So it seems like al-Qaeda muffed it again. It is extraordinary that the president of the United States should be inclined to spend so much time, money and energy on trying to snuff out an outfit that would appear to have the organisational capacity of Laurel and Hardy.
Look at their record. Having run three aircraft into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre on September 11 2001, they supposedly crashed a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania while attempting to plunge it into the White House and eliminate the president himself, along with Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Dick ‘Chainsaw” Cheney and the rest of the gang. This attempted attack was foiled, according to official sources, by a heroic decision by passengers trapped aboard the aircraft to overcome the dumb terrorists and sacrifice their own lives by forcing the said crash to happen.
There have been other reports that say the US air force was ordered to shoot down the plane before it could achieve its dastardly objectives, but these have always been strenuously denied in favour of the all-American heroism version.
The cross-eyed, brain-impaired Bush, meanwhile, was in a schoolroom in Texas or Florida or Alabama doing a patriotic television shoot with a room full of sleeping children while all this was happening. When news of the attacks against New York and Washington was relayed to him, he immediately fled the scene (with patriotic schoolchildren waking up in relief at this unexpected intervention from the gods), jumped into Air Force One and took to the skies, where he stayed in orbit for several hours, exploring various escape scenarios, just like Harrison Ford would have done in the movies, should the dastardly terrorists somehow manage to break into the plane in mid-flight.
Clear evidence of al-Qaeda’s incompetence lies in the fact that, with the loss of the fourth hijacked plane in a Pennsylvania mealiefield, they a) missed the White House by several hundred miles, and b) didn’t, in fact, manage to get into the presidential plane as it zigzagged its cowardly way across America, and finish off the task they had been sent to carry out.
Like Margaret Thatcher after the Irish Republican Army’s Brighton bombing, the hero of the Free World lived to fight another day.
A year and a half down the line, with the US preparing to bomb the hell out of Iraq, just for the heck of it (and also because they cannot for the life of them find this Bin Laden guy who supposedly set out to do all this damage, and some rag-head country has to pay the consequences), al-Qaeda rears its head again with what the FBI hastily presumes is a successful attack against an American spaceship lawfully re-entering Earth’s orbit after a 16-day shindig in outer space.
What really happened to the Good Ship Columbia? There are two theories. The second, scrambled together after no conclusive evidence could be found of Iraqi involvement, is that the damn thing was too old for the task anyway, and the American government could be liable for suits of criminal negligence for allowing seven healthy people from a variety of countries around the world to go up there in this tired old tub in the first place.
The first theory, which naturally surfaced within minutes of the realisation that the Columbia had actually plunged to Earth without hope of redemption, was that it had been brought down either by al-Qaeda or by the evil Saddam Hussein himself. And as investigators struggle to piece together information from bits of wreckage strewn across the entire landscape of the land formerly owned by the Red Indians, unanswered questions inevitably arise about whether the first or the second theories is the more credible.
But how about if both theories are true (as often happens in investigations of this kind, that would give both Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot room to ruminate to their hearts’ content). What, for example, if there was an al-Qaeda hijacker on board the doomed Columbia, operating on a series of assumptions based on actual knowledge of the weaknesses of the spacecraft — like, for example, someone on board muttering to themselves: ‘This damn old thing will fall apart as soon as I detonate even a few grams of high explosives in my Nikes.”
With the recent case against the so-called ‘bomb-in-the-boots” trans-Atlantic terrorist so recently brought to closure, no possibility can be left unexplored.
The only trouble is, in the case of the horrific loss of life on the Columbia (seven courageous, American-orientated volunteers killed, as opposed to 40 rail passengers in a Zimbabwe train disaster and 50 innocent flat dwellers in a Lagos bank bombing who perished on the same day, just for starters) where does the buck finally come to rest if the al-Qaeda link is finally proved.
In other words, who did it?
The darkies on board would naturally be the first suspects. There was a seemingly mild-looking black guy without a moustache, and a seriously intelligent-looking Indian woman with a scientific background on board the spacecraft. Would either of them have had a motive to detonate hidden explosives inside their pre-packaged space boots as the Columbia prepared to re-enter Earth’s orbit? No one will ever know.
The only fact of any interest is that if they or any of their co-passengers really were al-Qaeda operatives, they got their timing wrong as usual.
Presumably the target was George W Bush, who makes no bones about the fact that he comes from Texas. They certainly got the Texas bit right, but unfortunately Bush was no longer in his native Texas, where he should have been, but back in Washington DC, where that fourth plane failed to get him all that time ago.
So, as I say: Georgie is getting himself all fretted up about an enemy that is really too incompetent to get him where it hurts.
Which is another way of saying that if he just let the Arabs and the rest of us alone, the world (and his own backyard included, by the way) might just have a chance of becoming a better place.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza