JOHN ROSENTHAL, at his recently launched new version of Transatlantic Intelligencer (which I highly recommend) makes some excellent points on the March 11 mysteries, and translates big portions of Aznar's testimony at the parliamentary commission investigating the terrorist attacks in Madrid.

What he's writing has been almost totally absent from the major international media, so do read it all; he's put it in the free area:

Remarkably, the abiding impact made by the 11 March 2004 terrorist bombings in Madrid may have less to do with the extreme brutality of the attacks themselves than with the political drama that unfolded in their immediate aftermath. As a series of disparate clues came quickly to light suggesting a possible Islamist background to the attacks, the initial attribution of responsibility to the Basque terrorist organization ETA on the part of the outgoing government of José María Aznar was stylized into an intentional campaign of disinformation – a lie, in short – by both certain Spanish media and large parts of the American media and European media outside of Spain. For the anti-Iraq War “Left”, the surprising defeat of Aznar’s heavily favored Popular Party by the Socialist Party of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the general elections on 14 March would be nothing other than comeuppance for this supposed “lie of state” (and not, for instance, a sign of weakness on the part of a portion of the Spanish electorate in the face of the threat of Islamist terror).

But whereas Aznar’s and Interior Minister Angel Acebes’ attribution of responsibility to ETA may have been false, anyone who was aware of an event that occurred on a highway near the Spanish town of Cuenca on 29 February – but that went largely unnoticed outside of Spain – would have had trouble in good faith to regard it as a “lie”, rather than, say, an understandable mistake. For on that day, just a week and a half before the M-11 attacks, two ETA militants were intercepted by the Spanish Guardia Civil transporting over 500 pounds of explosives, apparently destined for Madrid.

In the meanwhile, many of the famous “clues” that emerged in such uncannily rapid succession and from which the greater part of the media deduced a seemingly incontestable Islamist responsibility have either turned out be hoaxes or to be far less reliable and unambiguous than they appeared at first glance. English speakers could be forgiven for not knowing this, since the story of what Fernando Múgica of the major Spanish daily El Mundo has dubbed the “Black Holes of M-11” has gone almost entirely ignored by the “legacy” English-language media.

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