This is one of the better weblogs covering the terrorist bombing in Spain today.
Posted 05:11 by John
They’ve announced the modus operandi of the bombing operations: what the killers did was simply get on a train, unobtrusively leave a pre-set backpack, and leave through another door before the train even left the station. This “rudimentary” technique, as they called it, worked perfectly, and it fits in with ETA capabilities now: three or four kids could have pulled this off, assuming the bombs were pre-manufactured for them in some ETA hideout near Hernani or whatever. There’s absolutely no reason to suspect this was anything but an ETA job. It might be interesting to find out exactly what connection ETA has with international terrorist gangs like Al Qaeda, though.
Posted 04:50 by John
Interior Minister Angel Acebes just gave a press conference. He stated that there were at least 173 dead and some 600 injured. There were 13 bombs; 3 went off at Atocha, 4 in the neighborhood of the Calle Tellez, one at Santa Eugenia, and 2 at El Pozo. 3 booby traps were disactivated by the bomb squad. In response to a direct question, Acebes placed the responsibility on ETA.
Iberian Notes [blogspot.com]
Although I suffer with the Spanish people, I fear they have been played like a fiddle by Al-Qeada. The knee jerk election results are exactly what they sought. If the new government thinks that by pulling troops out and stepping back from the war on terrorism that the terrorists will stop, then they are sadly mistaken. Blaming 9-11 and 3-11 on the victim nations is akin to blaming the victim of a rape for her attack.
It gives creedence to the terrorist’s agenda. This is a mistake since the agenda has become nothing more than rhetoric. The true agenda is vengance, destruction, hatred and death fueled by xenaphobia, racism, and a twisted ideaology. Spain has demonstrated that the terrorist tactics can work and this will serve only to embolden the attackers. Spain is a Western nation and played a part in the Crusades of old. Al-Qeada will never take Spain out of its crosshairs.
Al-Qeada is a supremicist, racist, hate group. Their ideaolgy references different history, but it is all the same when compared to all other racist/nationalist hate groups. The key difference is that these people were allowed to persist. If the American KKK or neo-nazi groups were allowed to grow in strength and were ignored by the government and population, the world would have this problem in reverse. It may have been American terrorists piloting planes into Saudi Arabian skyscrapers on 9-11. Would the world blame the Arabs for their fate? Maybe people would have said that if they didn’t try to control the West with oil they wouldn’t have been attacked. It sounds rediculous, but isn’t this what people have done to America?
Blaming the victims is wrong.
Thinking that terrorists will stop when you appease them is wrong. It makes them stronger.
They have no agenda that could possibly be appeased. The election results in Spain is a sign of weakness, of fear in the eyes of terrorists. Never show fear to an animal that wants you dead. It will kill you. Show strength and it will run.
It’s not that simple. I remember seeing articles on Saturday describing how the Communist party was attacking Aznar for attempting to manipulate public opinion by casting the blame on ETA. At the time, I also thought it was somewhat indecent to break unity at a time of national crisis.
If you read The Economist, however, it seems the Aznar government deliberately misrepresented the preliminary evidence to deny the bombings had anything to do with Al-Qaeda. It got to such a point their own intelligence services threatened to leak the information they had if the government did not come clean. The minister Ana Palacio was caught giving talking points to all diplomatic staff about how all blame should be cast on ETA and the possibility that it might be Al-Qaeda dismissed.
The Spanish people essentially voted in a backlash against a government that was unscrupulously manipulating intelligence to further a partisan agenda. Any similarities, etc…
The theory that the Spanish simply caved in to Al-Qaeda does not hold against closer scrutiny. The French were against the war, but one of their tankers was bombed off Yemen on 2002-10-06, and 11 French shipyard workers in Pakistan were killed in a terrorist attack on 2002-05-08. The wanton violence of Al-Qaeda does not distinguish between targets, and nobody believes they can be appeased.