A Black Feather, A poison pen... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Spanish bombs rock the province Just under two weeks ago, a series of bombs killed 202 people in Madrid. The Aznar gov't immediately moved to blame the Basqe separatist group ETA even though nothing of the attack fit the ETA pattern, the attack was too big, too coordinated and came with no advance warning. The conventional wisdom was that if this was genuinely an ETA attack, Aznar could, in spite of widespread antipathy towards his membership in George Bush's "Coalition of the Willing," count on a groundswell of national unity and ride it to re-election. This turned out to not be the case when a group claiming ties to al Qaeda stepped forward and claimed responsibility, causing the Spanish electorate to retract their already somewhat shaky support for Aznar and his support for Bush and the Iraq misadventure. Of course, the American conservative viewpoint on this is that the outcome of the bombing was a victory for the terrorists, which may be partially true, but they ignore the concept that Spain's involvement with Bush may have been the catalyst for the attack, QED if Spain had not been such staunch advocates of Dubya's decision to play cowboy and chase the man who messed with his daddy, the attack might not have taken place. Bearing this in mind, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near London or Rome on June 11, just in case the terrorists' choice of March 11 had any special significance. Meanwhile, another former member of the Bush administration, Richard Clarke, follows the same pattern emerging from David Kay and Paul O'Neill and says that Team Chimpy gave short shrift to the al Qaeda threat while it spent lots of time stroking the long simmering hard-on it had for Iraq. The guy was the in-house expert on terrorism through four administrations and the best defense that Cheney and Condi Rice and the rest of the administration can come up with is "Nuh-uhhh, Clarke didn't know...he wasn't in the loop" Do they not realize that saying this opens the door to the assdumption that if he didn't know, one could conclude that he was deliberately excluded from knowing, and if you deliberately keep your counterterrorism adviser in the dark, you are either really pushing an agenda against the guy from the start or you are deliberately courting an attack 2:22 p.m. - 2004-03-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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