Charles Bishop

"I have prepared this statement in regards to the acts 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 Iraqis 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! There will be more coming! Al Qaeda and other organizations have met with me several times to discuss the option of me joining. I didn't. This is an operation done by me only. I had no other help, although, I am acting on their behalf."

Boy in Plane Crash Is Recalled as Patriotic

Published: January 8, 2002

The 15-year-old who crashed a small plane into a skyscraper on Saturday was a former flag bearer at school assemblies who wanted to join the Air Force, the boy's teachers said today.

The police said the youngster, Charles J. Bishop, left a note of support for Osama bin Laden and the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. That stunned one educator who remembered the boy singing patriotic songs.

''I can picture him singing 'My Country 'Tis of Thee,' bellowing it out,'' said Dale Porter, a former headmaster of the Dunedin Academy, a private school that Charles Bishop attended in the eighth grade.

In a statement today, the boy's family said it was devastated by the loss and grateful that no one else had been harmed. ''Charles and his family have always fully supported our United States' war on terrorism and Osama bin Laden,'' the statement said. ''We do not understand why or how this incident happened.''

The authorities said Charles Bishop had no known terrorist ties. Chief Bennie R. Holder of the Tampa police said on CNN that investigators were looking into reports that the boy had ''often mentioned being of Arab descent.''

The police said it appeared that he deliberately flew the Cessna 172R into the 42-story Bank of America Plaza on Saturday after ignoring signals from a Coast Guard helicopter to land. He was the sole fatality.

The boy, a student pilot, took off in the plane without authorization while he was supposed to be checking its equipment at his flight school. Gov. Jeb Bush said today that the Federal Aviation Administration should consider changing the way it regulates the schools.

''How do we make sure this doesn't happen again?'' Mr. Bush said.

The head of the air traffic controllers' union here told The St. Petersburg Times that the plane passed 1,000 feet above a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 taking off from Tampa International Airport. Controllers warned the jet's pilots, and they slowed their climb, the head of the union, Joe Formoso, said.

The youngster's journalism teacher at East Lake High School, Gabriella Terry, said that her class discussed the attacks on Sept. 11 and that they saddened Charles Bishop. ''He told me he wanted to join the U.S. Air Force because he wanted to do something good for his country,'' Ms. Terry said. ''He was a good boy.''

Teachers at Dunedin said he managed a literary magazine, entered essay contests run by the Daughters of the American Revolution and helped plan bake sales and food drives as a student council member.

Robert Cooper, owner of the flight school where Charles Bishop began lessons in March, said he doubted the sincerity of the youngster's note and said the boy had voiced anger over the Sept. 11 attacks.

''I would call him a relatively typical gangly, intelligent, articulate 15-year-old with a complexion problem and a passion for flying,'' Mr. Cooper said.

The 911 You Were Never Told About

 

Was The White House Attacked By A Drone Plane With A Dead Pilot? 

