FAES, the foundation of José María Aznar, has issued a hoax on the 20th anniversary of 11-M about the hoax, that is, about the conspiracy theory that he promoted since the attacks to attribute its responsibility to ETA. According to FAES, the PP did not lie. The “professional liars” are those who accuse José María Aznar and his then government of lying. The FAES claims can be dismantled with the statements and movements of the Government in those days, as well as the testimonies of the investigation:
1. “Twenty years later, we reiterate that that Government did not ignore any police or intelligence report that contradicted its attitude or its communication policy during those days. The CNI leadership denied information at the time that attributed to it, as of Thursday the 11th or Friday the 12th, solid knowledge of the Islamic path. Never, ever did any official document reach the Government’s hands that definitively ruled out ETA authorship and unhesitatingly affirmed jihadist responsibility.”.
Four months before the attacks, the National Intelligence Center (CNI) warned the PP Government of the growing risk of an Islamist attack in Spain, and even identified the Algerian Allekema Lamari, one of the seven terrorists who committed suicide on April 3, 2004 in Leganés (Madrid). On March 16, 2004, five days after the massacre, the CNI, led by Jorge Dezcallar, held Lamari responsible for the massacre: “He has sufficient leadership skills and degree of fanaticism to direct it,” stated the letter, which claimed his “urgent and priority” arrest.
TVE has broadcast, 20 years later, in full, the interview that the network’s journalist Lorenzo Milá did with the president of the United States George W. Bush the day after the attacks and that the public entity, chaired at the time by José Antonio Sánchez with Alfredo Urdaci, as news director, censored at the time. In it, Bush pointed to another type of terrorism, not that of ETA.
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2. “They are trying to impute (again) the Government of President Aznar and, by extension, the Popular Party, the responsibility for having deliberately lied after the massacre; out of pure electoral calculation, given that the attack took place three days before a general election. Insisting on the authorship of ETA when – it is said – it knew that the jihadist hypothesis was correct, that Government would have wanted to perpetrate a massive deception by disconnecting the attacks from the Spanish participation in the intervention in Iraq, the cause of them according to this narrative, story or, better, story.”
In a CNI report of October 27, 2003 on the risk of an Islamist attack, it was explained that the “visibility of Spain in the Arab world” had increased in recent months due to several factors, among which it specified the support of the Spanish Government. to the invasion of Iraq in the debates of the United Nations Security Council; the deployment of Spanish troops in southern Iraq, starting in August of that year; the dismantling of fundamentalist cells in Spain (such as the arrest of the so-called Dixán command, in Catalonia, in January 2003), or the celebration in Madrid of the Donor Summit for the Reconstruction of Iraq, between October 23 and 24 of that year.
Curiously, in the crisis cabinet that Aznar convened after the attacks, he did not include the CNI, but he did include the Secretary of State for Communication, Alfredo Timermans, which gives an idea of what the (information) management priorities of the massacre were. The then director of the National Intelligence Center would later explain in Congress that they were left out of the game because they were not given information.
FAES now denies that the Aznar Government had insisted on ETA’s responsibility, knowing that this was not the case. On the day of the attacks, at 1:30 p.m., the Minister of the Interior, Ángel Acebes, stated: “ETA was looking for a massacre in Spain (…) Any type of poisoning that is directed by miserable people to divert the objective seems intolerable to me. and those responsible for this tragedy.” At 2:40 p.m., Aznar appears before the press and insists: “Terrorism is not blind. They have killed many people for the mere fact of being Spanish. We all know that this mass murder is not the first time it has been attempted. The security forces and bodies have prevented us from experiencing this tragedy several times. Thanks to their splendid task, the terrorists have their operational capacity more weakened than ever. His murderous instinct and his will to subject Spain to his dictates remain, however, tragically active. We will defeat them. “We will be able to put an end to the terrorist gang (…) There is no negotiation possible with these murderers who have so often spread death throughout the entire geography of Spain.”
By then, Arnaldo Otegi had already denied the participation of ETA and pointed to Islamist fundamentalism.
3. “That afternoon of Thursday the 11th, a van appears in Alcalá with seven detonators and a tape in Arabic. (…) The president speaks to the media again to report on the discovery of the van and the assessment given to the fact: that of opening a new line, keeping the ETA track as a priority. Shortly after, the minister appears to report on the expansion of the investigations by adding the jihadist hypothesis.”
From the platforms of horror, the then judge of the National Court Baltasar Garzón spoke that morning of the attack with police commanders. It was not ETA’s modus operandi. The information he received from the police, he says, was absolutely contradictory with what the Government was giving. “The official hypothesis, from ETA, was not the one handled by the police themselves. I had the opportunity to discuss it with [Agustín, entonces director general de la policía] Díaz de Mera and with the Minister of the Interior himself, Ángel Acebes. And I remember that Díaz de Mera answered me: “Moncloa’s instructions are that it was ETA. That’s what they say.”
Commissioner Jesús Sánchez Manzano explained that at 3:00 p.m. on March 11, 2004, when they inspected the van used by the terrorists, they already knew that ETA had nothing to do with it. “However,” he added in an interview with this newspaper, “indications of jihadist responsibility already emerged before, because early that day, when the bag bombs were found at the El Pozo and Atocha stations, The Tedax (explosive deactivation unit) already verified that the explosive material was white, not reddish like Titadyn dynamite, which was what ETA usually used.” Despite everything, Acebes maintains in his appearance after these findings that the main hypothesis continues to be ETA.
4. “Three days that changed the course of Spain.” (…)“given the embarrassment of seeing lying professionals, disguised as vestals, insisting on “Aznar’s lies on 11-M”, we do not remain silent so that no one says that he who remains silent grants. “We neither keep true facts silent nor accept repeated lies.”
The “lies” and “lie” were, indeed, repeated. They began on the same day as the attacks and continued for years, but those who plotted and disseminated them were not the media to which Aznar’s foundation, FAES, pointed out on the 20th anniversary of the massacre — among them, this newspaper — but leaders of the PP. Starting with the former president of the Government and his related media who, in their eagerness to link ETA with the attacks, came to confuse a tape of the Mondragón Orchestra with a Mondragón Group card or a remedy for foot odor, boric acid. , with irrefutable proof of the terrorist group’s link to the attacks.
The PP lost the elections, but continued to fuel the conspiracy theory that FAES now denies. In the parliamentary commission of 2004 and later, in 2007, Aznar insisted that “those who planned” the attacks were “neither in remote deserts nor in distant mountains” and that in any case, they had achieved their objective: “to change the course politician of Spain.” The PP spent years spreading the idea that the terrorists intended to change the color of the Government, a way of delegitimizing the Executive that came out of the polls on March 14, 2004. The French newspaper The world, as Ceberio remembers, The day after the elections, he headlined that Spain had punished the State’s lie. And the German version of Financial Times He told the German secret services that Aznar had endangered European security by maintaining responsibility for ETA when there was material evidence pointing to Islamist terrorism.
5. “It is true that on 11-M, throughout the day, all of Spain thought that ETA had been responsible”
The FAES statement uses as exculpatory evidence statements by politicians from other parties and the media attributing the massacre to ETA, ignoring the fact that it was the Government itself chaired by Aznar that had taken pains – with a frenzy of private calls and public appearances. — in that it were so. The former president of the Government, through a foundation, is now trying to disassociate himself from the lie by placing himself at the same level as any citizen, when at that time he had, logically, information from the Spanish intelligence services, also from the United States and the State security forces and bodies.
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