01-10-2007, 12:36:12
Sólo por terminar.... 
Por cierto, un tal Graeme ha puesto también una respuesta excelente.
The flimsiness of Mr. Latona's conspiracy claims should be clear by now. He continues talking about a famous backpack which contained a bomb with what Latona calls Type A explosive and was found several hours after the attacks, in a Police precinct, among personal belongings of the victims. The anticonspiracionist view (based on Occam and common sense) says that the backpack was inadvertently gathered with all the rest of personal belongings, put into trash bags and sent to the precinct with everything else (although its journey was a bit more complex than that). After all, it is not so strange to find an unexploded bomb in a massive terrorist attack. The conspiracy theory proponent will say that the bomb was PLANTED by Police.
Ahem. Again we have these brilliant conspirators that in a few hours are able to plant a bomb. Granted, they have a bit more time than the time they had with the van, but not that much. It so happens that the allegedly false bomb is very similar to two that the bomb experts of the Police were unable to deactivate during the morning of March 11th. Although the bombs exploded, they were able to check its contents (one better than the other), and --lo and behold!—the contents are similar to the allegedly false bomb. Activation method: cell phone. Type of explosive: a white, chalky substance, compatible with Type A explosive (and NOT with Type B, which is orange or red). Furthermore, pieces of nails and screws used as shrapnel and found in the sites of the attacks were analyzed by CSI, discovering they were basically of the same kind than the shrapnel found in the unexploded, allegedly false bomb. And the bomb's explosive (type A) was a kind of dynamite.
Conspiracionist, of course, reject all this uncomfortable evidence. To this day they claim no shrapnel was found, despite all evidence to the contrary, including photographs we have all seen. They also claim it is impossible the bomb was in one of the trains. As with the dogs, they bestow the gift of infallibility on police specialists that allegedly checked all the trains twice without finding the bomb (common sense possible explanation: what if someone took the backpack and placed it on the deck of the train station? We know for a fact that one of the unexploded bombs was not found by specialists, but by a humble traffic cop).
But the question remains: how could the conspirators create such a similar bomb? Let's assume for the sake of the argument that they knew it had to be dynamite, even Type A dynamite. Let's assume they knew they had to use a cell phone, although that information was limited to very few people at the time (again the sheer luck of having the right people in the right place). How could they know about the shrapnel, which was not analyzed until weeks later?
Conspirators make a big deal of the strange journey of the personal belongings from the train station. They were taken first to a nearby police precinct under orders from a judge. The chief there refused to take them. Then they were taken to a different, similarly named nearby precinct, in what seems to have been a confusion of names. Then the chief of the precinct ordered to take the belongings to IFEMA, a fairground used as an improvised morgue. Then some policeman thought that was wrong, as it contradicted the judge's orders, called yet another judge and asked for instructions; those instructions were to take back the belongings to the second police precinct and they were carried out. There the bomb was found during an inventory of the belongings.
Conspiracionists hint darkly that orders were disobeyed and that this crazy journey was used to plant the bomb. But, what is so mysterious about this? Contradictory orders in the middle of mayhem? Wow. Nobody had seen that happen before!
The fact is the common sense answer is, again: contradictory orders happen, especially when everybody is going crazy in the midst of the worst terrorist attack in Spain's history.
It turns out the backpack was key in the investigation. It lead directly to the first arrests, through the cell phone SIM card.
Conspiracionists therefore point out that the TIMING of the bomb's appearance is very important. It should be late enough so that the Minister of the Interior (Homeland Security) does not know about it when he makes his first statements blaming ETA (because the bomb's design and explosive do no match ETA), but not so late as to make the first (Islamist) arrests happen AFTER the elections (the attacks were on a Thursday; the bomb was found in the early hours of Friday and arrests were made on Saturday evening; voting was on Sunday). According to conspiracionism, conspirators would have had an exquisite timing in order to make the bomb appear in that small window of time. It had to appear THAT night and no other.
