January 09, 2002

The Kamikaze Kid I don't

The Kamikaze Kid

I don't think there's all that much in the Arab father angle on the Charles Bishop story, other than the obvious psychological one. There are some odd points in this Guardian article, however:

Some East Lake students remember that, after September 11, Bishop would refer cryptically to being of Arab extraction - a detail police are still unable to confirm, since his father, Charles Bishara, appears to have vanished without trace... "Sometimes when I'd ask him where he was from, he'd make jokes about being from Afghanistan," recalled Geoffrey Mackey, who attended another Florida school, Dunedin Academy, with Bishop. "Or he'd say 'I'm a Muslim!'" But then, Mackey said, "he'd correct himself and say, 'No - I'm from Boston'."

His grandmother recalls a conversation "in which he had warned her not to let his 'enemies' or his father attend his funeral if anything should happen to him."

They're also saying that this kid's suicidal urges could have been caused by the acne medication, Accutane.

Everybody agrees it doesn't sound like an Al Qaeda operation. (Sending little kids on suicide missions-- that sounds more like an Arafat mission; even so, I'm sure it wasn't.) It's a sad, weird story.

So the kid was troubled, maybe accutane-addled, and perhaps had some kind of Arab-fixation related to his absent father-- but how does that mean it's not "terrorism?" Of course it is. So much for "homeland security." As Ken Layne puts it:

Why does Do-Nothing Tom Ridge insist this has "nothing to do with terrorism"? Somebody commits a terrorist act -- a suicide crash of a hijacked plane into an American skyscraper -- in support of a terrorist war against the West. It doesn't matter if the kid acted alone (which it seems he did) or if the kid went crazy (which of the Saudi hijackers wasn't crazy?). It's a terrorist act. Deal with it, Tom. Or go back to goddamned Pennsylvania.
 
Exactly. What we have is a security system that requires the strict control of nail clippers on passenger jets, while neglecting rudimentary security measures for private airfields. There is ample evidence that Al Qaeda operatives have been interested in such airfields and have tried to gain access to such planes. Meanwhile, our security czar keeps saying, in effect, "it's not my job."

Posted by Dr. Frank at January 9, 2002 10:56 PM | TrackBack