Was Spain's outgoing government guilty of manipulation or simply bad judgment? Paddy Woodworth traces its response to attack
'The government has told the whole truth, absolutely everything, without hiding, manipulating or holding back any information." So said Spain's interior minister, Ángel Acebes, last Thursday, at a press conference in Madrid.
He was presenting two military intelligence documents which, he claimed, proved that he and his colleagues had told the public exactly what the security forces were saying to them in the hours and days after the March 11th bombings.
The spokesperson for the outgoing Popular Party (PP) government, Eduardo Zaplana, continued in the same vein: "A decent government, which has neither lied nor manipulated the truth, has been slandered. Those who have lied and manipulated information [about the government] have a lot of explaining to do. We will not tolerate being taken for liars."
We will not tolerate . . . it seems that the PP has learned nothing from the reaction of a majority of Spaniards to its handling of information about the attacks. The outgoing government can certainly make a case that, against all appearances, it behaved impeccably, and that case should be listened to and examined calmly. But it was the style, as much as the substance, of the PP's strategy after the bombings, which alienated and angered victims and voters.
This high-handed, finger-wagging tone was set by Acebes himself when, hours after the bombing, he described as "miserables" (vile or despicable people) anyone who suggested any alternative to the government view that ETA was responsible for the bombing. A similar dismissive attitude to criticism was evident thoughout the next few days, even when all of the material evidence pointed to Islamist terrorism. The government position shifted - slowly - but butter would not have melted in the mouths of its spokespersons.
This was a government that was clearly outraged that the opposition media, the international press and even its allies in the UN did not accept its increasingly incredible assertions absolutely and without question. And when these assertions were shown to have no foundation whatsoever in fact, they seemed equally outraged that anyone remembered them or had the temerity to ask why they had made them in the first place. The words "we were wrong" do not seem to have a place in the PP lexicon.
Nevertheless, there are reasonable people who still believe that the outgoing government has, indeed, been treated most unfairly by public opinion. Tom Burns Marañon is a former Financial Times journalist in Madrid, an accomplished writer on contemporary Spanish history and a senior executive in the Recoletos publishing empire. He used to be a Socialist Party (PSOE) supporter but is now an ardent admirer of the PP and an intimate of some of its leaders, though he is not a party member.
"What no one critical of the government seems to be able to imagine is that the government was not lying but really believed what it was telling the public at any given time," he told The Irish Times late last week. "There were very good reasons for believing ETA was responsible at the beginning. Even Ibarretxe [the Basque first minister and no friend to the PP] took it for granted that ETA was responsible in his first statement about the attacks. As for the PP, when evidence emerged that Islamists might be responsible, that evidence was not concealed in any way."
Not surprisingly, Burns therefore rejects the conclusion reached by most of the government's critics, that the PP not only concealed information but manipulated it in order to maintain its lead in the general election campaign, which was entering its last days when the bombers struck. This argument is based on the premise, which is certainly cogent, that the PP knew voters would rally behind them if the culprits were from ETA but would punish them if the bombers were Islamists, because the Spanish public massively rejected the PP decision to support the invasion of Iraq.
To see if Burns's defence of the government stands up, it may be helpful to go back over the events of the last 10 days, which unfolded at a bewildering pace.
The bombers struck at about 7.30 a.m. (6.30 a.m. Irish time) on Thursday, March 11th. Ten explosions ripped through four trains in three minutes. Two hundred and two people were killed and more than 1,000 injured.
Since ETA had attempted to bomb Madrid only 10 days previously, and has targeted trains in the past, it was natural that the Basque terrorists should be the immediate prime suspects. However, ETA has never deliberately inflicted such massive civilian casualties, and Arnaldo Otegi, the leader of its banned political wing, Batasuna, issued an unprecedented denial at 10.30 a.m.
Otegi suggested "Arab resistance groups" were responsible. A number of experienced commentators had already suggested this possibility. They argued that the modus operandi of the bombers was more typical of al-Qaeda than of ETA, and that Spain's high profile in the Iraq war made Madrid a prime Islamist target.
At 10.50 a.m. a "suspicious" van was found near one of the bombed railway lines.