Mmmh. What a complex conspiracy. Have you seen anything like it in real life? REAL LIFE, I repeat. These conspiracionist guys think the world operates like an Ethan Hunt movie.
I contend that the journey complicates, not facilitates, the planting of the evidence and the appearance of the bomb in the nick of time. How could the conspirators be sure that the belongings in the trash bags would be at the right place X at right time Y? The very nature of the contradictory orders, made evident in testimony, shows that the destinations of those bags was decided at the flip of a coin. If only that policeman had not learned the bags were sent to IFEMA, they would still be there, maybe for days. If only the chief that refused the bags had accepted them. If only the judge had given a different order. If inventory had been taken the next morning and not late at night the conspiracy might have lost its window. If Police had been a bit remiss in the pursuit of the cell phone lead, leaving for example a given late evening interview for the next day. And so on. So many lucky events strain belief. No planner relies so much on luck, let alone the planner of a conspiracy.
Yet another one: conspiracionists claim the chain of custody of the backpack was broken during that journey. The instructing judge took the pains of interviewing all the parties involved in the moves. He was satisfied with the result and he declared at no point was the chain of custody broken, at no time were the bags left alone. They were under the surveillance of at least two policemen constantly during the moves. When left at IFEMA, they were under the custody of a police unit. IFEMA, though improvised, was submitted to access controls.
There are many more conspiracy arguments concerning the backpack (for example, they claim the bomb was doctored to make it not explode, they claim that it is impossible that someone would leave such a clear lead (the cell phone card) given that cell phone alarms work even without the card, etcetera.
By now it should be clear that the favourite word of a conspiracionist is "impossible". Not only are police infallible; terrorists are too. For the conspiracionist, it is impossible that a bomb fails for "natural" causes (a twisted wire without any protection cannot become disconnected) or that a terrorist forgets to remove a card that he thinks will be destroyed. Or even that the terrorist knows the card is not necessary to activate the alarm.
Mr. Latona continues:
"Key physical evidence was removed from the chain of custody and mysteriously cleaned with acetone to make sure it would yield no inconvenient truths"
Here he mixes two conspiracionist claims. One has been addressed before: the chain of custody of the backpack was not broken.
What was "cleaned" with acetone " were the samples taken from the sites of the attacks for chemical analysis. Now, the word "clean" is a misnomer. It so happens that organic components have to be DILUTED in acetone in order to perform a given chemical test (TLC), which has been the standard chemical analysis used by the Police in previous terrorist attacks.
Aside from that fact, don't you simply LOVE Mr. Latona's clairvoyance? He KNOWS why acetone was used to clean the samples. "To make sure it would yield no inconvient truths". If this is not a rash judgement, I don't know what it is. It directly blames a person of destroying evidence. Mr. Latona, I tell you what I tell every other conspiracionist. If you are so positive a crime has been committed, go to the judge.
Mr. Latona goes on:
"Two of Spain's most senior police officials have given testimony so contradictory that one or the other must be committing perjury. Why would they do that?"
To cover their precious behinds, for instance? The contradiction needs to be explained. It refers to a very minor point which has no bearing on the actual trial.
In the morning of the attacks the Minister of the Interior was in a hurry to identify the explosive, in order to pin down the blame publicly (probably his worst mistake). The police lab was pressured into giving a statement before actual analyses were performed. Reluctantly, the senior police official in charge of the analyses agreed to give a preliminary result. Here is where stories diverge. That official, call him X, claims that he said the generic word "dynamite" to his boss over the phone, call him Y. Y claims that X said distinctly the word Titadyne, which is the kind of dynamite Latona refers to as Type B, which happens to be the dynamite ETA used.
Be is at it may, the word Titadyne reached the Minister, who confidently blamed the attacks on ETA on national TV.
That afternoon the confusion was solved: X insisted it was dynamite, generically, not necessarily Titadyne. It seems obvious a confusion that lasted a few hours at most had no bearing on the investigation, much less on the trial.
The only thing damaged in all this affair was the Minister's reputation. Had he not been so rash.... Suddenly, Mr. Latona's claim goes up in smoke, since the alleged contradiction turns out to be a red herring.
