MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's previous center-right government "manipulated and twisted" the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 in a bid to salvage general elections three days later, a parliamentary commission found on Wednesday.
In a 200-page report after a year of bitter wrangling, the commission accused Jose Maria Aznar's Popular Party (PP) government of ignoring police warnings that its support for the Iraq war increased the threat from Islamic terrorism in Spain.
The PP, which lost power to the Socialist party amid a backlash at its handling of the Islamic militant bombings, was the only party not to support the commission's findings.
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, including a tape by an Islamic group saying the attack was a reprisal for Spain's role in Iraq, the PP insisted Basque separatist guerrillas ETA were the prime suspects in the attacks which killed 191 people.
"The objective was to influence public opinion about the authors of the attack and avoid political consequences which might harm the electoral interests of the Popular Party," read the final report. The report alleged the PP was afraid of public outcry if the bombings were linked to its unpopular support for the Iraq war.
"It was clearly an informative attitude inappropriate for a democratic government," said the report.
Aznar, who stood down at the elections, told a hearing of the commission last year he still believed ETA was linked to the attacks. The commission said in Wednesday's report it found no evidence of any ETA involvement in the bombings.
Aznar's gang are a bunch of sick twisted bastards. Here's the short version of what happened. After the horrible terrorist act, Aznar went around telling everyone it was ETA. Spain's intelligence service figured out pretty quickly that it probably wasn't. Aznar managed to convince most of the Spanish media that ETA was involved. Some involved in the investigation started leaking to a Spanish radio station that it probably was Islamic terrorists. The rest of the Spanish media, intimidated by Aznar and the national tragedy, was incredibly hostile to these reports. Aznar's government went as far as replacing scheduled programming on state run TV (on the Friday evening before the Sunday election) with a documentary about ETA terrorism. By this time, enough information had come out that the media began to turn and the Spanish population began to rebel, including massive grass roots demonstrations on the day before the election. All this was enough to probably help push the opposition PSOE party over the edge.
Aznar's involved with an American style think tank which was recently pushing the notion that the opposition - PSOE - must have known about the attack, the one Aznar lied about, before the fact. Proof? They must have known because otherwise they couldn't have used it to their advantage in the elections.
Sick twisted bastards, trained well by our right wing sick twisted bastards.