Finalmente, un conspiracionista de EEUU...

[larean]

Encontrado en PPNNLL:

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/discu...IdMsg=1354

A pesar de declararse no conspiracionista, acepta muchas de las tesis peónidas. Sería interesante rebatirle.

Editado: pero no me deja registrarme para comentar...

[larean]

Ya estoy registrado. Let's kick some conspi ass after supper.

Por cierto que lo de conspi yanqui es relativo. El amigo está basado en Madrid.

[Rasmo]

Me desconcierta la facilidad con la que da por supuesto que se han falsificado y manipulado pruebas.
Yo creo que esta la principal perversidad del conspiracionismo practicado por medios de comunicación no marginales. Insisten tanto, tantas veces, con la misma cantinela, que, de algún modo, es como si pasara a formar parte de una especie de conciencia colectiva, algo así como "bueno, algo raro sí que había".

[no me aclaro con...]

y no me extrañaría que el autor fuera el mismo que le ha dado publicidad.

[Liberto]

Me desconcierta la facilidad con la que da por supuesto que se han falsificado y manipulado pruebas.
Yo creo que esta la principal perversidad del conspiracionismo practicado por medios de comunicación no marginales. Insisten tanto, tantas veces, con la misma cantinela, que, de algún modo, es como si pasara a formar parte de una especie de conciencia colectiva, algo así como "bueno, algo raro sí que había".

Es el "difama, que algo queda". Los mecanismos más efectivos son muy simples.

[Acorrecto]

Me parece algo distinto lo de éste autor. Se diría que, aunque pueda vivir -o no- en España, hace un artículo de opinión basado en otros artículos de opinión... No sé si me explico:
No creo que pueda discutir nada al respecto, con detalle y en profundidad. Es una opinión muy americana en el sentido que, por ejemplo, los hispanos de Florida consideran a Zapatero neo-comunista.

¿Alguien sabe algo de ésto? Yo no me enteré, la verdad, ni de la camiseta ni de los besitos previos a la niña:

One woman had to be escorted out for wearing a t-shirt with the Danish Mohammed caricatures. The judge either did not know or was not bothered by the fact that one of the men inside the defendants' glass cage had been blowing smirking kisses at that woman's school-age daughter, whose father was murdered on the trains.

[Mangeclous]

Lo de la camiseta sí que se supo en su momento. De lo demás, ni idea.

[Acorrecto]

Ah.
El dibujante ha sido condenado a muerte por una fatwa, hace una semana.

Los iba a colgar otra vez, pero ya he hecho "especial chistes", todos juntos, por separado, repetición, chistes nuevos... Si los vuelvo a poner me apedrean, pero no los islamistas sino los amiguetes, que están hartos :lol:

[larean]

El de los besitos era Zouhier, el niño bueno de PJ. Quién más.

[larean]

Ya he puesto el preámbulo. Voy a ir partiendo el artículo poco a poco, pero hoy es algo tarde. Continuaré mañana.

I am used to reading this kind of conspiracionist garbage in some Spanish newspapers, but I had always thought international media knew better and would try to preserve their well-earned prestige avoiding silly conspiracy theories like the plague. Alas, 'tis not so.

So it's time again to educate a conspiracionist and, in the process, warn the well-meaning readers who might get the wrong impression from all this misinformation that most of the author's claims are plain wrong.

Conspiracy theories (CTs) about the M-11 (3/11) terrorist attacks in Madrid hold about the same amount of water that CTs about 9-11 hold: none.

They are the invention of creative fiction writers with a strong political agenda. The difference is that in the Spanish case a major political party and its agitprop (let's use the same language the author uses) machinery, including the second newspaper in circulation numbers in Spain and the second radio network, have actively tried to sell the idea that hundreds of policemen, district attorneys and plain, common citizens conspired to either make the opposition party win the election or cover up the true authorship afterwards, or both.

