Oklahoma Suicide Bomber

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 07 December 2005

I was reading in my dream. It was a thin column of fully justified (straight on each side) text. It was a newspaper presentation. I was in the midst of reading the column which was about the fairly recent event of a young college man who, for reasons unknown, attempted to blow himself up in a stadium with 80,000 people at a sports event, but instead blew himself up outside it. [Note: I've seen a couple references to this online, but don't read newspapers.] As I was reading along, suddenly a yellow highlighter came in and highlighted the text I was reading, emphasizing the last part of a sentence. The article continued, with more text below, but the instant I finished reading the highlighted text, "my body woke me up" with that specific highlighted sentence in my head as a concept and in my memory as a visual.

The text looked like this:

...and something here and something here and something here and something here and the bomb exploded, having been triggered by the wireless detonator. And something here and something here and something here and something here and something here and...

So my body wass instantly awake and alert, aware of what I read, and my conscious mind says (4:47am for godssakes!), "So?!"

Who cares? What does it matter? He blew himself up, we know. And then it occurs to me: the wireless detonator.

It might have been him but my sense suddenly was: someone else triggered it. Not him. Someone else had a detonator, he was not working alone, and they were relatively near him.

The story (now that confusion has at least in part subsided) goes that the college kid did it for reasons unknown. (See map, thanks zombie) . Three blocks away is a mosque which is linked to a student association of Islam; the kid had various islamic materials and bombmaking materials in his own part of the room, but that is considered an incredible, unrelated coincidence (to the fact that islamic persons are infamous for blowing themselves up and trying to take others with them). A couple of kids said they had seen him go to the mosque (a few blocks away) but as the officials of the mosque, after the event, said "Neverseenhimbeforeinourlives" or something like that, police say they aren't sure.

OK, so a few blocks away from his apartment is the mosque and then farther away is the sports arena. He tried to get in, but wouldn't let his backpack be searched, and so he went around to the opposite side of the arena and tried to get in that doorway instead (gate 6). Again they insisted on searching his backpack, he refused and left. Arena security reported that a man refusing to be searched was seen sprinting away from gate 6 with a backpack, and KABOOM! a minute later he blows up.

His understandably upset family suggests that he was simply temporarily despondent and committed suicide. Riiiiiight. I know every time I feel temporarily despondent, I begin building shrapnel bombs to put in a backpack and take into sports arenas filled with tens of thousands of people, don't you?

It is possible that he set off the bomb intentionally or unintentionally. It is also possible that someone else participated in the construction and had their own detonator, just in case he got cold feet or something, or worse, seemed about to get caught.

I was not thinking about this subject yesterday or when I went to bed last night. It is out of the blue, although I did read about it a few days ago. Yet another in my current series of 'terrorism related dreams', in my opinion. I'm thinking I would have better sleeping habits if these could wake me up at say, 7am, instead of 4-something...