A strong aviation presence has been a fact in the State of Washington for many years, as part of the Military Industrial Complex. That fact may be connected to Cooper's choice of the State of Washington to conduct his hijacking (a political part of his Grudge). It may also connect to Cooper's identity. In 1971, Ted Kaczynski decided to leave civilisation (academia) in California to hold up in a cabin in Montana, then started his bombing campaign. Later the same year, 1971, Cooper conducted his hijacking and vanished.
There is a series on the Unabomber now airing on cable TV and I have just finished viewing the latest episode this evening. One FBI agent and one linguist from somewhere, maybe academia, have been going thru the Unabomber's manifesto (this is before it was published by the national media) and coming up with conclusions that contradict the "official profile" as developed by the FBI old timers, who are directing the Unabomber Task Force and have a low opinion of linguistics.
I think the methodology of the linguists is VERY interesting and I highly recommend this show. There are several more episodes to go.
That in a nutshell was the reason behind my post above -
The program details the dilemma the FBI faced in "profiling" the Unabomber. They finally resorted to a new profiling technique linguistic called 'ideolect' profiling. The techniques had been being used in Europe for some time ... it resulted in an internal war inside the FBI.
"Ideolect" is what the linguist was telling the FBI agent about in this evening's episode. The FBI agent then got thrown out of his superior's office when he tried to explain it to him.
The FBI undoubtedly worked up a profile for Cooper, but in view of their lack of progress on the hijacking, it will probably never be released.
Is there something along the above lines that we can do ourselves (since we are sure as hell not going to get any assistance from you know where)?
The notion of an 'ideolect' (linguistic finger print) is very old. It has been used for everything from trying to assign identity to Shakespeare plays, to assigning identity to the authors and chapters in the Bible - with some success. It has been used to fill in historical blanks about the origins of peoples, as the program tonight mentioned. Aside from actually assigning a correct identity to the Unabomber, based on his scripts, the field of linguistic finger printing had no recognised legal standing as a viable forensic method in Courts at the time, something the Unabomber was quick to point out. The search warrant obtained had no basis except in profiling - the Unabomber wanted all of the evidence obtained from his cabin thrown out on that basis. Later, as you will see, Ted's identity was nailed down and confirmed by his own family members familiar with Ted's earlier writings, which strengthened the FBI's case.
I have always thought it interesting that the origins of both the Unabomber and Cooper both go back to that 1970s period when people were dropping out and taking a stand, of one kind or another.
In the case of Cooper, if the goal is an 'ideolect', you would have to combine all of his spoken and written words, his commands and demands, along side specific instances of his actual behavior to somehow extrapolate an ideolect. Far more data was available in the case of the Unabomber. So far, none of the FBI pages released have mentioned any attempt to profile Cooper. Who knows if it was attempted or not and by whom. The FAA psychiatrist was proven wrong and very likely Himmelsbach's first appraisal was not data-based.
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