By Joe Vialls

1-10-2

According to the mainstream media, at about 2300 hrs on 11 September 1994, Frank Eugene Corder stole a single-engine Cessna 150L plane from an airport north of Baltimore, then headed south to Washington, flying over the National Zoological Park and down to the Mall, probably using the Washington Monument as a beacon. As he neared the famed obelisk, he banked a tight U-turn over the Ellipse, came in low over the White House South Lawn, clipped a hedge, skidded across the green lawn that girds the South Portico and crashed into a wall two stories below the presidential bedroom. Unfortunately, there are huge problems with this glib media account of what was, in reality, the first known deliberate air attack on a major building in America. Corder had no obvious motive for the crime, and although his wife had died some weeks before from cancer, Frank was getting on with life as best he could. He was building a small kit aircraft of his own at the same airport the Cessna 150L was stolen from, and frequently worked alone at night on his pet project, making him the perfect target of opportunity for anyone needing a pilot, dead or alive. Immediately after the crash, intelligence sources concurred that the flight was most probably flown as a "Proof of Concept", designed to thoroughly test Washingtonís air defenses and expose possible flaws. If the Cessna 150L managed to strike the White House wall directly, the concept would be considered proven, perhaps paving the way for later attacks using heavier aircraft loaded with munitions. In this respect the flight was a complete success. Although Corderís badly mangled body was recovered from the wreckage, there was no forensic way of establishing whether he had died in the crash itself, or several hours earlier. No one witnessed Frank Corder board or steal the Cessna in Maryland, and at no time did he make radio contact with the control tower or anyone else. Frank Corder behaved in all respects like a ghost, and he may well have been dead before the Cessna left the ground in Maryland. How? By use of remote control. Remote controlled aircraft have been around since the late fifties, and can be flown from the ground with absolute precision. All that is needed is a reliable radio link to the target aircraft, and if the target aircraft gets out of normal radio range, a "shepherd" aircraft to act as a radio relay, or as airborne flight director. It is now beyond reasonable doubt that the WTC attack aircraft of 11 September 2001 were controlled in a similar manner, in this case utilizing a counter-hijack system known as "Home Run". Those not familiar with "Home Run" can read a comprehensive report here, or use the link at the bottom of this page. Detailed technical information about aircraft remote control systems will be provided later in this report, but before getting into the heavy stuff, we should probably take a closer look at 15 year-old Charles Bishop. Bishop is alleged to have stolen a Cessna 172R in Florida, and then "committed suicide" by flying into the Bank of America building in downtown Tampa on 5 January 2002. Unfortunately, just like Frank Corder in 1994, no one witnessed Charles Bishop board or steal the Cessna in Florida, and at no time during the flight did Bishop communicate with the control tower or anyone else. Spookily perhaps, there is at least one visual indicator that Bishop was probably dead long before his aircraft hit the Bank of America. A Coastguard helicopter patrolling in the local area actually flew alongside the Cessna in an attempt to force the pilot to land, but without success. In the words of the helicopter pilot: "He [Bishop] sat motionless at the controls. He would not look at the helicopter, nor would he respond to radio or hand signals telling him to land his aircraft".   Think about it people, think about it! If this excitable 15 year-old was on a glorious suicide mission in support of his "idol" Osama Bin Laden, the temptation to give the Coastguard helicopter crew the finger would have been damn near irresistible. After all, what did he have to lose? On the other hand, what if Bishopís aircraft had been hijacked by remote control without his knowledge or consent? If he was still alive and saw himself being steered unerringly towards the Bank of America, chances are he would have been clawing desperately at the aircraft window, trying to get the Coastguard to save him from imminent destruction. "I would characterize it as a suicide," said Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder. A suicide note, which was found in the wreckage of the plane, "clearly stated that he had acted alone, without any help from anyone else," Holder said. "He did, however, make statements expressing his sympathy for Osama bin Laden and the events which occurred September 11, 2001." News of the note police found stunned Bishop's fifth-period algebra teacher, who described him as a bright, disciplined student who was well-liked by his classmates. "I'm floored. Totally floored," said Rayette Bouldrick. "He always had a smile. He was always pleasant and respectful." The suicide note "clearly stated that he had acted alone"? Sure it didÖ It is not hard to imagine a Kamikaze school kid thinking ahead to the time when his local Police Chief will have to explain what happened, and for political reasons will need to reassure the public that no one else was involved. Absolute Bulldust! If Police Chief Bennie Holder is incapable of recognizing deliberately planted evidence, he should quit his job and go fishing. Many readers find the concept of remotely controlled aircraft difficult to grasp, and in the past I have received many emails critical of this aspect of my investigations. Accordingly I decided to post precise details from various sources. It is a fascinating subject little known to the public, and it all really began near a sleepy little village in Wales during the fifties. Nestling beneath the stunning backdrop of the Snowdonia mountains on the mid-Wales coastline is the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) station of Llanbedr, home to the most unusual collection of 'aircraft' in the UK. It is here that DERA provide remotely piloted Drone 'aircraft' for use as aerial targets by the RAF and other UK forces. Situated within reach of the sand dunes of Cardigan Bay, the site is clearly visible from the nearby tourist havens of Barmouth and Shell Island. The airfield itself was constructed in 1939, however by 1950 Llanbedr had been used by the Army for Korean War training, but was refurbished in order to return it to aviation use by No.5 Civil Anti-Aircraft Co-operation Unit with its Mosquito target tugs and Meteor TT8 aircraft. However it was intended that an unmanned target aircraft should be used from Llanbedr, and plans were laid to procure a RPV called 'Jindivik' from Australia. However development delays led to a decision, taken in September 1951 to develop a number of surplus Royal Navy Fairey Firefly aircraft as a target drones, to bridge the inevitable gap. The piston engined Firefly was a useful asset, but it was not long before the drone programme was authorised to use jet powered ex-RAF Meteor F4's and F8's, as they became available. In its drone guise the Meteor became known as the U.15. The first take-off under automatic control took place on 17 January 1955 with a human safety pilot on board. Llanbedr received the first Meteor U.l5 in January 1957 and the first Meteor drone sortie took place on l7 July 1958. Telemetry as such was not available then, so a shepherd aircraft, usually another Meteor would escort the drone to the entrance to the Range, hold well clear and rejoin after the mission was concluded. As the Meteor F.8 became more available, surplus airframes were also converted into the more sophisticated Meteor U.l6, which made its first drone flight in the September of 1960, with over 200 of the type eventually being 'droned'. More details on RAF Llanbedr:- LINK Note carefully here, that although Llanbedr was nominally a Royal Air Force military base, development and effective control of the remotely controlled Fireflys and Meteors, lay in the hands of the civilian British Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), which has close though discreet ties with the civilian American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Back in the seventies it was DARPA and two American multinationals who collaborated in order to manufacture the system now known as "Home Run", a secret counter-hijacking system designed to recover hijacked aircraft to a friendly airport with minimum damage to surviving passengers and crew.     Similar systems used on the Meteors at Llanbedr were used on American aircraft, which improved enormously as the years went by. Nowadays the most sophisticated unmanned aircraft is probably the conversion of an F4 Phantom fighter to "QF4", denoting full remote control capability. However, most of QF-4s retain a piloted capability. This is because test and training scenarios require a high degree of choreography to make them as realistic as possible, and so pilots have to fly the QF-4s through "dry runs" to ensure that all details are considered. The US Air Force refers to unpiloted flights using the acronym NULLO ("Not Utilizing Local Live Operator"), while the US Navy calls them NOLO ("No Onboard Live Operator"). Up to four QF-4s can be flown in formation during NULLO flights. The drones do not interact with each other, they are simply commanded to follow a specific moving point in space known as a "rabbit", with each aircraft maintaining a specific three-dimensional offset from the rabbit. The autopilot system on the QF-4 is very sophisticated. For example, the remote operator can land the aircraft simply by giving it a single command to land. Although missiles used in air combat tests don't usually have combat warheads, once a QF-4 is used as actual target in exercises, its expected lifetime is no more than four missions. The QF-4 carries a self-destruct system to destroy itself if missile damage fails to shoot it down but causes it to become a potential threat. More details on the unmanned QF-4 here:- <LINK>     It does not take a rocket scientist to fit a basic remote control (plus rabbit), to a humble little Cessna standing unguarded at a remote civilian airfield. Once the pilot is on board ñ or placed on board, the basic system will fly the aircraft wherever the controller desires, including into the wall of the White House or the Bank of America building. Basically all he or she needs to do is "lead" the aircraft with the invisible rabbit, and the Cessna will follow as vigorously as a greyhound at a race track. The reason for the attack on the White House on 11 September 1994 is still shrouded in mystery, but the logic of a "Proof of Concept" flight is compelling. We can safely leave that incident alone for the present, especially bearing in mind later events on 11 September 2001, which need no further explanation here. Not so obvious is the use of young Charles Bishop against the Bank of America late on Saturday 5 January, so informed speculation will have to suffice. At the subliminal television level, the two words "Bank" and "America" certainly acted as powerful psychological reinforcers on the global viewing public. Everyone knows that the World Trade Center was Americaís premier "banking" zone, and everyone knows "America" has been attacked by aircraft belonging to "American" Airlines. Whether intentional or not, the effect of the Cessna crash in Florida was to once again sensitize Americans and others to flying over, or even near, America. Still on the subject of psychological reinforcers, it cannot be denied that this particular crash served to highlight the utter futility of grounding crop spray planes to prevent "terrorists" from spreading "biological toxins". The simple reality here is that Bishop's small plane, or any of the other tens of thousand like it, could easily carry enough Anthrax spores to kill half the population of Florida, or any other state, simply by crashing into a tall city building.. An alternative motive, perhaps compelling for the American Administration, would be that of "reinforcing" the absolute fiction that a bunch of "Arab Hijackers" with basic Cessna training, managed to control three heavy jets moving at over 400 miles per hour, manipulate their descent, and then hit three target bullseyes in Washington and New York so small that success would tax the skills of highly experienced jet fighter pilots. Vast numbers of American and others around the world are questioning the involvement of Osama Bin Laden in the events of 11 September, even more so now after the release of George W Bushís blatantly forged "Osama Confession" video. Somehow this questioning must be stopped, and the public forced to believe the increasingly wild myth about the hijackers. What better way than to arrange for a 15 year-old boy with only six flying hours to mount an attack on the Bank of America building in Florida? Think about it. If 15 year-old Charles Bishop could score a direct hit on Bank of America, then surely everyone must believe that the far more experienced and older Mohammed Atta (or whoever), with ten flying hours on a 4,000# Cessna, could obviously throw a 420,000# Boeing 767 airliner around New Yorkís restricted airspace like a giant kiddy toy. But the show must go on. Though Osama Bin Laden and Afghanistan had absolutely nothing to do with the New York and Washington attacks, from the viewpoint of certain American institutions it is vital that American operations in Afghanistan be allowed to continue unhindered, to their final and extremely profitable conclusion. Put simply, the "War on Terror" in Afghanistan has nothing to do with terror, and absolutely nothing to do with Unocal plans for an oil pipeline running from the Caspian Sea, through Afghanistan, to a Pakistani port. Though plans were once drawn up for just such a pipeline, estimated infrastructure costs were so high that the project was permanently filed in the wastebasket. Afghanistan is all about the drugs trade, which provided nearly 80% of the worlds #4 100% pure opium through American cartels and the CIA, until the Taliban took control in 1996. For a while the Taliban stopped the trade altogether, then started it again when the heroin was required as "trade" for more weapons and ammo from China and Russia. The problem after 1996 was that Taliban heroin was no longer routed via the American cartels, which lost tens of billions of dollars as a direct result. The "War on Terror" was launched to get rid of the Taliban, and their stranglehold on the heroin reserves rightfully "owned" by the American cartels. That job is almost complete. As I write, all of the CIAís old warlord "friends" have been restored to power, and the Afghan poppy fields have already been sowed with the 2002 crop. So courtesy of a thoughtful American Administration, fresh supplies of heroin for your children and their friends should be arriving in your American town or city sometime soon. Vialls Investigations: http://geocities.com/vialls/index.html