Latona makes yet another claim:
"... a few samples taken from gutted train cars show traces of chemicals that are not used in the manufacture of the type of dynamite stolen from the mine. On the other hand, they do show chemical fingerprints of a different type of dynamite that has not been available in Spain since 2002. This second variety of explosive, call it Type B, is commonly used by the Basque terrorist group ETA"
Wrong. The samples show traces of both Type A and Type B components. There is no commercial dynamite which has ALL the components found in the samples. Therefore, from the samples alone, it is impossible to rule out either type A or type B explosives.
Which brings us back to what the first lab technician said in the early afternoon of March 11th, 2004: I cannot say what kind of dynamite it is, only that it is dynamite. She was right all along.
The tests that Mr. Latona is referring to were performed recently. It is important to mention that not only the samples from the explosions had those Type B components; most of the other samples also had those components, including the explosive from the backpack and the van, which had unequivocally been identified in 2004 as Type A! Wait, it gets worse. An UNDOUBTED sample from the manufacturer of Type A dynamite also had Type B components.
OK, OK, what is happening here? Conspiracionist will tell you that the type B components in the samples from the train are real, but that the others were the product of human tampering.
Too bad eight experts in the trial, when asked the direct question of whether that human tampering was scientifically possible, said unanimously: NO. It's not possible. This is all the more important since four of the experts were presented by the defense and by conspiracionist accusations.
The obvious answer is: during these three years, the samples have become contaminated. This explanation is reinforced when one of the police experts produced a graph from a 2004 analysis of a given sample (call it sample 1, which is it's actual name). Type B components were absent. Same graph, same technique, 2007. Type B components present. Yet another 2004 sample shows a small trace of type B components which has INCREASED in the 2007 analysis.
I rest my case, your Honour.
By the way, did I mention one of the defense experts tried to cheat the bench showing a graph that had been trimmed on the right to hide a telltale component? No, I don't think I did...
Por cierto, un tal Graeme ha puesto también una respuesta excelente.The flimsiness of Mr. Latona's conspiracy claims should be clear by now. He continues talking about a famous backpack which contained a bomb with what Latona calls Type A explosive and was found several hours after the attacks, in a Police precinct, among personal belongings of the victims. The anticonspiracionist view (based on Occam and common sense) says that the backpack was inadvertently gathered with all the rest of personal belongings, put into trash bags and sent to the precinct with everything else (although its journey was a bit more complex than that). After all, it is not so strange to find an unexploded bomb in a massive terrorist attack. The conspiracy theory proponent will say that the bomb was PLANTED by Police.
Ahem. Again we have these brilliant conspirators that in a few hours are able to plant a bomb. Granted, they have a bit more time than the time they had with the van, but not that much. It so happens that the allegedly false bomb is very similar to two that the bomb experts of the Police were unable to deactivate during the morning of March 11th. Although the bombs exploded, they were able to check its contents (one better than the other), and --lo and behold!—the contents are similar to the allegedly false bomb. Activation method: cell phone. Type of explosive: a white, chalky substance, compatible with Type A explosive (and NOT with Type B, which is orange or red). Furthermore, pieces of nails and screws used as shrapnel and found in the sites of the attacks were analyzed by CSI, discovering they were basically of the same kind than the shrapnel found in the unexploded, allegedly false bomb. And the bomb's explosive (type A) was a kind of dynamite.
Conspiracionist, of course, reject all this uncomfortable evidence. To this day they claim no shrapnel was found, despite all evidence to the contrary, including photographs we have all seen. They also claim it is impossible the bomb was in one of the trains. As with the dogs, they bestow the gift of infallibility on police specialists that allegedly checked all the trains twice without finding the bomb (common sense possible explanation: what if someone took the backpack and placed it on the deck of the train station? We know for a fact that one of the unexploded bombs was not found by specialists, but by a humble traffic cop).