The conspiracy is so perfect that three and a half years later not a single whistleblower within the conspiracy has been found, even though the said conspiracy requires hundreds and hundreds of participants, all of them luckily found in the right place at the right time, as well as a mastermind so cunning that it could make hundreds of evidence pieces and witness testimonies fit perfectly to tell a story that is the exact opposite of the truth.

Forget the Kennedy assasination. That was child's play compared with THIS, the mother of all conspiracies.

Imagine the Democratic Party and the New York Times spousing CT's about 9/11? That's basically what has happened in Spain, believe it or not.

I will presently get into details, showing the falsehood of the bulk of the author's claims. I can do it blindfolded; I and my pals have been doing the same for 42 months.

[Matsusaka]

Muy buen trabajo larean

[Rasmo]

Estoy deseando leer el resto.

[ikke_leonhardt]

Por cierto que lo de conspi yanqui es relativo. El amigo está basado en Madrid.

¿Basado en Madrid? ¿Es un periodista o una ciudad de ficción?

Admiro mucho su paciencia y su entusiasmo a estas alturas. Yo hoy por hoy leo cosas como

(...) after three years of forensic work, it has proved impossible to determine what type of explosives were used to slaughter all those people

... y me entra una pereza...

[larean]

Segunda entrega:

Let's now get to the nitty gritty details. Mr. Latona says that " The answer [to ETA involvement] is no, certainly not, but that doesn't mean there is no conspiracy"


That is, he rejects one of the typical conspiracy theories but accepts uncritically another, more outlandish conspiracy: police forces were somehow involved in a cover up, tampering with evidence and committing perjury.

Such serious accusations deserve scrutiny. Let's see the claims in detail. In Mr. Latona's words:


"testimony has made it clear that evidence was tampered with, reports by crime lab technicians altered, what looks like false evidence (a car and a backpack laced with the "right" kind of Type A dynamite) were presented to the investigating magistrate"


This is simply preposterous. Let's start with the simplest claim: "reports by crime lab technicians have been altered". False, false, FALSE. Not a single report presented in the trial has even been CLAIMED by any of the parts to have been altered, let alone proven so. What Mr. Latona is referring to is to a completely SEPARATE case, still on trial, in which a police lab chief allegedly altered a report. This case has no bearing on the 3/11 trial. As I have said, nobody even raised the issue during the trial. It was once or twice mentioned in passing, but no evidence was produced, no witnesses questioned, nothing.

Let's go into some detail. A white powdery substance is found in the house of one of the people indicted in the 3/11 trial (and also on a separate criminal investigation related to Islamist terrorism). It turns out to be quite harmless: boric acid, used as a cockroach insecticide and to remove bad odours. A lab technician boldly announces that, although he does not know what the substance might be used for, it is interesting to note that the very same substance was found in the house of one ETA member and one anarchist. The lab chief considers this part of the report is ridiculous, as the substance is harmless, and deletes it. We may discuss endlessly whether he did right or wrong (and we have, my position being that the head of a lab has the authority to remove wild speculation from the reports produced by his lab), but to jump from this irrelevancy to the conclusion that "reports by crime lab technicians have been altered" is ridiculous. None of the two judges involved in the original investigation has found any relevance in boric acid. It might as well had been toothpaste: a harmless commercial product.


Let's continue. Far from what Latona claims, testimony has NOT made clear any tampering. Quite the contrary. Lawyers from the defense were totally unable to poke any holes in the evidence presented by the prosecution, tried hard as they may with the enormous help of the pro-conspiracy agitprop media and some wayward particular prosecutors (in Spain an affected party can become part of a criminal trial) that supported the conspiracy theories in all of their flavours.


What is the source of the alleged tampering claims? Let's review the facts. Scarcely three hours after the facts a van (not a car as Latona claims) is found near a train station. Police was alerted to its presence by a common citizen (a janitor) who thought three people who were hanging around the van BEFORE the attacks were suspicious. Upon hearing that there had been a terrorist attack he decided to share his suspicions with the Police. Police from the nearby precinct round up the van, make a cursory inspection that includes explosive detection by dogs (which turns out to be negative), seal the van and send it off to the main Police unit in Madrid (all the time escorted by police from the precinct), where a detailed search is conducted, finding small traces of what Latona calls Type A explosive plus a very rare type of detonators, a cassette with Islamic chants from the Quran and DNA traces and fingerprints of some of the people from the Islamist cell, along with several belongings of the owner (the van was stolen).

