I always believed that HAL said the AE-35 unit was about to fail
because he had no other way of censoring what was about to be splashed
all over the airwaves. My theory is that the crew was provided a
constant stream of a few civilian broadcasts (BBC for one) and one of
those broadcasts was about to break the story about the Tycho Monolith.
 Perhaps the Soviets leaked enough information to the FOXes, MSNBCs and
the CNNs to get them hot on the story so the US would have to show its
hand.  HAL gently brought the Monolith rumors up to get a feel for what
the flight crew knew or thought, as per his NSA directives.

HAL's final breakdown occurred when his true computer nature showed.
His timetable was exact about when things could be revealed to the
flight crew. It took many months to get to Jupiter, yet being a very
literal machine could not reveal the true mission objectives until x
time occurred a few short hours later. He did not know how to lie, but
did not know when to tell the truth.


--- Jim Brust <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>         I remember from the sequel film it was brought up that HAL
> was directed to
> not let the crew know the true reason for going to Jupiter.  I think
> the
> dialog was something like ' ... HAL was told to lie by people who
> find it easy
> to lie and this was in direct contradiction to HAL's basic
> programming of
> accurate processing of data...'.


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