But the question remains: how could the conspirators create such a similar bomb? Let's assume for the sake of the argument that they knew it had to be dynamite, even Type A dynamite. Let's assume they knew they had to use a cell phone, although that information was limited to very few people at the time (again the sheer luck of having the right people in the right place). How could they know about the shrapnel, which was not analyzed until weeks later?
Conspirators make a big deal of the strange journey of the personal belongings from the train station. They were taken first to a nearby police precinct under orders from a judge. The chief there refused to take them. Then they were taken to a different, similarly named nearby precinct, in what seems to have been a confusion of names. Then the chief of the precinct ordered to take the belongings to IFEMA, a fairground used as an improvised morgue. Then some policeman thought that was wrong, as it contradicted the judge's orders, called yet another judge and asked for instructions; those instructions were to take back the belongings to the second police precinct and they were carried out. There the bomb was found during an inventory of the belongings.
Conspiracionists hint darkly that orders were disobeyed and that this crazy journey was used to plant the bomb. But, what is so mysterious about this? Contradictory orders in the middle of mayhem? Wow. Nobody had seen that happen before!
The fact is the common sense answer is, again: contradictory orders happen, especially when everybody is going crazy in the midst of the worst terrorist attack in Spain's history.
It turns out the backpack was key in the investigation. It lead directly to the first arrests, through the cell phone SIM card.
Conspiracionists therefore point out that the TIMING of the bomb's appearance is very important. It should be late enough so that the Minister of the Interior (Homeland Security) does not know about it when he makes his first statements blaming ETA (because the bomb's design and explosive do no match ETA), but not so late as to make the first (Islamist) arrests happen AFTER the elections (the attacks were on a Thursday; the bomb was found in the early hours of Friday and arrests were made on Saturday evening; voting was on Sunday). According to conspiracionism, conspirators would have had an exquisite timing in order to make the bomb appear in that small window of time. It had to appear THAT night and no other.
Mmmh. What a complex conspiracy. Have you seen anything like it in real life? REAL LIFE, I repeat. These conspiracionist guys think the world operates like an Ethan Hunt movie.
I contend that the journey complicates, not facilitates, the planting of the evidence and the appearance of the bomb in the nick of time. How could the conspirators be sure that the belongings in the trash bags would be at the right place X at right time Y? The very nature of the contradictory orders, made evident in testimony, shows that the destinations of those bags was decided at the flip of a coin. If only that policeman had not learned the bags were sent to IFEMA, they would still be there, maybe for days. If only the chief that refused the bags had accepted them. If only the judge had given a different order. If inventory had been taken the next morning and not late at night the conspiracy might have lost its window. If Police had been a bit remiss in the pursuit of the cell phone lead, leaving for example a given late evening interview for the next day. And so on. So many lucky events strain belief. No planner relies so much on luck, let alone the planner of a conspiracy.
Yet another one: conspiracionists claim the chain of custody of the backpack was broken during that journey. The instructing judge took the pains of interviewing all the parties involved in the moves. He was satisfied with the result and he declared at no point was the chain of custody broken, at no time were the bags left alone. They were under the surveillance of at least two policemen constantly during the moves. When left at IFEMA, they were under the custody of a police unit. IFEMA, though improvised, was submitted to access controls.
There are many more conspiracy arguments concerning the backpack (for example, they claim the bomb was doctored to make it not explode, they claim that it is impossible that someone would leave such a clear lead (the cell phone card) given that cell phone alarms work even without the card, etcetera.
By now it should be clear that the favourite word of a conspiracionist is "impossible". Not only are police infallible; terrorists are too. For the conspiracionist, it is impossible that a bomb fails for "natural" causes (a twisted wire without any protection cannot become disconnected) or that a terrorist forgets to remove a card that he thinks will be destroyed. Or even that the terrorist knows the card is not necessary to activate the alarm.
Mr. Latona continues:
"Key physical evidence was removed from the chain of custody and mysteriously cleaned with acetone to make sure it would yield no inconvenient truths"
Here he mixes two conspiracionist claims. One has been addressed before: the chain of custody of the backpack was not broken.