by Daniel Hopsicker
January 14--Tampa Florida 
Tampa’s kamikaze kid pilot was (pick one):  a. A Bin Laden sympathizer b. An American Patriot.  c. A British Citizen.
Answer: All of the above. Puzzled? So is everyone else...
In an exclusive investigation the MadCowMorningNews has discovered startling and critical discrepancies in key elements in the official account of the life and death of Charles Bishop, the kamikaze pilot who a week ago flew a Cessna into a Tampa skyscraper. 
Taken together, these discrepancies seem designed to deflect public attention away from the boy's father, a man named Charles J Bishara. 
Charles Bishop’s wild last ride is the only authenticated episode of terror associated with a sympathizer of Osama Bin Laden since the September 11 attack. 
So Bishop's case is important. But a week later the word used most often to describe it in the press is "puzzling." 
Why did young Bishop target the Bank of America skyscraper after telling friends that he abhorred the World Trade Center attacks and wanted to go to Afghanistan and "get the SOBs''?
"Pushing the envelope in juvenile delinquency"
Osama Bin Laden had urged his followers to hit banks. Is that why Charles Bishop went out and hit one? Is he really just a troubled kid? Doesn’t flying a plane into a skyscraper somewhat stretch the definition of adolescent "acting out?"
Why would an honor student bellowing out patriotic songs near the top of his lungs and telling teachers he aspires to join the Air Force leave a suicide note praising America’s Public Enemy No.1, Osama bin Laden?
Why would he tell his family that he didn't want his ``enemies'' coming to his funeral, a request similar to one made in the last will and testament of suicide pilot Mohamed Atta?
Last Saturday, Charles Bishop crashed a plane into a building, leaving behind a suicide note professing admiration for Osama bin Laden. 
Yet by Monday police were saying he wasn’t a terrorist...
On Tuesday, reporters began speculating—in a truly Orwellian double-speak touch, since anyone flying a plane into a building is the very picture of sincerity—on the sincerity of his note.
By Friday, he was being remembered in news stories as, of all things, an American patriot.
At his Saturday funeral, the reputation of this "polite, brilliant, compassionate kid" had been so redeemed (or twisted) that someone placed a stripe off one of his father's Air Force shirts in his casket.
Finally, on Sunday, Charles Bishop's metamorphosis was complete. Now the terrorist act he carried out was no longer even a specific case anymore, and Bishop was reduced to an icon, the poster child, one editorialist imagined,  for "what might go down in history as "the terrorism generation." 
Perhaps this week he’ll be nominated for a Nobel Prize.
With every important question in the case still-unanswered, the official version of events borders on satire; it is so ridiculous that it reads like a bad spy novel by E. Howard Hunt.
The official explanation for why Charles Bishop killed himself in such spectacular fashion is "suicide by zit." 
His actions weren’t political. 
They were hormonal.
"This particular kid fits an interesting profile that I think the Secret Service and the FBI have been investigating for some time now," said one ‘expert’ trotted out for a quote in a typical wire story. "Kids who have grown up with an inadequate sense of empathy," said Michael Peck, a Santa Monica psychologist who has specialized in suicides of youths.
"But he's only half-Sicilian."
Might there be a better explanation than this? Might this suppressed explanation offer glimpses of the real identities of some of the people and organizations responsible for murdering 4000 innocent civilians on September 11? 
The first hint of trouble came from Katie Hughes, a Tampa police spokeswoman. She said Bishop's father, who they have been unable to contact since his son’s suicide, is of Syrian and Sicilian descent.
"Another mystery to be unraveled," read the Miami Herald. "Where is the boy's father?"
 The mystery deepened... Reporters could not find the father of the dead kamikaze kid, but they tracked down his grandfather. Strangely, he didn't seem to know much about Bishara either..Never mind that he's his son. Robert Bishara said, apologetically, "I don't want to say anything that might be wrong."
Aren’t Mobsters noted for omerta--not talking to outsiders? Or is this instead just another example of the breakdown of the nuclear family? 
"Heroin, sure. But nobody said 'trafficking.' Yet."
Press accounts referred to Bishara as a "small time crook" from Winchester, Massachusetts. They said that he began a string of mostly petty, occasionally alcohol-fueled crimes that made him familiar to the police in both Malden, and nearby Everett, where he lived.
He was cited for running a stop sign and driving without a license in 1985. Two years later, he was convicted of breaking into a restaurant two blocks from his father's house. The same year, he was convicted of possession of burglary tools and larceny. 
He is currently wanted by authorities on heroin charges.
Bishara's list of encounters with the law must be a long one... We discovered this particularly colorful opportunity for Charles to get to know local law enforcement from 1987, that we haven't seen mentioned anywhere... 
Turns out, Charles gets stabbed a lot.
First in an unsuccessful and by now famous suicide pact with the woman who is today the grief-stricken Mother, Janis Bishop. A sensitive soul she may be today, but sixteen years ago she plunged a 13-inch knife into poor Charles' liver. 
"Just don't point the knife at my liver, okay?"
Just two years later Charles Bishara gets stabbed again.
Though current press reports haven't mentioned it, he was stabbed in the leg, arm, back and shoulder (thank god they missed his probably still-tender liver). His attacker was simultaneously shouting at his girlfriend, "Do you want to see me stab someone?"
Sounds like something right out of Raging Bull. How many other "incidents" like this might there be?
The reason this may be important is that there may be a little problem with the widely-disseminated police and FBI portrayal of Bishara as a small time crook running into minor spats with the law. If the authorities aren't lying to us--and when have we ever known them to do that?--then being a small-time crook  must be paying really well in Boston these days.
Charlie's own little place in the sun
Wanted in Massachusetts on heroin charges, Charles Bishara, the MadCowMorningNews has learned, owns a penthouse condominium at the new Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples Florida, located just a hundred miles down 1-75 from the family he is reputed to have had no contact with for 15 years.
Penthouse condominiums sell for about a million dollars each, said Ritz Carlton sales representative Jeff DeAngelis. He vaguely remembered Charles Bishara purchasing a little over a year ago.
Bishara's million dollar get-away is behind the gates of the "Bolero" neighborhood, which is not as cheesy as it sounds because it sits on a Greg Norman-designed golf course.
It looks to be the very lap of luxury. Perhaps more trained observers in the FBI see something else.
Is half-Syrian and half-Sicilian Charles J Bishara just a small time crook? Or is he in reality some kind of Mob Boss? Take a look at his house: What do you think? 
Could young Charles Bishop's violent act of terrorism have been an attempt to impress his absent Mobster Dad with his big cojones? 
An even bigger question: why did Charles Bishop praise Osama? No one knows. Maybe he saw something. Or heard something.  In America's current war, what might this help explain about the postures of the Sicilian Mafia and the Arab Christian clans of Lebanon from which Charles Bishara sprang--along with another Bishara,  Sirhan Bishara Sirhan?
No information at press time on any relationship. But Sirhan worked at race tracks. Is the Mob big on the ponies?
"Only connect." 
Could the secretiveness surrounding the entire Bishop/Bishara family be because Bishara is somehow implicated in the currently-controversial scandal involving Bishara's fellow Boston Mobster, Whitey Bulger?
Bulger, it appears,  was "whacking" his rivals as well as various and sundry other citizens of Boston with something like impunity because of his "relationship" with the Boston FBI. 
The case is made even more explosive by the startling action of President Bush last month. Bush  invoked executive privilege. Bush blocked a congressional subpoena exploring abuses in the Boston FBI office after a Congressional committee began to investigate.
Reporters in Boston charge cover  up! 
Bush's party-mate Dan Burton was so incensed that he lambasted his fellow Republican in the Oval Office.
"You tell the president there's going to be war between the president and this committee," he told a Justice Department official during what was supposed to be a routine prehearing handshake.
Observers said Bush’s invoking executive privilege was triggering what one congressman called "the start of a constitutional confrontation."
"They're all on a motoring safari in Asia."
Could the reason authorities "can't find" Bishara be the same reason they "can't find" Whitey Bulger? Or Osama bin Laden? 
Could they all be riding motorbikes across South Asia with Mullah Omar? 
These speculations make at least as much sense as the laughable notion that what the citizens of Tampa were subjected to last weekend was acne-medication-induced terror.
Finally we come to the Curiosity of the Week:  the case of Charles Bishop's nationality. According to UPI, Charles Bishop was "a British citizen, who did not have a license to fly."
A British citizen? All-American patriot Chuck? (Being born of at least one British parent inside the U.S. means that until he reached 18 he had both British and U.S. citizenship.)
"I say old chap, would you mind awfully giving us the money?"
His mother’s maiden name is deTore, which doesn’t sound English. 
So it must be Charles’ Bishop’s father, Charles Bishara, who has the British passport. How many small-time thugs in Boston carry British passports? Probably not too many, right?  Does America's Most Wanted Whitey Bulger have a British passport, too?
Someone familiar with Charlie Bishara's home, Winchester, Massachusetts, told us of the town's colorful history with the Mob. And he also told us something else about Winchester, which may shed some light on the Bishop/Bishara business, when we take up the case of Janis Bishop.
And one last item, one we have not even allowed ourselves to think about yet:
Charles Bishara's home in Naples Florida is just a short  five-minute drive from flight school owner Rudi Dekkers' headquarters at the Naples Airport.
Of all places. 
Small world.
What are the odds? 
It must be admitted that Charles Bishara’s many brushes with the ‘wild side’ would be consistent with—fourteen years ago—a low-level career in the Mob.
From the size of Charlie's little getaway home in Naples, Mr. Bishara  may have been moving up—just a little—since then.
NEXT: THE CURIOUS CASE OF JANIS BISHOP
 

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."

The Ecconomist: "First Principles: Russia’s annexation of Crimea hasgiven NATO renewed purpose"

“We see Russia speaking and behaving more as an adversary than as a partner... Transdniestria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and now Crimea. What connects those crises is one big country unilaterally deciding to rewrite international rules.”

- Anders Fogh Rasmussen, 

NATO Secretary-General.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea has given NATO renewed purpose

LAST November, in their biggest live-fire exercise since 2006, NATO forces repelled an imaginary attack on Estonia by a fictitious country called Bothnia. Steadfast Jazz 2013 was partly a response to huge and deliberately intimidating Russian exercises since 2009 that had caused jitters in Poland and the Baltic states. (One ended with a simulated nuclear strike on Warsaw.) It was also intended to mark a return to the 65-year-old alliance’s original priority of collective territorial defence as its combat mission in Afghanistan winds down. At the time, despite surging Russian defence spending and belligerent pronouncements from the Kremlin—including threats to attack a modest European missile-defence system under construction—NATO was searching for relevance because most Europeans had never felt safer.

