Talk:2004 Madrid train bombings/Controversies about 11M-2004:Sources in english

References (pro, contra and neutral) in international press to the debate about who was responsible for the bombings[edit]

Randroide 19:05, 4 January 2007 (UTC) Bomb squad link in Spanish blasts: ...Señor Suárez Trashorras and two other men implicated in the bombings have already been identified as police informers... [1],The Times.[reply]

Spain suspects were informants': The move came after Spain's El Mundo newspaper said Moroccan Rafa Zuher and Spaniard Jose Emilio Suarez had been in contact with police before the attacks. [2], BBC

Randroide 15:10, 28 December 2006 (UTC) The Toyota Corolla picture debate [www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1757836/posts].[reply]

Southofwatford 09:31, 11 December 2006 (UTC) A contribution from the Economist [[3]][reply]

Prosecutors and police are now convinced that only radical Muslims were involved. Seven blew themselves up in a mass suicide three weeks later, as they were about to be arrested. But senior PP figures have openly fanned conspiracy theories that still try to establish some link between the Islamists and ETA.

Randroide 18:51, 18 October 2006 (UTC)National Review[reply]

On May 16, the Madrid daily El Mundo published a remarkable editorial that draws upon the paper’s ongoing investigation and contains information potentially as explosive as the 3/11 attacks themselves: El Mundo suggests that, almost immediately after the 12 bombs went off in one of the city’s busiest train stations, some in the Spanish police force fabricated evidence, then swiftly hyped it to the domestic and international press. The object seems to have been to support the oppositions’ claims that Islamists angry over the government’s support for the war in Iraq were responsible for the attacks. At worst, the information uncovered by El Mundo could mean that the deadly bombing was actually perpetrated with the complicity of the same Spanish police bomb squad, Tedax, that was subsequently charged with investigating the crime.

Either way, if the leads published in recent days pan out, it would appear that Spain’s 2004 elections were stolen by terrorists, alright. But the terrorist operation that brought the socialists to power may have been an inside job — in effect, a coup perpetrated by some of the same authorities who are responsible for preventing terror. Explosive stuff, if true. But all preliminary and speculative right now.

Questions have been raised about the actual provenance of a knapsack dubbed “Backpack 13” and its contents (plastic explosive, a cell phone used as a trigger, and nails and bolts that would act as shrapnel to maximize the bomb’s destructive effect). Shortly after the 3/11 attack, ABC News showed what it claimed as “exclusive” footage of both the purported backpack and its unexploded innards. Alemán’s posting says: According to reporter Fernando Múgica in the Spanish daily El Mundo. According to Múgica, at a Madrid police station “the officers wanted to help the ABC re ters, but when the camera crew came, they didn't have the backpack that had contained the bomb there, so one of the officers showed them a similar backpack which was the property of another officer.” Said Mugica, “I don't know whether the network knew this or simply accepted that the bag they were shown was the real one.”

Alemán says the journalistic investigation revealed that “the Tedax officers hid for three months [from] the investigating judge that an X-ray done to the real (not to the [one] staged for ABC) backpack showed that there was no way it could have ever exploded since it had unconnected cables. Something odd, since it had always been said that the bombers were technically proficient.”

Even more curious is the fact that the phone in the Backpack #13 was a Mitsubishi Trium, one of very few on the market that require a SIM card to operate the alarm. Since, as Alemán notes, “it was the analysis of the SIM card which, less than 48 hours after the blasts, allowed the police to arrest the alleged perpetrators,” the question occurs: Why would terrorists who owned a cellphone shop and are deemed to be very technically proficient deliberately choose to use a device that would lead the police to their door?

Cellphones used for March 11 were unlocked in a phone shop owned by... a Spanish police officer. And not just any police officer: It was Maussili Kalaji, a Syrian born citizen who had been granted Spanish citizenship several years ago and entered the police department when he arrived in Spain [despite] his past as an Al Fatah member and as an agent for the Soviets' intelligence services.

