"WE HAVE BECOME political pawns", said the spokeswoman of the Association of Victims of March 11 during her emotional testimony before the parliamentary commission investigating the attacks:

A victim of the Madrid train bombings called today for a new commission to investigate the terrorist attack and urged politicians in tearful testimony not to use the victims as political pawns.

Pilar Manjon, the spokeswoman of the Association of Victims of March 11, described the suffering of victims and their families in the nine months since the bombings blamed on Islamic terrorists killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800.

“For you each of the killing is a simple figure, for us they are human beings. For us they have names and surnames,” said Manjon, dressed in black. Her voice occasionally cracked with emotion as she delivered her testimony to the parliamentary commission investigating the bombings.

“Anyone of us could have travelled in those trains, anyone of us could have died in some of the scenes of the horror,” said Manjon, who lost a 20-year-old son in the attacks.

She asked politicians not to use the victims for political purposes, referring to the flurry of allegations and counter-allegations between Spain’s political parties following the March 11 attack.

“Victims don’t understand about politics and we demand you not to use us, not to manipulate us,” she said. “You have turned us into pawns of a political game,” she added.

[...] Manjon called for the creation of a new commission of independent investigators, without political background, to find out more about what happened before the attack, including why police apparently didn’t share and investigate tips from informants that might have prevented the bombings.

She gave a quite moving speech which was actually a little surprising, since she had been very partisan in the past. During Aznar's testimony a couple of weeks ago, she demonstrated with some people in front of the Parliament building in which it was taking place with her hands painted in red and accusing former prime minister of being responsible for the attacks. She was also quoted in the media saying "of course Aznar's people are not worried about this, because it was workers and not his supporters riding these trains; they usually go to work driving their Audis". Of couse, sometimes pain makes people say things over the board; the shameful thing is that the biased media exploited her, and other victims, pain.

And she's right about the fact that the commission was tainted because of its politization. It should have been modeled much similarly to the 9/11 commission in the US, but it wasn't. As I wrote in the past,

the Madrid probe is taking place too soon after the atrocities, while there's still a parallel police and judicial investigation about its criminal aspects going on. And this invites for pure political manoevering [...]

Another reason why the 9-11 and the 3-11 are so different is that, in the former, the commissioners were especially appointed according to their previous experience and knowledge in anti-terrorism and intelligence affairs. Yes, you could also notice a political side of it, but it was a hundred times better, and more professional, than seeing 'regular' congressmen chosen in the same proportion than the parliament composition; chosen only because of the party they belong to, regardless of the fact that most of them don't have a clue of what intelligence or law enforcement work really means. You could see in their questioning: they were clearly speaking of something they rushed to learn in a couple of reports and books just to get ready for the probe.