An intriguing — literally — post comes from Spain’s Barcepundit, who chronicles questions being raised in his country about whether the then-opposition Socialist party manipulated information in the immediate aftermath of the March 2004 terrorist train bombings in Madrid.
The Socialists went on to trounce the ruling Popular Party in the elections — election results that some have interpreted as Spain giving in to terrorist fears and/or backlash against the Popular Party for insisting the evidence pointed to the Basque separatist ETA, when it turned out to be masterminded by Islamic terrorist fanatics.
Read the whole post but here’s are some key paragraphs:
(Socialist Prime Minister) Zapatero and his government accuse Aznar’s administration of lies and monumental lack of foresight because Aznar thought ETA was the author; the Socialists told they knew it was an attack by Islamic terrorists from minute one. In that case, why are they refusing any more testimonies before the parliamentary investigation of March 11?
It is indeed an interesting question. And he adds this:
One would think that it would be Aznar’s Popular Party the one to try to close the commission ASAP for fear of getting more egg in the face, if they indeed knew that the authors were Islamic from the beginning. However, it’s the Socialist party who is trying to shut down the commission’s works when there’s still big question marks about who new what and when: Aznar and his people claim that Socialist-friendly law enforcement officers kept that information away from the chain of command and gave it to key Socialist officials first.
Coupled with disinformation disseminated via the Socialists’ virtual house organ, the PRISA media group (no. 1 in TV, radio and newspapers) -such as the alleged existence of suicide bombers in the trains according to three sources in the police, which has been proven to be false- they created the impression that the government was lying, when actually they were kept in the dark on crucial details of the investigation, and some false information was planted (i.e. the suicide bombers) to make the public think that the government hadn’t talked about them because they were hiding it.
That’s a pretty damning allegation — and if true it could eventually come back to haunt the Socialist government. Barcepundit concludes:”For the record, I’m not accusing the Socialist party of having a hand in the attacks, but of using them at their own electoral advantage, four days before the general polls.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.