The evidence presented thus far by El Mundo is, to be sure, inconclusive. Yet, it strongly suggests that at least some in the Spanish police may know considerably more about who was really behind the 3/11 bombings — attacks that undid the electoral fortunes of the Spanish government, brought to power socialists hostile to its most important domestic and foreign policies and precipitated changes in those policies that could only encourage terrorists to interfere in elections elsewhere.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a contributing editor to NRO.

[4]

Polls taken before the attacks suggested the party was on track to win the elections with a slender lead of around four points over the opposition Socialists. [5]

Earlier today, the minister announced the arrest of three Moroccans and two Indians in connection with the bombings....[]...The Government said autopsies conducted on victims showed no signs of suicide bombings - a hallmark of Islamic militants....[]... Spain's spy chief, Jorge Dezcallar, quickly denied a radio report that said intelligence agents were "99 per cent sure" that Islamic elements, not Basque separatists, were responsible. Broadcaster Cadena Ser, which is close to opposition Socialist Party, cited sources at the national CNI intelligence agency as saying agents thought a 10-15 member cell placed the bombs on the trains and may now have fled the country. But Dezcallar, a Government appointee, told the national news agency Efe that agents did not favour one line of investigation over another. [6]

The indictment, which runs to almost 1,750 pages, concludes that the attacks were carried out by local radical Islamists who were inspired by, but not directly linked to, al-Qa'ida....[]...But Vicente Martin Pujalte, of the conservative opposition party, said they were still unconvinced by the "insufficient conclusion". He said: "To say this is an autonomous cell who simply decided [to carry out the bombing] one morning seems a weak argument." He described the accused as "secondary actors" in the conspiracy. [7]

A group purporting to be part of Al Qaeda that claimed responsibility for the Madrid train bombings and warned of a looming attack on the United States seems to be a phantom organization, according to US intelligence officials and terrorism specialists...[]...there is no evidence the organization exists. E-mail messages purporting to be written by the group previously claimed responsibility for everything from the North American blackout to a suicide attack that killed 20 Italian policemen in Iraq. But none of those claims has proved true, intelligence specialists say....[]...By last August, he said, he already had begun to disregard the group when it sent the clearest indication that it is a sham: a message to Al-Quds claiming responsibility for the blackout that struck New York City, Ohio, southern Ontario, and eastern Michigan last year.That blackout was determined to have been caused by a power grid failure.[8]

[9]

Randroide 08:46, 11 October 2006 (UTC)TIMES ONLINEBoth his language and his frenetic legislative activity have infuriated conservatives, who had expected to win the 2004 election and remain convinced that the explosions which took 192 lives just before the election were too sophisticated to have been the work of a motley collection of Islamic extremists, and so must have been, in some unspecified way, the handiwork of Eta. The conspiracy theory debate rumbles on in the Spanish press, but there is little doubt that Señor Zapatero’s policies have been popular — his approval rating stands at about 60 per cent and his main opponent is languishing at less than half that level [10].[reply]

Randroide 08:46, 11 October 2006 (UTC)THE GUARDIAN"the actual investigation of the origins and ramifications of the attacks has proceeded at snail's pace. Several suspected terrorists were blown up - or blew themselves up - in an apartment on the outskirts of Madrid days after the bombing, which certainly made things more difficult. In addition, it is hard to envision anyone among those who died or those who have been arrested having enough planning skills and technical sophistication to have organised the highly synchronised attacks and having set up the sophisticated explosive devices that were detonated with cell phones. " [11][reply]