Four months on, thanks to Vladimir Putin, NATO no longer has to justify its existence. The new revanchist Russia is not the existential threat that the Soviet Union was during the cold war. But as Mr Putin made chillingly clear on March 18th in his announcement of the annexation of Crimea, it is willing to use military force in support of coercive diplomacy when it feels its interests are jeopardised. The events in Crimea are tragic for Ukraine, and it is deeply disturbing for central and eastern European countries with significant numbers of Russian-speakers that Mr Putin claims the right to intervene on their behalf whenever he chooses. But the crisis has breathed life into the Atlantic partnership.

On March 26th, after an emergency meeting of the G7 to agree on new sanctions against Russia, Barack Obama arrived in Brussels, where NATO has its headquarters, bent on rededicating the Article 5 vow by alliance members to regard an attack on one as an attack on all. Nobody is yet talking about a return to the cold-war days when NATO was Europe’s bulwark against a foe with the armed might to back up an expansionist ideology. But Mr Putin has stripped NATO’s cosily secure members in western Europe of their illusions and the alliance’s next summit, in Cardiff this September, will be charged with new purpose and urgency.

NATO’s attempts since the 1990s to enlist Russia as a security partner through bodies such as the NATO-Russia Council now lie in tatters. “We see Russia speaking and behaving more as an adversary than as a partner,” says Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the alliance’s outgoing secretary-general. “Transdniestria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and now Crimea. What connects those crises is one big country unilaterally deciding to rewrite international rules.” The hope, especially strong in Germany, that the zero-sum geopolitics of hard power no longer had any place in Europe has been dashed. Mr Obama’s attempt to “reset” America’s relations with Russia after the 2008 war in Georgia is also over. So too, surely, is the belief he expressed in early 2012 that there was a “strategic opportunity to rebalance [ie slash] the US military investment in Europe”. Out of the 6,000 forces committed to the Steadfast Jazz exercise, only 300 were American.

Almost nobody connected with NATO believes that the crisis created by Russia’s appropriation of Crimea will quickly fade. “We have learned to read Putin’s speeches,” says François Heisbourg, the chairman of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. “He says what he does and he does what he says. His proposed Eurasian Union of post-Soviet states is a new empire. East Ukraine cannot be allowed to be part of the West because there is no Eurasian space without it. We have entered a long-lasting, deeply antagonistic relationship with Russia.”

The challenge for NATO is now to get all 28 members to agree on the nature of the threat posed by Russia to Europe’s security, and to decide how to respond. It must first live up to its commitment under Article 4 to reassure members who feel immediately threatened. Already, America has sent 12 F-16 fighters to Poland and ten F-15s to the Baltic states for air-patrols. They will be joined by four British Typhoons in April. NATO has also dispatched Boeing E-3As to monitor Eastern European airspace.

Further ahead, it seems almost certain that NATO will resile from the declaration in the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act that it has “no intention, no plan and no reason” to place significant military assets in countries that joined the alliance after the Soviet Union collapsed. As Kori Schake, a Bush-administration defence official now at the Hoover Institution, a think-tank, says: “The ‘three no’s’ were a contingent restraint. Those considerations no longer apply.” But few would advocate moving NATO’s much-diminished arsenal of short-range nukes nearer to Russia. They were originally intended to compensate for its weaker conventional forces if the Warsaw Pact launched a blitzkrieg attack on Europe, and are now seen as a dangerous anachronism. These days it is a relatively weaker Russia that regards battlefield nuclear weapons as a necessary force multiplier.

On March 23rd NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), US Air Force General Philip Breedlove, said the alliance would have to rethink how to respond to aggressive Russian troop movements carried out under cover of legitimate military exercises. NATO could reposition military forces and carry out exercises that would reassure allies, he suggested. A bigger question is whether America will emphasise its strategic commitment to the newly insecure Europe by permanently basing some of its ground forces in a front-line state, perhaps Poland.

Reboots on the ground

NATO will struggle to calibrate deterrence in conditions very different from those of the cold war, and to decide how much military aid to offer countries, such as Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, that Russia is determined to prevent becoming alliance members. It could help Ukraine modernise its forces by providing training and selling it weapons on easy terms, says the previous SACEUR, now-retired Admiral James Stavridis, and share intelligence and offer logistical support. “Would that be inflammatory?” he asks. “Compared to what?”

As for deterrence, it is clear what Mr Putin wants. He is out to restore Russia’s great-power status by forging a Eurasian union based on conservative values and dependent on Russia for its economy and security, by coercion if necessary. He is pumping up Russia’s military budget by 40% over the three years from 2013, according to SIPRI, a research institute. The aim is not offensive operations against NATO, but to be able to make swift, focused interventions in Russia’s “near-abroad”, backed up by the threat of nuclear escalation.

After years of squeezed defence budgets and counter-insurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the West’s technological superiority is no longer as overwhelming as it once was. But its capabilities still far outstrip Russia’s. For Ms Schake, the answer to deterring Russia is simple: “We must be inflexible on Article 5, but it is no good half-caring about countries that are part-way Western.”

Mr Putin wrongly believes that NATO has never ceased to be an American-dominated alliance aimed at keeping Russia down. In fact, it has proved highly adaptable and has tried hard to enlist Russia as a partner. NATO may not yet know how to handle the threat posed by Mr Putin’s Russia. But it has overcome greater challenges before.

CIA Holding Back About Lost Flight MH370, Says Former Malaysian PM

CIA Holding Back About Lost Flight MH370, Says Former Malaysian PM

By Lindsay Murdoch, Fairfax Media SE Asia Correspondent

Monday, May 19, 2014

The Vanishing Act: SEE the lost flight MH370 movie trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4rKJaGQbcY/

Original Report

ONE OF THE most influential figures in Malaysia's ruling party claims information about flight MH370 is being hidden and the Australian-led search for the plane off Western Australia is a waste of time and money.

Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad said the plane's disappearance on March 8 was ''most likely not an ordinary crash after fuel was exhausted''.

''The plane is somewhere, maybe without MAS [Malaysia Airlines] markings,'' he said. ''It is a waste of time and money to look for debris or oil slick or to listen for pings from the black box.''

Dr Mahathir, 88, who was prime minister for 22 years from 1981, wrote in his personal blog he could not imagine that the ''the pilots made a soft landing in rough seas and then quietly went down with the aircraft''.

''Someone is hiding something. It is not fair that MAS and Malaysia should take the blame,'' he wrote. 

Dr Mahathir suggested the United States' Central Intelligence Agency had knowledge of the disappearance of the plane with 239 people on board but was not sharing it with Malaysia.

He also claimed that Boeing, the plane's maker, and ''certain'' government agencies, have the ability to remotely take over control of commercial airliners such as the missing Boeing 777.

''For some reason, the media will not print anything that involves Boeing or the CIA,'' he said.

In another blog last month, Dr Mahathir, who remains a power broker in the ruling United Malays National Organisation, questioned whether the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean and blamed Boeing for its disappearance.

During his time in power, Dr Mahathir was often critical of Western countries such as the US, even once suggesting the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York were staged as an excuse to mount attacks on the Muslim world.

His comments on MH370 reflect deep suspicion in Malaysia of foreign involvement in the plane's disappearance despite Prime Minister Najib Razak saying last week that nobody knew what happened on board, or precisely where the plane was, more than two months after it disappeared.

Mr Najib said experts had identified that MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, where the search was focused, discounting dozens of other theories and reported sightings.

But Dr Mahathir wrote in his latest blog that planes ''don't just disappear . . . certainly not these days, with all the powerful communications systems, radio and satellite tracking and filmless cameras which operate almost indefinitely, and possess huge storage capacities''.

''Can it not be that the pilots of MH370 lost control of their aircraft after someone directly or remotely activated the equipment for seizure of control of the aircraft?'' he wrote.

Meanwhile, relatives of the 12 crew members on the plane claim Malaysia Airlines abandoned them after discovering they had engaged US law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered for legal assistance.

Jacquita Gonzales, the wife of Patrick Gomez who was the in-flight supervisor on MH370, said the airline sent relatives an email last Friday advising that caregivers who had been assigned to help families had been terminated.

The airline earlier this month closed family assistance and accommodation centres in Beijing.