So, what is the conspiracionist claim? That this evidence was planted by police in the main Police unit to lead to Islamist scapegoats.

The arguments conspiracionists use?

That policemen on the scene declared they inspected the van and that it was empty. This is simply false. The presiding judge of the tribunal made it very clear when a defense attorney tried to jump to conclusions cross-examining a policeman: "So you say the van was empty". "That is not what he is saying, counsel, he is saying that he saw nothing that drew his attention; you may like it more or less, but that is what he is saying". No policeman has ever come forward to support the conspiracionist claim that the van was empty.

The fact is that no search was undertaken in the place of origin: the only policeman inside the van spent a total of four or five seconds, according to his account, and only to unblock the shift stick, taking care, in his own words, not to touch anything. Besides, the explosive and detonators were found below the passenger seat, out of sight.

Conspiracionist manipulation rose to glorious heights when El Mundo, the leading conspiracionist newspaper, published a doctored photograph of the contents of the van, neatly arranged to take as much space as possible, and claimed it was a "reconstruction" of what the police officers should have seen. Just a step away from the National Enquirer. The same newspaper announced some time later that one policeman had spotted in the up-to-now empty van a business card of a respectable Basque company (which would, by some unexplained means, lead to the Basque terrorists of ETA!). It was later revealed that the business card was actually an audio cassette of the Mondragon Orchestra. Picture Mad Al Yankovich and you will understand what the Mondragon is about. That was the ETA link according to El Mundo. Obviously and justly, they became the laughingstock of the newspaper trade.

Besides, most of what was found in the van were the OWNER'S BELONGINGS. Were they not there when policemen allegedly claimed the van was empty? If they were not there, what sense does it make to remove those belongings only to plant them later? Since the van was stolen, nobody would have thought it strange to see those belongings disappear.

The second argument is of course the dogs: they were unable to detect the traces of explosive. But the fact is only one dog entered the load area of the vehicle, some distance from the bag containing the traces of explosive, and that dogs do have false negatives. We have two documented cases in Spain a few months before 3/11: Plaza de Colón and Zarautz graveyard. In both cases dogs were unable to detect pounds of explosives.

The third argument is the supposedly unexplained time it took the van to get from Alcalá where it was found to the Madrid central unit: around one hour. The actual trip is recorded in Internet road tools as taking around 35 min. Not only are we to believe that around 60 items of evidence were planted in less than half-an-hour; we are also asked to forget that that day, with no public transportation, the roads were collapsed, and that a tow truck usually takes more time than a car to reach a given destination.

Upon such flimsy foundations are conspiracy theories built.

But wait, it gets worse. According to Latona, the cover-up was after the fact. That is, contrary to what some of the wackiest conspiracy theories claim, Police was not involved in the actual attack, they only tried to cover it up for political advantage.

Wow. You have to admire the execution skills of these guys. They managed to find a stolen van less than three hours after the attacks; coax a citizen into falsely declaring he had seen it before the attacks; and plant evidence that lead to the authorship of their choice less than seven hours after said attacks, evidence that fits perfectly with hundreds of pieces of other evidence. They also identified the scapegoats immediately and were able to gather DNA and fingerprints to conveniently place them in the van. And of course, the decision to embark on such a risky adventure was taken in an instant, and the planning of this humongous operation took a few minutes. Yeah, right.

Did I forget to mention that the detonators were of a rare kind that led directly to the Asturias mine where the explosives were stolen, and that the conspirators of course had time not only to find those detonators but to alter cell phone records and witness testimonies (including one minor who has already been convicted of helping the illegal explosive deal and one of the people indicted in this trial) that squarely place one of the Islamists in that exact spot in Asturias BEFORE the attacks and that document the negotiation to buy the dynamite?

