the father is. For all we know, he might be an al-Qaida terrorist, safely in the Middle East or somewhere in the U.S., planning an attack. Maybe the unreleased portions of the suicide note refer to this, but because of a lax media, we don't know. Where is the network news on this? It's like playing "Where's Waldo."

Instead, we're being told Bishara-Bishop was a "superpatriot," in the words of his flight school's president, Bob Cooper. Many flight school instructors described Sept. 11 terrorists as nice guys, too. The lesson here is that lip-service can be deceiving. While many Muslims are hard-working, loyal Americans, some of the most vocally patriotic may not be.

Cavalierly dismissing a terrorism connection, the media – from the Washington Post to ABCNews.com to the Associated Press – began running stories blaming Bishop's suicide mission on Accutane, the powerful acne pills produced by Hoffman-La Roche. Accutane has been unjustly vilified over the last year due to the suicide of Congressman Bart Stupak's, D-Mich., son, who was taking Accutane at the time.

While Stupak's loss is regrettable, his son would not be the first teenage child of a politician, who felt neglected because daddy was too busy politicking in Washington and the district. Rather than address that possibility, Stupak began an interminable crusade of congressional hearings against Accutane, claiming the acne medicine causes suicide and depression. No doctor he, Stupak's kangaroo court will only serve to drive up the cost of Accutane to those who need it.

Stupak has a special tax-funded website and e-mail address soliciting venom with which to attack Accutane maker Hoffman-La Roche. The media's haste to blame Bishop's suicide flight on Accutane adds more fuel to Stupak's witch-hunt.

While it's true that, according to the FDA, 147 people on Accutane from 1982-2000 either committed suicide or attempted it, that's actually much lower than the overall suicide rate for youth aged 15 to 24 – the age range of most Accutane users. Since over 20,000,000 people took Accutane over the last 19 years, that's a paltry combined suicide/attempted suicide rate of .000735 per 100,000 on the drug. Yet, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Centers for Disease Control, the 1998 (the latest year for which data is available) suicide rate for those aged 15 to 24 was around 11.3 per 100,000.

Accutane – which virtually erases acne and is the only treatment for severe or nodular, scarring acne – probably prevents a lot of pimply, less attractive teens (like Bishop), from committing suicide. The statistics bear that out. There is absolutely no conclusive evidence that the drug causes depression or suicide. But in their zeal to attack the big, bad pharmaceutical industry and remain politically correct, the media never reports this.

Enough about acne medicine.

It's time the press started covering the real story about this "sweet boy" who nearly strafed MacDill Air Force Base, where Central Command for foreign wars, including this one, is based.

It's time for them to look into the whereabouts and activities of his father and the contents of the suicide note. We all deserve to know.

Debbie Schlussel is a political commentator and attorney. She is a frequent guest on ABC's "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher" and Fox News Channel. Click here to participate in an online discussion group of Debbie's commentary, and here to join the unofficial Debbie Schlussel Fan Club.