''From day one they [Malaysia Airlines] said that we are all family. 'Anything you want, just come to us, we will help you.' That's why caregivers were assigned to us,'' Ms Gonzales, 51, said. 

''But to take away our caregivers, our lifeline to MAS, just like that . . . it's actually not right because our caregivers are not there to advise on legal matters.''

Ms Gonzales said the airline had told relatives to now engage with the airline through lawyers.

''As far as I am concerned, my husband is still an employee of MAS . . . as far as I am concerned, my husband is still on MH370, a flight to Beijing and he has not come back from Beijing yet,'' she said.

Malaysia Airlines has not responded to the relatives' comments.

Meanwhile, two films inspired by MH370 are being touted to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival. A 90-minute teaser for Vanishing Act, showing terrified passengers and a gun being brandished, was shot over six days in India.

Two books have also been written on the mystery.

Geldof Family Scapbook

Wednesday, October 28, 1998 Published at 14:22 GMT 


Entertainment

Yates loses custody battle 

Paula Yates with daughter at Michael Hutchence's funeral 

The television presenter Paula Yates has lost the custody battle with her former husband, Bob Geldof, for their three children.

The former Boomtown Rats singer and Live Aid hero won the right to have the children with him for most of the year after a three-day hearing at the Family Division of the High Court, in London.

Fifi Trixibelle, 15, Peaches Honeyblossom, nine, and Pixie, eight, will live with the 45-year-old during term time.

Bob Geldof: Recently had to apologise on Xfm for announcing death of Ian Dury

During school holidays the children's time will be "divided equally" between the two parents, who both live in London.

The Official Solicitor's office, in central London, said following an appeal by the News Group organisation the Court of Appeal partially lifted reporting restrictions on the result of the hearing in June this year.

However, the grounds for the former singer, currently a presenter with radio station Xfm, now being granted primary custody of the children are confidential and cannot be revealed.

In a statement the Official Solicitor said arrangements by Miss Yates and her ex-husband may be varied by private agreements between them.

"Since the making of the order on June 16, Bob Geldof and Paula Yates have, following amicable discussions made certain variations.

"They have asked that the press do not enquire further into the arrangements for the children," a spokesman said.

The loss of the custody of her first three children is the latest upset in the life of the former Big Breakfast presenter.

Michael Hutchence: Hanged himself in a Sydney hotel

Miss Yates, 38, is also facing a possible custody battle over the future of Tiger Lily, her two-year-old daughter by rock star Michael Hutchence.

The INXS singer left Miss Yates devastated after he committed suicide in a hotel room in Sydney last year.

The child's grandfather Kell Hutchence has launched proceedings in Australia seeking sole custody of the couple's child after concerns over a new relationship Miss Yates began while being treated at a clinic for a nervous breakdown earlier this year.

She met Kingsley O'Keke, 26, during her stay but the pair broke up after a six-week romance. O'Keke later sold his story to a tabloid newspaper.

Last year she had to come to terms with the discovery that her biological father was Hughie Green, the creator and presenter of the television talent show Opportunity Knocks.

Until then she had always believed her father was Jess Yates, the Stars on Sunday presenter.

Mr Geldof, who has said in the past "I love my three children more than anything in the world," launched a campaign for the rights of divorced fathers in 1996.

SIR BOB GELDOF has slammed critics of FATHERS FOR JUSTICE who try and discredit the British lobby group by pointing out the former drug habits of its most prominent members.

Geldof is a long-time supporter of Fathers For Justice, who are campaigning to establish the same rights for dads as mothers receive under British law.

The group have shot to notoriety recently by staging a series of daring protests, in which members dress as superheroes and then climb up famous buildings with banners, most notably the residence of monarch QUEEN ELIZABETH II, Buckingham Palace.

But Geldof is appalled that some news agencies aren't sympathetic to their cause.

He says, "I've heard people on telly saying, 'Of course, Spiderman was a drug addict and a burglar.'

"What the f**k has that got to do with whether he's a good dad or not? He could be a great dad.

"But all he can do, pathetically in our society, to flag to his kid he's still thinking of him, is to climb a f**king bridge dressed as Spiderman.

"Well I think that's heroic."

27/05/2005 09:07

A message to Families Need Fathers from Bob Geldof

 

The forced removal of fathers from their children is hateful and it is done under the auspices of a law that is profoundly unjust. It is of course an oxymoron to have unjust law. It is also a moral nonsense and this law having failed will fall. It is your job to hasten that day.

While family law remains flagrantly biased, prejudicial, and discriminatory, when its effects are in direct opposition to its intent, when inalienable rights go unrecognised, when the administrators of that law exist in an exclusive world of secrecy and overweening state power, when the cost of the implementation of this law to the state is onerous and the cost to society unbearable, when judgement is ordained by the sentiment of past ages and while our men and our children are forced through this disgusting and baleful construct, cruelly and surely ironically called 'Family' law, to exist in a world of emptiness, pain, loss, yearning and grief then all efforts must be made to focus through debate, lobbying and campaigning to strike it down forever.

Every person who is part of this organisation should act politically. Organise groups in your areas to contact others affected. Write letters, keep the subject in your newspapers, agitate and lobby your MPs. Be visible in your pain but rational in your argument, be angered by your loss but use reason against the unreasonable and above everything be motivated by the love of your children.

This law can and will be changed. Use your agony and dismay. Channel it to action. Let every humiliation and tear move you forward so that no child nor man may suffer again what you have.

Good luck,

Bob Geldof

December 2003

Q: Who Killed Michael Hutchance...? A: ASIO (-unconfirmed-)

THE DEATH OF A ROCK STAR

The coroner's verdict on the death of Michael Hutchence was suicide. But Paula Yates, the singer's girlfriend, claims that other forces were at work. So what really happened on the night of 21 November 1997? And why?

ROBERT MILLIKEN

 

 

Sunday 05 April 1998

WHEN MICHAEL HUTCHENCE flew into his native Australia last November, there were few signs that his dazzling career was about to crash land, that he was about to kill himself.

The lead singer of INXS was returning to Sydney, the city where he was born, for a concert tour to mark the twentieth anniversary of the band's birth. Twenty years is a long time in rock. It implies stamina, steeliness and an instinct for survival, qualities denied to many in that business. And for Hutchence, at 37, this trip had a special purpose. He was preparing for the arrival of his girlfriend, the TV personality Paula Yates, also 37, and their 16 month-old daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily. Hutchence had become exasperated by the couple's treatment at the hands of the British tabloids, and of the endless legal battles with Yates's former husband, the rock singer Bob Geldof, over her three children from that marriage. Hutchence planned to set up a base for his new family Down Under, from where he would embark on the next stage of his career as a solo singer and actor. As he approached 40, everything looked rosy. Or so he told his friends.

Underneath, though, Hutchence was a mass of insecurities. Ever since a freak accident in 1992 robbed him of most of his senses of taste and smell, he had become increasingly prone to bouts of depression. He would burst into tears for the slightest reason. In late 1995, he started taking Prozac, the controversial anti-depressant. He took it frequently from then on, sometimes with cocaine, ecstasy and other recreational drugs. Despite outward appearances, the aspect of Hutchence's life that was causing him the most inner turmoil by the time he returned to Australia in November was his relationship with Paula Yates. He felt trapped by it, friends say, in a way that he had never felt trapped before.

Hutchence flew in from Los Angeles where, accompanied by Martha Troup, his New York-based personal manger, he had spent a few days talking about possible film deals involving Michael Douglas and Quentin Tarantino. He landed in Sydney on Tuesday 18 November at 11pm, and checked into the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Double Bay, an upmarket neighbourhood in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Next day, INXS's Sydney publicist helped him to inspect an apartment for Paula and Tiger Lily's anticipated arrival before Christmas. On Thursday, he joined the other INXS members for rehearsals at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television studios. That night, he skipped a film premiere and slept instead. There were more rehearsals on Friday, which broke up in the early evening with the band agreeing to reconvene the next morning. The Saturday rehearsal was crucial: it was the last before the start of the Australian tour. But Friday 21 November would be the last time INXS would ever play together.

