TruthNews Commentary, Feb. 2, 2003

Just as we're getting ready to attack Iraq, the space shuttle blows up. Just a coincidence? Perhaps. The shuttle carried Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut. Just a coincidence? Well, maybe. Ramon was one of the Israeli air force pilots who bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, thereby thwarting Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Just a coincidence? Hmm...

Space flight has become so routine that we've forgotten how hazardous it is. But perhaps this is one coincidence too many. When Saudi and Egyptian terrorists struck America on 9/11, they struck at two visible symbols of American power -- commerce and military. But there's a third pillar of American superiority, and that's our technology. It's our technology that powers both our economic and military strength. And the most visible symbol of our technology is the space shuttle.

The news media has been at pains to explain that terrorism is not suspected in the Columbia disaster. The Columbia is 22 years old, and the reentry phase is when the shuttle is under maximum stress. But this also is the point where the shuttle is most vulnerable to sabotage.

The space shuttle is thoroughly checked out and refurbished after each flight in a procedure involving hundreds, perhaps thousands of engineers and technicians. It would not be difficult for one of these people to place a bomb in the structure, loosen some of the thermal tiles, weaken a wing spar, or tamper with the on-board computers that control re-entry.

It's common knowledge America is heavily dependent on thousands of foreign-born engineers who have immigrated to America. That's because our own citizens want to become doctors, lawyers, or stockbrokers, and we have a serious engineering shortage. Most of these immigrant engineers are dedicated, patriotic Americans. But it's next to impossible to verify the backgrounds of people from foreign countries, especially unfriendly third-world countries, so it would not be difficult for a terrorist organization to sneak an engineer into this country and put him to work for NASA. And NASA relies on many foreign-born engineers because they're among the best and the brightest of the engineers in this country.

America has also produced it's share of native born wackos, like Ted "the Unabomber" Kazinski and Timothy McVeigh, who would both be perfectly willing to blow up the Space Shuttle if they weren't in prison and burning in hell, respectively. To some extent, these wackos are easier to discover and less likely to work for NASA, or for that matter, to be working in the employ of Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden (although there's some evidence that McVeigh colluded with Hussein). But the Defense Department, CIA, and FBI have all had agents with top secret security clearances turning traitor and providing information to the Russians. The most notorious recent examples are the Navy's John Walker, captured in 1986 (not to be confused with John "Walker" Lindh, the traitor who helped the Taliban), the CIA's Aldrich Ames, captured in 1994, and the FBI's Robert Hanssen, captured in 2001. So the idea of space shuttle sabotage being carried out by either a foreign-born agent posing as an immigrant or a native-born traitor is not far-fetched.

Some terrorist attacks, like 9/11 and the suicide bombings in Israel, are meant to seen as terrorist attacks. The terrorist groups stumble over each other to take credit for these attacks. But other attacks are designed to be seen as accidents or random acts of violence. The best example of such an attack is Muammar Qadhafi's 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Only a painstaking reconstruction of the aircraft debris revealed that the crash was caused by a bomb that was later linked to the Libyan dictator. The anthrax attacks and the Washington sniper attacks are of a similar nature. Part of a terrorist conspiracy or just free lance wackos? No one knows.

The Columbia disaster could very well have been just an accident. The space shuttle is a very complex machine, and there are probably a million things that could go wrong and cause a catastrophic failure. A commentator on TV yesterday said that following the last space shuttle explosion in 1986, NASA assessed the probability of a shuttle disaster at one in 86. This number was later revised make a shuttle accident appear much less likely. But the doomed Columbia flight was the 88th flight since the Challenger, so maybe the original number was accurate.

We may never know what happened to the Columbia. Everyone on TV has been loudly proclaiming that we'll solve this just as we discovered what happened to the Challenger. But the debris is scattered over several states, there is no video of the explosion (unlike the Challenger), and the telemetry reported so far is inconclusive. The explosion on board Apollo 13 in 1970, which caused the third lunar mission to be aborted, has never been conclusively explained. NASA hasn't even been able to figure out what caused the door of Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule to come off at the conclusion of America's second space flight in 1961, sinking the capsule and nearly drowning Grissom.

So these official statements that there is no evidence of a terrorist attack on the Columbia are nonsense. At this point, there's no evidence of anything except that the shuttle blew up. But there are too many coincidences here to rule out the possibility of terrorist attack. After years of investigation, we still don't know what caused the crash of TWA flight 800 near Long Island in 1996. Terrorist attack or mechanical failure? No one knows. And the shuttle investigation will be considerably more difficult, and likely more inconclusive, than the TWA 800.