Of course there is a simpler explanation, as always. Occam's razor tells us that we should always prefer the simpler explanation, all other things being equal. And that explanation is of course: the evidence is real. It was not tampered with.

I will continue later.

[nanu]

Good work, Areán

[Pit]

Good work, Areán

Outstanding,indeed

Me parece que ya les has dejado callados a los conspis anglosajones,larean .

[Acorrecto]

¡Y dice que continuará después!
Pobre gringo, si lo llega a saber hubiera escrito sobre JFK.

[larean]

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...

[larean]

Último:

Let's go on.

Mr. Latona says:

",it has proved impossible to determine what type of explosives were used to slaughter all those people"

False. This is an oft repeated mistake, in part product of what is called the CSI effect. The fact that forensic chemical analysis does not produce conclusive results does not mean that the REST of the evidence, when weighed by the bench, will not conclude that the explosive was Type A bought illegally in Asturias (need I to remind you a minor has already been convicted in a ruling that accepts as a proven fact the dynamite traffic from Asturias?), perhaps contaminated with small amounts of a Type C explosive, also present in the mine.


Can you imagine a judge in the US saying: "Ooops, no conclusive DNA tests. This fellow walks." When in fact the accused has been filmed on national television committing the crime and his fingerprints are all over the immediately retrieved murder weapon? It's an exaggeration, but sometimes exaggerations are good to convey the picture.


Mr. Latona goes on and on repeating conspiracionist claims. One of my favourites: those good-for-nothing small-time drug pushers would have never been able to pull out something this complex.


I admit it flabbergasts me. Casablanca, Morocco. Two terrorist attacks in the past few years with the participation of petty criminals. My Islamist experts tell me that petty criminals are the fodder of Islamist terrorism, being recruited in jails.


Be it as it may, what ontological impossibility makes a petty criminal incapable of becoming a Fundamentalist? If a millionaire, a doctor and an engineer have been capable of becoming terrorists, what prevents a person closer to crime to do so?


There is evidence, in the form of witness testimony (including his widow) that the "petty criminal" who was a sort of ringleader, Jamal Ahmidan, became a Fundamentalist in a Moroccan jail. Islamist activity by many of the indicted has been reported in testimony. Some of the indicted had been under police surveillance for Islamist activities. One of the dead terrorists was in jail in connection with logistic support for 9/11. Does that look like a harmless band of small-time crooks?


I am glad Mr. Latona had the sense to remove the racist slur that conspiracionists in Spain use: "moritos", little Moroccans, to refer to the indicted. However, he makes the same claim: they were incapable of something so complex. I detect a racist undercurrent there, at least when that claim is posited in Spain: are the conspiracionist saying that Moroccans do not have the acumen to plan and execute a terrorist attack?


Furthermore, to say this after 9/11 (a much more complex operation), Casablanca, Oran, Istambul, Bali, the aborted attacks in England and Germany and especially after the London train attacks is ridiculous.

London was, in general terms, a similar operation to Madrid: trains full of people, bombs, Islamists under previous surveillance. Only the activation method differs.


Does it take a genius to figure out that bombs in full trains at rush hour will kill many, many people? Does it take a genius to realise suburban trains have minimal security? Does it take a genius to surf the Internet and find what one of the Police specialists called "the simplest possible bomb design"? Does it take a genius to synchronize timers? Does it take a genius to get into a train with a backpack, "leave" it under a seat or in a corner and get off the train?


Come on, Mr. Latona. Reading you, it might seem that the Islamist recruiting office requires a successful Mensa test.


Those guys were perfectly capable of doing what they did. And the mountain of evidence against most of them will weigh more than your subjective claims of impossibility.


The fact is the trial will answer most relevant questions. Who did it? A local Islamist cell inspired but not controlled by Al Qaeda. How? By carrying bombs disguised in backpacks and leaving them in trains. Bombs were activated by cell phone alarms used as timers.