After a drink at the Ritz Carlton bar, Hutchence joined his father for dinner at the nearby Flavour of India restaurant. Kelland Hutchence (known as Kell) is a successful Sydney businessman who lives up the road from Double Bay in Bellevue Hill, a neighbourhood of mansions overlooking Sydney Harbour that is home to some of Australia's richest people, including Kerry Packer, the media magnate. Kell is a friendly man with grey hair, a ruddy face and a passion for urban conservation. Over dinner that night, his one concern was his son. "I held his hand across the table," Kell said later. "I said, 'Mike, is everything OK? I know you're very happy, but you seem a little uptight.' And he said, 'No, Dad, I'm fine. Really. I've never felt better.' "

Kell Hutchence dropped his son back at the Ritz Carlton at 10.30, then drove home through the quiet, leafy streets of Bellevue Hill. For Michael Hutchence, the night was just beginning. He went straight to the hotel bar, ordered a drink and started flirting with two young women fans. At about 11 o'clock, Kym Wilson, an Australian actress, and Andrew Rayment, her boyfriend, arrived to meet Hutchence. Wilson, a former star of TV soap-operas, once had a romantic fling with Hutchence, and the couple remained friends, as Hutchence did with several old girlfriends.

He invited Wilson and Rayment to his room, saying that he wanted to stay close to his telephone in case of calls from Britain about the latest legal ruction between Yates and Geldof. The original plan had been for Paula to go to Sydney for Christmas and stay for three months. But she could do so only if she could take two of her and Geldof's daughters - Peaches, eight, and Pixie, seven - with her. Initially, Geldof had agreed. Then he changed his mind. So the couple were due in court again that Friday - or early Saturday morning, Sydney time: about now. For Hutchence, the stakes were high indeed. No Peaches and Pixie meant no Paula - and therefore no Tiger Lily, the daughter he loved more than anyone else in the world.

Kym Wilson and her boyfriend stayed in Hutchence's room for almost five hours, until dawn was breaking on Saturday. Only two people have spoken about what happened in those hours: Derek Hand, the New South Wales coroner, and Wilson, who sold her "exclusive" account for a fee reported to be around Au$100,000 (pounds 40,000) to Woman's Day, a magazine in Kerry Packer's empire. (The magazine said that Wilson "will donate her fee" to a trust fund for Tiger Lily.)

As they partied into the small hours, the threesome drank vodka, beer, champagne and daiquiris. "Michael talked about how he desperately wanted the girls to be with him, and that was what they wanted too," says Wilson. "Michael wasn't very fond of Bob Geldof. He didn't paint a good picture of him at all." As things turned out, that was putting it mildly.

By 4.30am, Rayment was falling asleep at the foot of Hutchence's bed. "Michael just looked at him," says Wilson. "He looked at me trying to keep up the conversation, and said, 'Oh, look, you two go home'." They did, and when they woke up later that day they turned on the radio to hear that Hutchence was dead.

Left alone in his room, Hutchence sank into despair. The trigger was a phone call from Yates in London about an hour later. She told him the custody case had been adjourned, so she would not be going to Australia with the children after all. Hutchence sounded "desperate", according to Yates. He rang Geldof almost straight away and begged him to let the children go to Australia. Geldof later described Hutchence as "hectoring, abusive and threatening". A woman in the room next to Hutchence at the Ritz Carlton was woken up by Hutchence shouting and swearing at Geldof down the phone.

Hutchence then rang the two women who friends say were closer to him than any other, Yates included. They were Martha Troup, his New York agent, and Michele Bennett, an old Australian girlfriend from the days before he was famous, who had remained his closest friend and confidante. She arranged Hutchence's last birthday party, in January 1997. Bennett, now a Sydney film producer, lived only a few streets away in Bellevue Hill. But, at a critical moment when Hutchence needed to reach these women, he only got their voices electronically. On Bennett's answering machine he left a message that she said later sounded "drunk". Then he rang Troup in New York and spoke to her voice-mail. "Martha," he said. "Michael here. I fucking had enough [sic]." That was at 9.40am in Sydney. Troup picked up the message a few minutes later and rang Hutchence's hotel room immediately. There was no answer.

At 9.50, Hutchence rang another of Troup's numbers. He left a message on that machine which Troup said "sounded as if he was affected by something. It was slow and deep." She was so worried when she heard it that she rang John Martin, INXS's tour manager in Sydney, who was getting ready for the Saturday rehearsal.

Meanwhile, Hutchence made his last call to Michele Bennett at 9.54. She answered this time. Hutchence cried down the phone, and she told him she would come straight away. But when Bennett knocked on his door, there was no answer. She tried unsuccessfully to ring the room. With long experience of Hutchence's wayward and unpredictable habits, Bennett assumed that he had pulled himself together and gone out, or simply gone to bed. She left him a note at reception and went home.

In fact, Hutchence had tied a belt around his neck, attached the buckle to a door handle in his room and hanged himself. The buckle broke away, and, when a maid went into the room shortly before midday, she found Hutchence's naked body kneeling on the floor facing the door. Bennett has never spoken publicly about the drama. "I'm still dealing with things in my own way," she told me.

WHEN THE death was announced later that day, Australia was shocked. Hutchence was the greatest rock star, and INXS the biggest band, the country had ever produced. Although another Australian act, the heavy-metal group AC/DC, could claim to have sold more records, INXS were far more stylish and had a much greater appeal across a mainstream music audience.

In Britain, the tabloids went ballistic. By the time he died, Hutchence was known less for his music and more for his turbulent lifestyle. He was the leather-clad, decadent rock star who was responsible for Kylie Minogue shedding her goodie-goodie Neighbours image and, as she said, "introducing me to sex". He was the man who seduced Paula Yates while she was still married to "Saint" Bob Geldof, propelling himself into a running battle with the paparazzi ever since.

With Paula in London and Michael in a hotel room on the other side of the world - where he spent his last night with an actress (albeit in the presence of her boyfriend), left pills scattered across the floor and was found dead with nothing on but a leather belt around his neck - the mix was too potent. Some London tabloids suggested that Hutchence and Kym Wilson had had sex that night. While others claimed that his death resulted from a bungled act of solitary auto-eroticism. Wilson has denied the first charge. "There were definitely no drugs in the room when I was there," she says. "And there wasn't any sex either."

The coroner has discounted the second. In the report in February of his inquest into Hutchence's death, Derek Hand said of the auto-eroticism theory: "There is no forensic or other evidence to substantiate this suggestion." He concluded that Hutchence had committed suicide, had intended to do so, and that no one else was involved.

Paula Yates refuses to accept this verdict. In Australia last week, where she presided over the christening of Tiger Lily in a Sydney church, she also gave her first extensive interview since Hutchence's death to Channel Nine, an Australian commercial television network which had flown her over from Britain first-class. She said that Hutchence regarded suicide as "the most cowardly act" and that he would never have left their baby. She suggested that the auto-erotic theory was the right one. Of Hutchence's sex life, she said: "I think he had tried everything. I hope he had. I just don't think he killed himself. He did in the end, but it was accidental. I knew him so well."

How well? When the shock of Hutchence's death died down, people started to look at it more clinically. They called it selfish, sordid, self-indulgent and wasteful. Of all the people with problems, they said, Hutchence was better-placed than most to deal with them. He was rich and famous, with loving, attendant parents, friends he could call on and the support of a band that had been his "family" since he was a teenager. Everyone had a theory: that Hutchence was the classic fading rock star afraid of growing old, that he saw no future for himself beyond INXS, whose days were numbered anyway.

But was it really that simple? Were there darker forces involved, the demons of a deeply depressed and paranoid man from a macho culture who had finally given up on trying to present a front to the world about who he really was? "Martha ... I fucking had enough." Those words say a lot, and so little as well. Enough of what?

Of all the possible causes of Hutchence's final depression, the one that the coroner highlighted was his relationship with Paula Yates and the pressures of the dispute with Geldof. The coroner concluded that the depression was also caused by a cocktail of drugs found in Hutchence's blood: alcohol, cocaine, Prozac and what Hand described only as "other prescription drugs". What were these? And how harmful were they when combined with a drug like Prozac? The coroner's report raised more questions than it answered.

There were few gloomy portents in Hutchence's childhood in Sydney, where he was born in January 1960. His family later moved to Hong Kong, where Kell ran an importing business and Michael spent eight years at a school for expatriate children. His main school interests were acting, athletics and stamp collecting. "Rather immature, but very pleasant" was the school's verdict on his report card when he left.

The Hutchences returned to Sydney when Michael was 12, but his parents' marriage did not last. They divorced in 1975. Both have remarried. His mother, Patricia, moved to Los Angeles to work as a make-up artist; and in his last years, Michael was estranged from her. Michael went to school in the pleasant, affluent suburbs of Sydney's northern beaches, where he met three brothers, Andrew, Tim and Jon Farriss. With their friends Kirk Pengilly and Garry Gary Beers, they formed a band called The Farriss Brothers. In 1977 the band was rechristened INXS, and for the next nine years they rocked around Australia's pubs and clubs and released a series of moderately successful albums.

