The tinfoil is not that there might be an al-Qaeda terrorist bombing in the US in October, I think any one who thinks about the perilousness of the world today knows that that is a real possibility. You don't need a tinfoil hat to believe that. No the tin-foil here is the talk that it was neither ETA nor al-Qaeda who were responsible for 3/11, but that it came from the extreme in the Spanish right. An
article from Iraqwar.ru, who have never been shy about posting tin-foil, wonders out loud about the murkiness of who-done-it, is also not shy about pointing a finger at:
The most likely candidates for the Madrid explosions are extreme right-wingers associated with both the Francoist edge of the governing conservative Popular Party - which is really more at the center than the edge as the party was founded by one of Franco's ministers who is still a major power in the party - and the Spanish military. I wouldn't call the Popular Party fascists, but some of their friends certainly are. It was not that long ago (1981) that these same people attempted a coup in Spain, and they are still a powerful force behind the scenes. We will probably never know the truth, as it cuts too close to very deep power structures in Spain.
Now if it weren't for our own Josh Marshall expressing a similar wonderment about how come there wasn't intelligence "chatter" leading up to 3/11, I'd have read that tin-foil and moved on. But he made me think of it again when he said
here:
One of them -- discussed in this article in the Post -- is just how little Spanish or other Western intelligence services seem to have known about this. There was no chatter, no hints. The entire operation seems to have slipped through entirely unnoticed by anyone. That suggests the possibility that we're really flying blind on the actual terrorist threat, or at least that it's quite possible for al Qaida or affiliated groups to launch a major attack without our even getting hints that it's going to occur, let alone being able to stop it.
That terrorism can come from the right is no tin-foil notion either. McVeigh and the Italian P-2 in the 70's are easy examples.
So how do we fight a two front war of terrorism, fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians on one side and fascist security freaks on the other.
Of course, we use our two most powerful weapons, democracy and free web-speech. With our web-speech we defeat Bush by hammering home that he and the Republicans are weak on defense and soft on terrorism. The turn of events of the Spanish elections on Sunday have renewed my feelings that we can do it.
That Bush is weak on defense is about more than his Texas Reserve issues. Everyone knows that it took more guts to either serve or protest than it did to be a spineless "combat dodger". Bush and the Republicans are weak on defense because they cannot stand up to the corporate treasury raiders in the military-industrial complex who squander our taxes on Reaganesque star wars and other left over cold-war projects instead of port security and coast guard. Weak on defense because they won't stand up to either Israels' Sharon and make progress on that root cause of terrorism nor the house of Saud and that root cause of terrorism. Bush and the Republicans are soft on terrorism because they took their eyes off the real threat for an adventure in Iraq. They are soft on terrorism because they allow auto makers off the gas guzzelling hook and leave us vulnerable to oil black-mail.
It makes me so proud of democracy to watch the Spanish voters see their way through a terrorist attack and not lose their collective heads. They have done us a great service because now terrorists don't know how an electorate will react to a bombing. Before Spain the assumption has been that a terrorist event moves governments to the right. By establishing a new common wisdom, that an electorate can move to the left after a terrorist bombing, makes such an event less likely here in October. Make no mistake, there is a real co-dependency between authoritarian governments and fundamentalist terrorists. They want us to become more repressive. It makes their recruitment job easier.
Thank you Spanish voters.