You want to know "exactly" how that happened. Absurd. Nobody knows exactly how the terrorists hijacked the 9/11 planes, where exactly they were standing, what they did to gain access to the cockpit, etc. We will never know, but it doesn't matter. Asking for unreasonable detail is an unreasonable requirement.


Why did the attacks happen? You may not have heard it, but there is a Yihad out there against the West. It is also probable that the Irak war heightened Spain's desirability as a target. And did you know Ben Laden fantasizes with claiming back Al Andalus, the name they give to previously Islamic Spain?


You also ask: " Why weren't they detected and neutralized before they did?" The same question can be asked of any successful terrorist attack. It is an important question, but trials do not answer those questions, as a rule. Trials answer questions like "Is this person guilty of this crime?" They have no business questioning the effectiveness of the Police prevention methods, as not preventing a crime is not, as a rule, a crime in itself.

Yet, the question is important. It belongs in a Parliamentary Commission. Too bad the commission we had was mired in politicking and was unable to recommend any prevention measures beyond the obvious ones.


Mr. Latona claims the legitimacy of this government rests on 191 corpses (actually 192, counting a dead SWAT policeman in Leganés). I am shocked. I always thought government legitimacy, in a democracy, came from counting voting ballots. I must have been misinformed.


Mr. Latona continues with this paragraph:


"According to many non-Zapatero compliant commentators, that is the reason why the government did not hesitate to bring total discredit on the National Police, the CNI intelligence agency, the Civil Guards and, saddest of all, the elite explosives unit, TEDAX, which has saved dozens of ETA's intended victims from death over the years through the heroism of its officers. Basically, they say, the government overreacted and flushed its own case down the toilet in trying to suppress anything that could possibly suggest the slightest whiff of ETA involvement in M-11."


This is preposterous. First, Mr. Latona hints falsely that only Zapatero-compliant commentators reject conspiracionism. That is strictly untrue. The rightist ABC, the veteran newspaper in Spain is fiercely anti-Zapatero... and fiercely anti-conspiracionist.


Second, it blames the government on bringing "total discredit on National Police, Civil Guard, CNI and Tedax. Absurd. It is the conspiracionists the ones who have been for the last three years and a half trying to bring discredit to those institutions with their constant false claims. It is them who publish slanderous lies, libels, calumnies, that put into question, WITHOUT EVIDENCE, the investigation and the professionalism of any policeman who chances to give testimony that contradicts the conspiration....and this means all policemen who have given testimony; all of them contradict conspiracy claims, save for one infamous exception, a politician turned head of police under the PP government, who slandered some of his own former agents and was proven wrong by them. This fellow, by the way, now faces criminal charges for withholding information from the tribunal.

Mr. Latona mentioned the numbers: let's say around 200-250 of the witnesses and experts were Police. All of them had a consistent story that runs COUNTER conspiracionist claims. Are they all lying?

You've got to admire the conspirators. 250 declarations, and not a single crack found. That's organizational skills, no doubt about it.

But the most ridiculous claim of this whole article is contained in this paragraph. It says the current government is responsible for the cover up. Well, well, well. If only that were true. It would mean that the time travel problem has been solved, at least to the past, and that is BIG news.


Mr. Latona fails to mention that most of the alleged cover up that he has been defending occurred with the Popular Party BEING IN POWER. In effect, the PP was in power as acting goverment for a FULL MONTH after the attacks.


The cover up of the backpack and the van, the first chemical analyses, most of the arrests, the Leganes suicide, all happened during PP tenure.


The hapless PP Minister of the Interior went on record, after the Leganés suicide, to claim that the main core of the terrorist cell was either dead or in prison.


How did the opposition manage a cover up from outside the government, in the nose of government officials, without them noticing? Preposterous.


Mr. Latona finishes this gem saying that the odds are good that " the judges are going to be cracking down harder on the witnesses, and the state institutions which they represent, than they are on the defendants". Wishful thinking. I will be back here when the verdict is out to laugh my head off.

[Liberto]

Este Larean tiene un catalán estupendo...