It was during this period in the early Eighties that Michael Hutchence met three people, all outside the band, who were to be among the most constant figures in his life, and to whom he would often unburden himself: Michele Bennett, Greg Perano and Richard Lowenstein. Perano co- founded Hunters and Collectors, another big Australian act of the Eighties. Lowenstein was a noted film- maker and rock-video producer whose 1983 feature, Strikebound, so impressed Pete Townshend, of The Who, that he flew Lowenstein to Britain to make a short film, White City.

Lowenstein first met Hutchence in April 1984 after Hutchence had been impressed by Talking to a Stranger, a cutting-edge video that Lowenstein had made for Hunters and Collectors. INXS were on tour in north Queensland and Lowenstein, who was down in Melbourne, was leaving for the Cannes film festival in four days. Hutchence insisted that Lowenstein and his crew fly to the "sunshine State" beforehand to make a video of an INXS song, "Burn for You". Lowenstein relented, and still remembers his first meeting with Hutchence vividly: "I came face to face under the Queensland sun with six bronzed males and their girlfriends, wearing Hawaiian shirts and board shorts. The most effusive of these males stood up and loped over, shaking our hands with an eager puppy-dog gleam and a smile to die for. He said his name was Michael."

Lowenstein cast Hutchence as a junkie in his next feature, Dogs in Space, a 1986 cult film about a group of post-punk deadbeats in Melbourne. But life for Hutchence and INXS was about to change dramatically. With their 1987 album, Kick, the band finally hit the international big-time. Kick sold nine million copies worldwide, and gave the group their first American Number 1 hit, "Need You Tonight", for which Lowenstein also produced the video. As they toured Europe and America into the Nineties, Hutchence the new superstar also took on the identity of an international superstud.

His 10-year relationship with Bennett safely behind him, he embarked on a series of flamboyant affairs with high-profile women, including Kylie Minogue and the Danish model Helena Christensen, and a series of lesser- known beauties. Being attached never stopped him having other affairs on the side, however. Lowenstein believes Hutchence's sexual permissiveness masked an essential shyness and insecurity.

"He would flirt with everybody - women or waiters in restaurants," says Lowenstein. "He had a magnetic effect on men as well as women. The attraction to women wasn't as a conventional male stud, but as a man who had feminine qualities and feline body language without being effeminate. That was hugely attractive to women, along with the direct eye contact that he gave everyone. He wanted to seduce everyone, if not physically then metaphysically." A Sydney artist who encountered Hutchence at parties in Sydney and New York concurs: "He loved women. But he had a very fluid sexuality."

Hutchence and Paula Yates had met during the Eighties, but they only got involved after he appeared as her guest on Channel 4's Big Breakfast show in January 1995. She left Geldof and he ditched Christensen. He called her his "soul mate"; she described him as the "Taj Mahal of crotches". Up to then, Hutchence had gone into most relationships on the cavalier assumption that they would end after a few years, and his friends expected he would eventually find a way to move on from Paula as he had from Kylie and Helena. But a series of complications arose that made that option, for the first time, very problematical.

The first was the arrival of Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily in 1996. Hutchence's friends insist that parenthood with Paula was not on his agenda, any more than marriage to her was, despite her tearful claims after his death that they were planning to marry in January this year on the Pacific island of Bora Bora. Last week she repeated her claim, saying she was "certain" they would have married "around Christmas". She also dismissed suggestions that Hutchence never wanted a child with her. "We had a year of fertility treatment," she said.

But Kell Hutchence maintains that his son had no intention of marrying Yates. Lowenstein says that, if his friend ever got married to anyone, it probably would have been to his old flame, Michele Bennett, the one woman on whom he felt he could rely. "I always felt that, after everything, he'd go back and marry Michele and have a baby with her."

Once Tiger Lily did arrive, however, Hutchence was smitten. He experienced a form of unconditional love for the child that was new to him. For that reason, Hutchence grew increasingly paranoid about a parallel complication in his life centred on Yates's bitter and public custody battle with Geldof over their three children. He grew terrified that Tiger Lily would become a victim of this and possibly be taken from him.

Hutchence's fears reached a height in late 1996, when he and Yates were arrested after opium was allegedly found in their London home. They claimed it was planted to discredit them; the case was dropped. Geldof won a temporary custody order at the time over his three daughters. Hutchence and Yates claimed later they found electronic bugs in their home, which they believed were planted to get evidence against them.

Soon after this incident, Lowenstein had dinner with Hutchence at the Latin, a fashionable Melbourne restaurant. They talked of setting up their own film company. Back at Hutchence's Melbourne hotel, he grew agitated over the legal battle in Britain, flew into a rage against Geldof and punched the wall of his room. "He struck me then as one of the loneliest people I had ever come into contact with," says Lowenstein.

The stormy public relationship with Yates was not only eating away at Hutchence inside. It also highlighted a gulf that had grown between him and the other members of INXS. As they approached 40, most had settled down to stable domestic lives in Australia - two to the obscurity of cattle farms. Hutchence, by contrast, was still jetting here, there and everywhere, the perennial rock star, living between his houses in London, Hong Kong, the south of France and Australia. "INXS had peaked and didn't have the same creative energy any more," says Greg Perano. "The others were content to grow old, but Michael never really grew up."

HE MAY WELL have survived all this had it not been for a bizarre accident that had seriously, and possibly fatally, affected his mental well-being. In 1992, Hutchence was riding a bicycle home from a nightclub in Copenhagen when he got involved in an altercation with a taxi driver, fell and hit his head. The result was a fractured skull and severed nerves that left him with only about 10 per cent of his senses of taste and smell. His friends are convinced that the accident was a turning point that led to increasing bouts of depression and reliance on Prozac.

"Ever since the accident, he was on a slow decline," says Lowenstein. "I'd never seen any evidence of depression, erratic behaviour or violent temper before it. I saw all those things after it. One night in Melbourne, he broke down and sobbed in my arms. He said, 'I can't even taste my girlfriend any more.' His girlfriend then was Helena. For someone who was such a sensual being, this loss of primary senses affected his notion of place in the world and, I believe, damaged his psyche."

Hutchence grew increasingly sensitive to criticism and conflict. The tabloid dramas of his life with Paula affected him deeply. So did public put-downs such as that by Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who called him a "has- been" at the 1996 Brit awards. "He was a lost soul, to tell you the truth," says Perano.

By the time of his death, many of the conflicts of Hutchence's life were closing in. He was still estranged from his mother. He was caught in an unbearable war between Yates and Geldof. He feared losing his daughter. His own professional future was uncertain. A big question that arises is: what was the link between the drug cocktail in his body that night - Prozac combined with alcohol, cocaine and "other prescription drugs", a cocktail that the Sydney coroner said helped to cause Hutchence's "severely depressed" state - and his suicide?

Prozac is from a relatively new generation of anti-depressant drugs. In the latest annual edition of Mims, a standard medical-reference journal, the manufacturers of Prozac, Eli Lilly Australia, warn that doctors should prescribe Prozac in "the smallest quantity consistent with good patient management in order to reduce the risk of overdose". The drug "may impair judgement and thinking". People who take it, the warning says, should tell doctors if they are also taking other prescription drugs or alcohol, itself a depressant. How much of this regimen did Hutchence follow?

Richard Lowenstein is convinced that his friend's erratic use of Prozac contributed to his death. "He took it like candy. He was always travelling and there never seemed to be one doctor monitoring his doses or even asking if it was the right medication. I don't believe Michael intended to kill himself. He loved life too much. I believe his action came about in a sudden fit of anger and frustration from a chemical onslaught in his brain."

Hutchence's other close friend, Greg Perano, disagrees. Perano, a man who has suffered from depression himself and was once close to suicide, talked frequently to Hutchence about the condition they had in common. Hutchence wept to Perano, too. "You get into such a dark hole that you can only see one way out," says Perano. "And that is to stop whatever is causing it."

He says: "I believe that there were just a few minutes in which Michael wanted this to happen. A few minutes later he might not have wanted it. It may sound horrible, but I think it's what he wanted. He was at his peak. He was still charismatic. He hadn't grown fat, bald or old. People still thought of him as young."

Intentional or not, Hutchence seems finally to have succumbed to a streak of self-destructiveness that put him in a pantheon of other rock gods, for whom the pressures and prices of fame over the past 30 years proved too much to handle: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison of the Doors and Kurt Cobain.

