Is This 40-Year-Old Coverup Still In Progress?
JANUARY 28 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY of the catastrophic failure of the Space Shuttle Challenger and the beginning of an official cover-up that might still be going on.
The main fuel tank of the Space Shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launch, destroying the Shuttle and killing all seven astronauts. The televised launch was being watched by an enormous audience, including some 2.5 million U.S. students. The large school-age audience was watching because one of those on board the Shuttle was a high-school school teacher who had been recruited to be the first “Teacher in Space” and conduct science lessons from orbit to foster interest in space exploration.
As soon as the Shuttle, which was easy to see because it was only nine miles up in a clear, blue sky, disappeared in a ball of smoke and flame, several observers had a very good idea of what had gone wrong. The Shuttle’s 530,000-gallon fuel tank had exploded, almost certainly because it had been heated by a leak of super-hot gasses from one of the Shuttle’s two solid-fuel booster rockets.
Some of the people who immediately understood what had happened had been directly involved in an angry debate a half day earlier about whether the Shuttle could be launched safely. They had argued that a launch would be unacceptably dangerous, because Florida was experiencing an unusual cold snap and the Shuttle was not designed to operate in sub-40-degree weather, but after hours of back-and-forth, their objections had been rejected by NASA managers.
On the day of the disaster, the cover-up began. At first, the cover-up concerned the reason for the explosion, which, even though it was obvious to the men who had said the launch was too dangerous, took more than a month of investigation and hearings to show that NASA managers had been flat wrong to reject the advice of experienced engineers.
When the presidentially appointed Rogers Commission began its investigation, NASA officials kept mum about the pre-launch argument concerning safety and claimed they had no idea what might have caused the explosion.
It took more than a month for the Rogers Commission to discover a senior truth-telling engineer to testify. Then Allan McDonald, a high-level engineer at Thiokol, the company that built the Shuttle’s solid-rocket boosters, and who was also Thiokol’s representative at Cape Kennedy, revealed that he and other senior engineers had been completely opposed to the launch because of the unprecedentedly cold weather.
McDonald was the first witness to speak frankly about the effect of cold weather on the performance of rubber gaskets, known as O-rings, that were designed to seal the joints in the Shuttle’s solid-rocket boosters. McDonald knew that the O-rings had to be flexible to work properly, and that low temperatures reduced their flexibility. No one could say exactly how cold was too cold, but McDonald had been certain that it was too cold that morning for the Shuttle to fly safely.
On the day before the launch, when McDonald told a flight-readiness meeting his opinion that a safe launch that day was impossible, NASA managers mocked him, asking him, must we put the launch on hold until April?
It was, as McDonald testified, unlike any other flight-readiness meeting he had participated in. McDonald testified: “I've been in many flight readiness reviews, probably as many as anyone in the past year and a half at Thiokol. And I've had to get up and stand before, I think, a very critical audience, . . . justifying why our hardware was ready to fly. . . . It's been that way through all the reviews I've ever had. And that's the way it should be. . . . And I was surprised here at this particular meeting that the tone of the meeting was just opposite of that.”
Roger Boisjoly, another Thiokol engineer in the flight-readiness meeting put it this way in his testimony: “This was a meeting where the determination was to launch and it was up to us to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was not safe to do so. This is an entire reverse to what the position usually is in a pre-flight conversation or flight readiness review.”
In fact, there had been 24 successful Shuttle launches before the Challenger disaster; exactly eight of them launched on the date and time scheduled; another eight had launched late, but within 26 hours of the scheduled time; and eight had launched between two and 74 days late. Every one of the 2-days-plus delays had been due to unresolved safety concerns.
After McDonald and Boisjoly testified and the Rogers Commission knew where to look, it found plentiful evidence that the explosion had been caused by hot gas leaking past a cold and relatively inflexible O-ring.
That left the Rogers Commission with an obvious follow-up question: why had NASA managers behaved completely uncharacteristically during that fatal flight-readiness meeting, requiring incontrovertible proof that safety concerns were valid instead of proof that safety concerns were mistaken?
The answer to that question is the real explanation of what happened to the Challenger and why. Forty years later, it remains a mystery. https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidents/assets/rogers_commission_report.pdf
It’s Not a Crime to Damage a Weapon of Genocide
JANUARY 29 IS THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY of a break-in to an English aircraft storage facility by three members of the Seeds of Hope East Timor Ploughshares Group. Three anti-genocide activists, all of them women, attacked a brand-new fighter jet with carpenters’ hammers, causing more than $2 million in damage.
The target of the 1996 attack was a jet that was being prepared for sale to the Indonesian military for use in their genocidal war against the people of East Timor. When the activists had done what they could to render the jet useless, their presence in the hangar had not yet been detected, so they telephoned security in order to take full responsibility for the action.
The three were arrested, as was a fourth member of the group who had helped plan the break-in but had not been part of the attacking squad. The four were charged with criminal damage and conspiracy and held in pre-trial detention for six months, after which they were tried by a jury in Liverpool.
