Copy Desk considers 10 Hinrichs facts

Mark Tapscott outlines the case for the PROBABILITY that Joel Hinrichs' death on October 1 was not a lone suicide. He calls it "10 Reasons Why a Hinrichs' Terrorist Link Seems Like the Most Plausible Possible Explanation."

The least likely of the three scenarios is the official explanation that has Hinrichs killing himself as a result of severe depression and other life problems, having no terrorist links or associations whatever and intending only to harm himself while perhaps making a big public statement. Here's why this is the least satisfactory of the possible explanations:

1. Hinrichs is the only one of the average annual 30,000 suicides in this country during the past decade to blow himself up. That makes his death what statisticians refer to as an extreme outlier. The conventional factors that explain the rest of the suicides simply don't apply to an extreme outlier like Hinrichs.

2. People who intend only to kill themselves do not maintain so much bomb-making material in their home that up to 24 hours might be needed to remove it all, as was the case with Hinrichs. Storing that quantity of lethal materials indicates a desire for multiple deaths, not a single death. Odds are good that the search warrant sealed from public view by the U.S. Justice Department describes those bomb-making materials in detail.

3. It would have been much "easier" for Hinrichs simply to put a bullet through his brain. He had a life-long fascination with explosives and guns and it is easy to buy or otherwise obtain firearms in Oklahoma. Such an individual in so much depressive pain that he would drop out of school for a year would know "it could all end" more quickly with one bullet than an elaborate scheme to blow himself up at a football game.

4. Given #3 above, the choice of a chemical compound known among Middle East terrorists as "Mother of Satan" is more likely a political statement than an indicator of personal pain. There are other explosive compounds that Hinrichs could more easily have used, given his life-long fascination with engineering processes - i.e. figuring out how things work.

Mark goes into some detail over scenario No.2: that Hinrichs was part of a plot to perpetrate a terrorist act on the OU campus. He has six points of consideration. They most definitely are worth mulling over.

Finally, on scenario No.3, Hinrichs might have been involuntarily involved in a terrorist plot, coerced by some means or measures to cooperate, perhaps to protect family. Tapscott says:

... Given his fragile mential state, he might have been recognized as a prime blackmail candidate by others. That approach is familiar in terrorist circles, particularly in recent months in Iraq. There is no logical reason to think the same approach would not be used in the U.S.

If Hinrichs was an unwilling participant, it is likely he went to his death convinced it was the only way he could protect somebody else, most likely his family. Sadly, this is also the scenario least likely ever to be proven.

Read, and learn. Especially you folks at the OU Daily.