Randroide 08:46, 11 October 2006 (UTC)THE GUARDIAN There are too many coincidences,' journalist Encarnación Valenzuela wrote in El Mundo recently. 'There is enough to be able to affirm that Eta had something to do with the 11 March attacks. A series of supposedly suspicious coincidences, unanswered questions left by the police investigation and contacts between members of the Basque separatist group and Islamists in jails are the main evidence offered by those backing the conspiracy theory...[]...Revelations that police in the northern region of Asturias hid evidence that they ignored several warnings about the local explosives traffickers who sold stolen dynamite used by the bombers has, meanwhile, been taken by some as proof of a wider, more sinister cover-up. The confrontation has reached national newspapers, with El Mundo fanning the conspiracy theory while the pro-government El País repeatedly tries to quash it...[]...The clues which the conspiracy theorists say point to Eta include the fact that some radical Islamists and Eta members have made friends in jail and have discussed the tactics of terror. The fact that a vanload of Eta explosives was seized a few weeks before the attacks as it travelled a route that could have led to the Islamist bombers' hideaway near Toledo is offered as further evidence. With the explosives used in the bombings being sent to Madrid that same day from Asturias, it is argued that either the Islamists had been planning to make more bombs or that the Eta van was a smokescreen. Eta was known to have been planning attacks in Madrid, had tried to bomb trains and was ready to use mobile phones to set bombs off, as happened with the dozen bombs that ripped through crowded commuter wagons on 11 March. It had considered planting a similar number of bombs at a ski resort used by King Juan Carlos. The conspiracy theorists also point to a series of 'connections' between Eta, the explosives traffickers and Asturias. A car used in an Eta bombing two years ago was stolen from the street where one of the traffickers lived. A former fellow crook had, meanwhile, claimed in a tip-off to police in Asturias before the bombings, that the traffickers were dealing with the Basque terrorists. Even the fact that one of the drivers of the vanload of Eta explosives carried photographs of a town 30 miles from where the explosives traffickers lived has been presented as evidence of an Eta link. 'Coincidences do not exist in the fight against terrorism,' Astarloa told a radio station.[reply]

Added by --Larean01 12:18, 11 December 2006 (UTC), fragments that Randroide "forgot", from exactly the same source:[reply]

The conspiracy theory has not convinced police, the government of Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero or numerous experts in terrorism.

They say there is no proof of involvement beyond the dozen Islamists arrested so far, the seven who blew themselves up when surrounded by police a few weeks after the attacks, their Spanish dynamite suppliers and their Islamist contacts abroad.

'I do not believe a connection exists, nor do I believe one will be shown to exist,' Judge Baltasar Garzón, Spain's leading anti-terrorist judge declared recently.

...

Few experts, however, give credence to the Eta theory. Some see it as an attempt by the People's Party to muddy the waters in a vain bid to save the party's battered reputation.

'I don't see the proof. There is nothing conclusive here,' said Rogelio Alonso, a terrorism expert at Madrid's Rey Juan Carlos university.

[12]

Randroide 16:47, 12 October 2006 (UTC) THE GUARDIAN Newspaper spat over Madrid bombs 'conspiracy' Attack was Socialist coup, crook alleges in interview Paper guilty of 'yellow' journalism, says rival daily. Spain's two largest newspapers, El País and El Mundo, have launched into a fierce row over their reporting of investigations into the Islamist train bombings that killed 191 Madrid commuters two and a half years ago. The outbreak of hostilities between the country's most influential dailies follows the publication in El Mundo of a series of interviews with a small-time Spanish crook accused of supplying the explosives used in the bombings. In the interviews José Emilio Suárez claims the bombings hid what was effectively a coup d'etat that brought the Socialist government of prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to power.[13].[reply]

Randroide 14:09, 12 October 2006 (UTC) Interview with José María Aznar in the BBC: Aznar talks about his doubts about the Indictment from the minute 4.[reply]

You know in this moment some perpetrators of the attacks, but you do not know who imagined the attack, who is the leader of the attack who is the idea (sic) of the attack, who established and supported means for the attacks, who defined the logistics of the attacks, who established the strategies of the attack. Nothing...I think that one part of the perpetrators are Islamists, but I think that not only is an Islamist attack.