What was "cleaned" with acetone " were the samples taken from the sites of the attacks for chemical analysis. Now, the word "clean" is a misnomer. It so happens that organic components have to be DILUTED in acetone in order to perform a given chemical test (TLC), which has been the standard chemical analysis used by the Police in previous terrorist attacks.
Aside from that fact, don't you simply LOVE Mr. Latona's clairvoyance? He KNOWS why acetone was used to clean the samples. "To make sure it would yield no inconvient truths". If this is not a rash judgement, I don't know what it is. It directly blames a person of destroying evidence. Mr. Latona, I tell you what I tell every other conspiracionist. If you are so positive a crime has been committed, go to the judge.
Mr. Latona goes on:
"Two of Spain's most senior police officials have given testimony so contradictory that one or the other must be committing perjury. Why would they do that?"
To cover their precious behinds, for instance? The contradiction needs to be explained. It refers to a very minor point which has no bearing on the actual trial.
In the morning of the attacks the Minister of the Interior was in a hurry to identify the explosive, in order to pin down the blame publicly (probably his worst mistake). The police lab was pressured into giving a statement before actual analyses were performed. Reluctantly, the senior police official in charge of the analyses agreed to give a preliminary result. Here is where stories diverge. That official, call him X, claims that he said the generic word "dynamite" to his boss over the phone, call him Y. Y claims that X said distinctly the word Titadyne, which is the kind of dynamite Latona refers to as Type B, which happens to be the dynamite ETA used.
Be is at it may, the word Titadyne reached the Minister, who confidently blamed the attacks on ETA on national TV.
That afternoon the confusion was solved: X insisted it was dynamite, generically, not necessarily Titadyne. It seems obvious a confusion that lasted a few hours at most had no bearing on the investigation, much less on the trial.
The only thing damaged in all this affair was the Minister's reputation. Had he not been so rash.... Suddenly, Mr. Latona's claim goes up in smoke, since the alleged contradiction turns out to be a red herring.
Latona makes yet another claim:
"... a few samples taken from gutted train cars show traces of chemicals that are not used in the manufacture of the type of dynamite stolen from the mine. On the other hand, they do show chemical fingerprints of a different type of dynamite that has not been available in Spain since 2002. This second variety of explosive, call it Type B, is commonly used by the Basque terrorist group ETA"
Wrong. The samples show traces of both Type A and Type B components. There is no commercial dynamite which has ALL the components found in the samples. Therefore, from the samples alone, it is impossible to rule out either type A or type B explosives.
Which brings us back to what the first lab technician said in the early afternoon of March 11th, 2004: I cannot say what kind of dynamite it is, only that it is dynamite. She was right all along.
The tests that Mr. Latona is referring to were performed recently. It is important to mention that not only the samples from the explosions had those Type B components; most of the other samples also had those components, including the explosive from the backpack and the van, which had unequivocally been identified in 2004 as Type A! Wait, it gets worse. An UNDOUBTED sample from the manufacturer of Type A dynamite also had Type B components.
OK, OK, what is happening here? Conspiracionist will tell you that the type B components in the samples from the train are real, but that the others were the product of human tampering.
Too bad eight experts in the trial, when asked the direct question of whether that human tampering was scientifically possible, said unanimously: NO. It's not possible. This is all the more important since four of the experts were presented by the defense and by conspiracionist accusations.
The obvious answer is: during these three years, the samples have become contaminated. This explanation is reinforced when one of the police experts produced a graph from a 2004 analysis of a given sample (call it sample 1, which is it's actual name). Type B components were absent. Same graph, same technique, 2007. Type B components present. Yet another 2004 sample shows a small trace of type B components which has INCREASED in the 2007 analysis.
I rest my case, your Honour.
By the way, did I mention one of the defense experts tried to cheat the bench showing a graph that had been trimmed on the right to hide a telltale component? No, I don't think I did...
[A los creyentes] les competerá difundir lo que otros han acuñado; ya que ningún hombre suelta y expande la mentira con tanta gracia como el que se la cree.