Faced with the possibility of serving 10 years in prison, the four pled not guilty on the ground they “were acting to prevent British Aerospace and the British Government from aiding and abetting genocide.” The jury acquitted them because it deemed their action reasonable under the UK’s Genocide Act of 1969, a law that gave effect to the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/
Whites Kill, But Blacks Do Time (1966)
JANUARY 30 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the publication of a report showing that there had recently been an increase in the number of civil-rights related murders in the southern U.S. The report, published by the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council, detailed 20 murders during the 13 months ending in January 1966, making 1965 an unusually bloody year for those with connections with the struggle against Jim Crow.
Seven of the 1965 slayings occurred in Alabama, four in Mississippi, two each in Georgia and Louisiana and one each in Arkansas and South Carolina.
According to the 1966 report, 17 of the murder victims had been Black and three had been White. The report compared the murder statistics to those it had collected for previous years: 14 murders in 1964, 13 in 1963, four in 1962, three in 1961, six in 1960, four in 1959, nine in 1958, three in 1957, seven in 1956 and six in 1955.
Almost all of the tabulated killings had been committed by White southerners, according to the report. Despite the fact that Whites were the killers in the vast majority of cases, the statistics also showed that a total of five Whites and four Blacks had been sentenced to prison for any of the 85 killings. https://www.fjc.gov/history/spotlight-judicial-history/mississippi-burning
No Wonder Trump Admires Andrew Jackson
JANUARY 31 IS THE 192ND ANNIVERSARY of the arrival of two companies of U.S. Army troops in Williamsport, Maryland, where they began a 2-month deployment as strike-breakers. They had been dispatched by President Andrew Jackson, who was using his authority under the Insurrection Act, the same law that President Trump refers to so often, but has yet to put into play.
It was the first time in U.S. history that the federal military had been given orders to break a strike.
The 1834 strike of workers on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal was quickly suppressed, but the troops remained on-scene for more than eight weeks to insure that the government-imposed labor peace prevailed.
It is notable that Jackson took the unprecedented step of ordering federal troops to break a strike to come to the assistance of John Eaton, the president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, who just happened to be Jackson’s bosom friend and Jackson’s former Secretary of War. https://speakoutsocialists.org/1834-andrew-jackson-strikebreaker
If Anyone Needs a Pardon, It’s President Wilson
FEBRUARY 1 IS THE 105TH ANNIVERSARY of Eugene Debs fiery denunciation of President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to refuse to pardon Debs from serving 10 years in the penitentiary. Debs’ crime was to have allegedly “incited insubordination, disloyalty, and obstruction of military recruitment,” all violations of the “Espionage Act.”
After Wilson’s 1921 decision was announced, Debs wrote, and widely distributed: “I may be in prison, but unlike the man who keeps me here, I am not an exile from my own country. . . . I understand perfectly the feelings of Wilson. When he reviews what he has done, when he realizes the suffering that he has brought about, then he is being punished. It is he, not I, who needs a pardon. If I had it in my power I would give him the pardon which would set him free.
“Woodrow Wilson is an exile from the hearts of his people. The betrayal of his ideas makes him the most pathetic figure in the world. No man in public life in American history ever retired so thoroughly discredited, so scathingly rebuked, so overwhelmingly impeached and repudiated as Woodrow Wilson. . . .
“I shall remain faithful to my ideals of democracy to my last heartbeat. I was sent here for my convictions and I shall leave here with them. I hope Mr. Wilson sleeps as easily and with as clear a conscience in the White House as I do in the penitentiary.” https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/debs-v-united-states/
Wars Kill, But Mum’s the Word
FEBRUARY 2 IS THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY of the Pentagon’s ban on news reporting or photographs of the arrival in the U.S. of the remains of military personnel killed in the Gulf War.
It seemed that in 1991 the Department of Defense decided that photographs and descriptions of planeloads of flag-draped coffins was more than the U.S. public could bear. Or could it have been that the government was trying to hide the human cost of war?
The ban on such news coverage remained in place until February 2009. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB152/gast_kelly.pdf
John F. Kennedy, Movie Fan
FEBRUARY 3 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of President John Kennedy going to a movie theater near the White House on a weekday afternoon to watch the film Spartacus. While it was unusual for a sitting President to see a film in theater with members of the general public, Kennedy’s trip to the theater was really exceptional because the anti-communist right wing, including the American Legion, was actively boycotting Spartacus and denouncing those who ignored the boycott.
The inspiration for the 1961 boycott was that the screenplay for Spartacus was written by Dalton Trumbo, who had spent 11 months in prison for his 1948 refusal to testify about his political associations to the House Un-American Activities Committee. After serving his time, Trumbo, like hundreds of other left-leaning workers in the film industry, was blacklisted and prevented from working in Hollywood. In addition, the movie was based on a novel written by Howard Fast, who had also served time in prison to punish him for having been a Communist.
Spartacus, the film, gave full credit to Trumbo for having written the screenplay, which was the first time in more than 10 years that a major film studio had ignored the blacklisters’ antagonism to the left. Giving credit to Trumbo was like a crack in a dam; it presaged a flood of defiance that soon wiped the blacklist out.
Kennedy ignored the American Legion’s cries of “shame,” but he never suggested he had ignored the boycott as a matter of principle. His explanation for the visit to the theater was that he was a Kirk Douglass fan and he wanted to see the film projected in 70 millimeter format, which was not possible in the White House screening room. https://xxxxxx.org/2015-12-25/trumbo-and-hidden-story-red-scare
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