ZAPATERO is appearing today at the parliamentary commission investigating the March 11 bomb attacks:

The March 11 atrocity — which struck three days before a general election — helped catapult Zapatero, an underdog Socialist, into office, ousting a pro-U.S. conservative party that had led in all the public opinion polls.

[...] Aznar’s conservative Popular Party (PP) will have the chance to grill Zapatero about the dramatic days between March 11 and March 14, when the PP was erroneously blaming the attacks on the Basque separatist group ETA.

PP politicians privately say they will question Zapatero about whether his Socialist Party played any role in the illegal demonstrations outside its offices that sprang up on election eve and contributed to the defeat of PP candidate Mariano Rajoy.

Angry crowds accused the PP government of lying about who was responsible for the attacks for political gain, a charge denied by Aznar and others who say they took their leads from police.

Zapatero also could face questions about who kept him informed about the investigation before the vote to see whether he was the source of press leaks, some of them wildly off the mark — that undermined the credibility of the outgoing Aznar government.

As with Aznar's testimony a couple of weeks ago, I have the TV on in the background, but it's just too much information to do a proper live blogging. So I'll do what I did, which is to update this post with relevant information in English (from the MSM and blogs), with some comments of mine in between if appropriate. The session has been going on for more than 5 hours already, and it's going to be a long one, maybe more than the 11 hours that Aznar was in the commission: it's 2 rounds by each party representative (it's 8 parties, I think), and now we're just in the middle of the questioning by the second party in the first round. Of course, it's been long because the first was the commissioner for Aznar's PP, but the others aren't expected to take that much time.

Anyway, watch this space for updates.

UPDATE. Robert Duncan wants to believe Zapatero at the commission saying that there was no connection between ETA and al-Qaeda on March 11, but he asks, what about the photo?

As I wrote before, the possibility that it was a joint operation is real, but not too likely. But it makes you wonder when the Zapatero administration and its apologists, including the friendly media, are saying that there's almost a metaphisical impossibility that a secular ETA might want to collaborate with religious fanatics. Not for 11-M, but absolutely altogether. Which is simply stupid, for many spreading the myth do know about this; namely judge Garzón. Just go and see this other picture. And regarding March 11, there may not be conclusive evidence, but there are some very serious questions (many of them at Robert's post). And it simply makes you wonder why the current government refuses to investigate.

I personally think that if ETA had any role at all it was not in the bombings themselves but in the creation of an atmosphere in which, if any attack would take place, the government would immediately think of ETA. Sort of a disinformation campaign to dupe the government, knowing (from the contacts in prisons? from the jamboree in Tehran on January 2004, like every January?) that there was going to be a real attack by Islamists. Hence the van full of explosives intercepted a couple of weeks before March 11 (when he was located by the police, the driver shouted "please, don't do anything, I surrender, I'm from ETA" too soon, almost before the first cop "good evening"; and he was carrying a map with a big red circle conspicuously surrounding the exact same area where the bombs where eventually placed on the fateful day that the bombings took place).

And then there also that secret meeting by Carod-Rovira, the Catalan indendentist politician, which led to ETA declaring a truce for Catalonia only which sparked a political furore (see this post for background). Contrary to what many in Aznar's party were saying, I don't believe that Carod went to the meeting with ETA to negotiate that truce. To be sure, it was plausible, since Carod had publicly asked ETA in an open letter in the past to kill wherever they wanted in the rest of Spain if they had a gripe, but just not in Catalonia, because according to him Catalans have the same aspirations for independence as Basques (his words, not mine). But I simply don't think this was the case now; Carod says he didn't go to meet ETA to negotiate a truce (among other reasons, because he has no attibutions for Spain's homeland security). He's refused to tell what did they talk about, and this is why many people don't believe him, but I do. I simply believe he was duped into going for a meeting that someone close to ETA promptly leaked to the media and which, together with the partial truce, would increase the political pressure many notches. And at the same time it would increase the perception that an attack by ETA before the elections (as they've done several times in the past) was likely because, what's the best way of materializing a partial truce for a part of Spain's territory?

You guessed it: attacking outside that portion of the territory.