[14].

Randroide 20:31, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Here we have a connection between Jamal Zougam, the “leader of Spain’s al-Qaida cell,” suspected in the Madrid bombings, and British-American-Pakistani-German intelligence operations. It is possible the Spanish Unidad Central de Operaciones worked with these intelligence operations to create false flag terrorism, terrorist acts eerily similar to the NATO-linked Gladio operations in Italy, most notably the 2nd of August 1980 Bologna railway station bombing, [15]

--Larean01 15:59, 19 October 2006 (UTC) Randroide: Please refer to the piece by El Mundo's deputy editor as an op-ed piece appearing in The Guardian. It is not The Guardian's position.[reply]

Randroide 19:07, 20 October 2006 (UTC) Please, Larean, re-read carefully the title I gave to this section.[reply]

--Larean01 12:20, 23 November 2006 (UTC) I know how to read. I am sorry, but your failure to acknowledge that that fragment is op-ed by EL MUNDO's deputy editor does not speak very highly of your good faith. But if you don't do it, I will:[reply]

To readers/editors: please note that the reference quoted by Randroide from The Guardian (first The Guardian reference) is NOT a news piece by a journalist of The Guardian. It is an op-ed piece by Victor de la Serna (oh, coincidence!) the deputy editor of the main Spanish conspirationist newspaper, El Mundo. The Guardian clearly marks it as op-ed (see the URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/COMMENT/story/0,,1524398,00.html, my emphasys). See also how the Web page is clearly marked "Comment". The Guardian has a partnership with El Mundo.

Please also note that Randroide has refused to acknowledge this fact. I find this behaviour deeply disturbing, as it would seem that Mr. Randroide is trying to deliberately mislead readers into thinking that The Guardian endorses conspiracy theories.

Randroide 12:46, 23 November 2006 (UTC) Read the title, larean. Maybe you missed it, I will write it bigger:[reply]

 References (pro, contra and neutral)

A reference is a reference, is a reference.

I did not titled this section "news pieces" nor "International doubters of the indictment". I titled "References", and by G*d that Enrique de Diego text is a reference.

Now you, Larean, are trying to mislead the reader, or maybe you are unable to understand what is a context given by a title.

Larean wrote: I am sorry, but your failure to acknowledge that that fragment is op-ed by EL MUNDO's deputy editor does not speak very highly of your good faith.

You must explain us by what peculiar mechanism of your mind, you have doubts about my good faith caused by my allegued failure to "acknowledge" an obvious fact stated in plain view in the very same webpage I just linked.

Southofwatford 08:12, 24 November 2006 (UTC) It's not the first time that Randroide has been coy about the real nature of this article, Larean01. Of course, anyone who reads the entire article can find the truth. In any case, we are quite entitled to make its origen absolutely clear that this is not written by a Guardian journalist if it is proposed to use it as a source in an article.[reply]

--- Randroide 08:45, 24 November 2006 (UTC) Of course you are entitled to make clear who wrote the article. "The Guardian" chose to publish it, and that says something.[reply]

--Larean01 23:04, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Randroide, don't be disingenuous. I am sure you have heard the phrase "quoting out of context". In your RFC you talk about The Guardian as one of the sources supporting your claims. That is simply not true.

The Guardian chose to publish an op-ed. So what? No newspaper endorses its op-ed pieces. And that is what is important here. The Guardian is NOT a source that supports your claims.

Randroide 08:46, 28 November 2006 (UTC) Again, Larean:[reply]

 References (pro, contra and neutral)

This time I underlined the relevant words, to see if this time you finally get the picture.

The picture I get is that you quote and use emphasis very selectively. For example, you ommitted parts in your second The Guardian quote that are critical to providing balance to their piece, noting that "few experts" give credence to the conspiracy theory. Yes, they use that term. For example, you "forget" to mention the first The Guardian piece is an op-ed by El Mundo's deputy editor.