CORI DAUBER wonders how would I dissect this inane opinion piece by Javier Marías, a Spanish writer, on yesterday's New York Times. I really don't have to, because she's done a pretty good job herself.

I can only add that the piece reflects exactly the mindset of a lot of people in this country and, alas, Zapatero's government approach to the massacre: first, a mixture of going back to a fetal position, as if not looking the enemy in the eye would make it disappear.

Second, a way of keeping open the possibility of accusing the previous Aznar administration for bringing the attack on the country by having supported the war against Saddam. Among other things, this is why the Socialist-friendly, Aznar-hostile press (which is virtually all media, led by the rabidly partisan PRISA group) almost buried, or failed to report altogether, the fact that the March 11 attacks -according to a phone wiretap by Italian police by Rab'i Uthman al-Sayyid, known as Mohamed the Egyptian, one of the SOBs who staged the attacks- were planned around 9/11. That's one and a half years before Aznar joined Bush, Blair and Durao Barroso at the Azores Summit. and almost one year before Bush went to the UN's General Assembly to talk about Iraq for the first time.

And third, a will to avoid hard questions (whoddunit?) just in case the answers are damning; as I wrote a few days ago, the parliamentary commission has brought more questions than answers regarding who were the intellectual masterminds. And some possibilities are friggin' earthshattering.