At 1 p.m. the prime minister, José María Aznar, made a call to the editor of the main opposition paper, El País. He stated baldly that ETA was behind the attack. He had made a similar call to the opposition leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, three hours earlier.
At 1.15 p.m., interior minister Ángel Acebes told the press that he had "no doubt it was ETA", and described as miserables those who thought otherwise.
At 3.30 p.m. the police found detonators and Koranic tapes in the suspect van. A few minutes later, military intelligence reported to the government that it was "almost certain" ETA was responsible.
Two hours later, the foreign minister, Ana Palacio, instructed all of Spain's ambassadors to use every opportunity to get the message across that ETA was guilty. She also instructed Spain's United Nations representative to insist that ETA, and only ETA, would be mentioned in a motion condemning the attack, against advice from allied countries.
At 8.20 p.m. Acebes told the press about the Koranic tapes and detonators. He said the investigation was still firmly focused on ETA, but, contrary to his own earlier statement, added that "all hypotheses are under consideration".
At 9 p.m. an Arab newspaper in London received a message from Abu Hafs al-Masri, a group linked to al-Qaeda, admitting the attack. Forty-five minutes later, Aznar again told El País that he was sure ETA was to blame.
The government continued to argue this case throughout Friday, although a statement issued by ETA at 6.30 p.m. categorically denied responsibility. Despite the fact that ETA had never made a denial of this kind before, Acebes said "we don't believe them".
Eleven million people marched in anti-terrorist demonstrations that night. The slogan "Who was it?" was heard all over the country.
At 4 p.m. on Saturday, the police arrested five suspects linked to an al-Qaeda cell, who allegedly assisted the bombers. Six hours later, Acebes announced these arrests to the press. In the meantime, demonstrators chanting "before we vote, we want the truth" had gathered outside PP headquarters. The PP accused these demonstrators of illegal propaganda on a day when electoral activity was prohibited by Spanish law.
Shortly after midnight, and just into election day, Acebes told the press that a video claiming the attack for al-Qaeda had been found in Madrid. At lunchtime, the foreign minister told the BBC that the trail to ETA was still hot, and suggested that ETA may have been working with al-Qaeda.
That night, in the biggest electoral upset in Spanish history, the opposition Socialist Party emerged as the clear winner, contrary to every opinion poll taken before the bombing. The prime minister-elect, Zapatero, announced that he would withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, as promised in his election programme.
On Tuesday, foreign correspondents in Madrid officially complained that they had come under undue pressure from government officials to say ETA was responsible for the bombings. Individual complaints had been made since the previous Saturday.
On Wednesday, 4,000 PP demonstrators chanted "Zapatero, head of al-Qaeda" outside party headquarters. The party's defeated prime ministerial candidate, Mariano Rajoy, who had claimed he wanted no demonstrations, greeted them with a victory sign from the balcony. Subsequently, he angrily denied rumours that he had tried to get the king to postpone the elections on Saturday night.
On Thursday, Acebes and Zaplana declassified two intelligence documents which, they claimed, showed they were only following the advice of investigators in blaming ETA. El País, however, claimed that a document still classified points to the opposite view, and accused the government of blaming the intelligence services for its own political decisions.
That is, in essence, the story so far as of late yesterday afternoon. It seems difficult to go through this sequence of events and not conclude that the outgoing government was, at the very least, guilty of bad judgment in a crisis. What kind of interior minister tells the press he "has no doubt" about who is responsible for a terrorist attack, only hours after it has happened and with only circumstantial evidence at his disposal?
Why was the al-Qaeda hypothesis dismissed so aggressively and arrogantly on the first day, until evidence produced by the police made it impossible to exclude it? (Incidentally, it should be stressed that the Spanish police and intelligence services did not allow the direction of the investigation to be determined by the obvious inclinations of their political masters, and Spain can be proud of them for that.)
Why the repeated efforts to pressurise journalists, opposition politicians and diplomats into telling only one side of the story? If the outgoing government's political reputation is in shreds today, these questions suggest that it really only has itself to blame.
And can we go beyond bad judgment, and say that the PP deliberately manipulated information about an appalling terrorist attack, and possibly even lied about it, just to save its electoral bacon?
While this question remains open, the Spanish people, on behalf of the victims of the bombings, will deserve and expect much better answers than they got from Acebes and Zaplana this week.