Hutchence's affairs in death are as tangled as they were in life. In the last few weeks, it has emerged that his estate, worth about pounds 8 million, has been hidden in a complex web of discretionary trusts and holding companies stretching through Hong Kong, Australia, the British Virgin Islands and Europe. His will gave half his estate to Tiger Lily with the other half divided equally between Paula Yates, his father, brother, sister and his mother, even though he remained estranged from her. But, when he died, Hutchence was technically bankrupt.

The web of companies controlling Hutchence's assets was reputedly designed to minimise the tax liabilities on his income. Many of the companies have as a director Colin Diamond, Hutchence's New Zealand-based financial adviser and a co-executor of his will. But the impact of the financial arrangements that Hutchence left in Diamond's hands means that the beneficiaries may face a long battle in securing assets that they believe are rightfully theirs. Hutchence owned houses in Smith Terrace, London SW3, and Antibes in the south of France. These and other properties in Australia are not listed as part of his estate. The London house, for example, is owned by a company in the British Virgin Islands.

Patricia Glassop, Hutchence's mother, is now threatening legal action against a company that is planning to sell one of her son's three properties in Queensland. "I feel like I have lost Michael twice," she told the Sydney Morning Herald last week. "His houses have been closed down. I do not even have one of his shirts to remind me of him." Diamond and his solicitor brother, Stephen, are reported to be negotiating with Kell Hutchence and Yates, but refusing to deal with Michael's mother.

Why did Hutchence leave his affairs this way? His friends believe he was concerned above all to secure Tiger Lily's inheritence from legal challenge by others, and that he understood the complexities of the way his fortune was being handled. Others are not so sure. Last week, the company that arranged Hutchence's funeral in Sydney last November was threatening to sue his estate for its bill of Au$50,000 (pounds 20,000), which is still unpaid.

The funeral angered INXS members and many of Hutchence's old friends. Acting for Hutchence's mother, Harry M Miller, a Sydney celebrity agent, negotiated the live television rights with an Australian commercial network. Nick Cave, the Australian singer, sang for his friend but refused to let his segment be televised. Paula wanted Tom Jones to sing "What's New Pussycat?", Michael's favourite song by his favourite singer, but his family refused. Jones attended and wept instead. Greg Perano later wrote a letter to Tiger Lily, which Paula is holding for the child, bemoaning the funeral's tone. "It was your father's last show," he wrote. "He was so bored his mates had to carry him out in a box."

After his cremation, Hutchence's ashes were divided between his family and Paula and Tiger Lily. Sacrilege to some, but an unavoidable outcome, it seemed, of his stormy, unreconciled life.

A few weeks later, the surviving members of INXS, together with Michele Bennett and a handful of Hutchence's old friends, joined his father and brother on a yacht in Sydney Harbour. It was 21 January 1998, the day Michael would have turned 38. They swapped stories about him; then, as a Maori singer sang "Amazing Grace", Kell and Rhett Hutchence moved to the bow of the boat. They held each other as they tipped their son and brother's ashes overboard. As the boat moved slowly away, the evening sky turned bright red and the waters of Sydney Harbour went perfectly still. Main picture: Michael is interviewed by Paula Yates on the set of Channel 4's `Big Breakfast' show, the meeting that led to an affair. This page (clockwise from above): Michael in 1985 with Michele Bennett, the long-time girlfriend who remained his closest friend and confidante; with the Danish model Helena Christensen in 1994; holding Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, the daughter he loved more than anyone else in the world, in 1996 at the Chelsea house he shared with Paula Yates; posing with fellow members of INXS in 1996; and stepping out with Kylie Minogue in Sydney in 1990

Mourners at the funeral on 25 November included Paula Yates (top), Michael's father Kell and step-mother Sue (middle), and pall-bearers including fellow members of INXS and Michael's brother Rhett (above, in stripes)

flag: [ww] [ff]

 Paula Yates, Michael Hutchence, and Bob Geldof

The epitome of white trash! Holy fuck!

I've been reading about this lot.

We all know that Yates and Geldof were married. She was a major drug addict, even attempted to take her life. She then shacks up with Hutchence, has a kid, and we know what happened to him -- "suicide" (??) She says later that she believes that he could have killed himself with a noose while jerking off. This is the opposite story she gave to investigators. I'm sure that the authorities and coroner would have been able to tell if this was the case. Many say that she had threatened Hutchence to marry her or she was taking his kid away. Apparently, she pulled this same stunt the day he was found dead. Some even think he was murdered because of the way he was found.

Hutchence died in 1997. Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000, leaving behind a bunch of kids, including the one she had with Hutchence. More about Paula: she found out that the person she thought was her father, wasn't. It was some game show host.

The names of her children: Fifi Trixibelle Geldof (born 1983), Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof (born 1989), Little Pixie Geldof (born 1990), Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence Geldof (born 1996)

Anyhoo, she dies, and Geldof runs and petitions to adopt the Hutchence kid, before any of her or Hutchence's family gets the chance to do the same. Because he files first, they all have to be OK'ed by him to also petition -- WTF?!

Yates had said that Geldof was a lunatic, screaming that he was, "above the law".

Now, we have all these scandals involving his kids, having drunken orgies, drug binges, etc.

There's a ton more, the real sleazy shit, but these are pretty much the hard facts. They are one fucked up lot.

Geldof, yeah, the asshole fame whore charity seeker, (Live Aid), is all into the father laws, you know, the ones that basically want to stick it to the mother of their kid.

So, what's your take on Yates, Hutchence, and Geldof? With Hutchence, how do you think he really died? Does Geldof get on your nerves with his fame whoring? Do you remember Yates' career as a TV presenter. She first met Hutchence doing an interview, and it can be seen on Youtube.

by: Anonymous

replies 130

03/19/2011 @ 08:37PM

The Professional Victims of 9/11

Q: How many 9/11 "Widows" does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: I don't know either, but if you think the three Jersey Girls will be enough to convince me Hamzi managed to make a 270* corkscrew power-dive into Wedge-1 of the Pentagon to make impact with the retaining wall at a speed of  around 650mph, just 2 inches above the South Lawn, think again...

"In July 2004, when the 9/11 Commission released its Final Report, we read with enormous interest, Chapter 6 - "From Threat to Threat", including footnote #44. Footnote #44 details an instance where a CIA desk officer intentionally withheld vital information from the FBI about two of the 9/11 hijackers who were inside the United States. This footnote further states that the CIA desk officer covered-up the decision to withhold said vital information from the FBI. Finally, footnote #44 states that the CIA desk officer could not recall who told her to carry out such acts."

- 9/11 : Press for Truth.

Revealed: the men with stolen identities
2001-09-23, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2012-02-07 16:51:19
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1341391/Reve...

Their names were flashed around the world as suicide hijackers who carried out the attacks on America. But yesterday four innocent men told how their identities had been stolen by Osama bin Laden's teams to cover their tracks. The men - all from Saudi Arabia - spoke of their shock at being mistakenly named by the FBI as suicide terrorists. None of the four was in the United States on September 11 and all are alive in their home country. The FBI released the list of 19 suicide terrorists three days after the attacks. The Saudi Airlines pilot, Saeed Al-Ghamdi, 25, and Abdulaziz Al-Omari, an engineer from Riyadh, are furious that the hijackers' "personal details" - including name, place, date of birth and occupation - matched their own. The other two men accused of being terrorists are Salem Al-Hamzi and Ahmed Al-Nami. Mr Al-Hamzi is 26 and had just returned to work at a petrochemical complex in the industrial eastern city of Yanbou ... when the hijackers struck. Mr Al-Nami, 33, from Riyadh, an administrative supervisor with Saudi Arabian Airlines, said that he was in Riyadh when the terrorists struck. The FBI admitted that there was some doubt about the identities of some of the suspects. A spokesman said: "The identification process has been complicated by the fact that many Arabic family names are similar. It is also possible
that the hijackers used false identities." The spokesman declined to say whether the FBI would apologise but added: "If we have made mistakes then obviously that would be regrettable."

Note: The deceptions in the official story of 9/11 are nowhere more clearly shown than in this important story. The FBI never revised its list of alleged hijackers, and these four are all later listed in the official 9/11 Commission report as the hijackers. Click here and scroll down a little over half way to see their photos in the official report. For more on this, click here. For an abundance of reliable information suggesting a major 9/11 cover-up, click here. For other revealing news articles on 9/11, click here.

The Arlington Merry-go-Round.