Well, here's the news; it's pretty unpleasant to start with. As you almost certainly know, four American civilian contractors were killed in Fallujah, near Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle. They were shot to death and then their bodies were burned and hung from a bridge. It was apparently more of a lynching than a terrorist hit, according to La Vanguardia, which picked the story up from Reuters, of course; that is, they say it was a quickly organized small mob of locals rather than the typical international terrorists or Saddam Fedayeen. Now, according to Fox News and the Associated Press, it was a planned attack committed by the same terrorist gunmen as usual, and that the crowd then torched the bodies, defiled them, and hung them off the bridge.

Beirut Bob Fisk knows people who were there; at least that's what his piece in the Vanguardia implies. He spends two and a half columns describing in loving detail exactly what happened; then, of course, there's the obligatory disclaimer that it was "horrible". Both Bob and La Vangua point out that these images are apparently not being shown on American TV and imply government censorship. You, of course, do not want to see them.

But La Vanguardia has a front-page color picture, six inches by nine or so, in which you can see two burned bodies hanging off a green-painted steel bridge. There are about ten or twelve people visible in the photo, several of whom are identifiable and most of whom are cheering. Apparently the whole thing was filmed.

My attitude is that American and Iraqi forces should get all the film they can, go into Fallujah, and arrest everybody that was part of the mob--not more than about 100, from the looks of things--and put them on trial for murder. Let's not go off half-cocked with some sort of revenge attack which, though fully justified, would be counterproductive.

Meanwhile, five American soldiers were killed in a car bombing in the Baghdad suburbs. Now, this is not good news at all, but remember that we had more success in February than in January, and more in January than December. March was a bloody month but not as bad as last November, the peak of violence. It seems, through reading the European press, that Iraq is an inferno where you can't walk the street without being "butchered like a sheep", as Beirut Bob so elegantly put it, when in reality most of the country (according to what I read in the American and some of the British press and in most of the Iraqi blogs) is about as safe as Barcelona.

Oh, by the way, as for the war on terrorism, there's been a string of busts in Turkey, Belgium, and Holland of some of our terrorist friends in a radical Turkish Islamic group, and in Britain there's been a roundup of a bunch of scumballs who were trying to make a Tim McVeigh-style fertilizer bomb. Meanwhile, they're having a big old conference in Berlin about Afghanistan, a subject on which everybody now agrees--remember the Afghan war? All the lefties were against it and said we were going to lose horribly. Now consensus is it worked, though the Vangua of course dwells on the unsolved problems like poverty and warlords. Now, now, Afghanistan has had poverty and warlords since about 2000 BC or so. You've got to give us a few years in order to make some progress before complaining that Kabul doesn't look too much like Paris or Copenhagen yet. Anyway, though, Hamid Karzai has asked for $28 billion from the West; he wants $8.2 billion over the next three years. The Americans kicked in a billion and the European Union is promising $300 million. The Germans will put in $400 million of their own.

As far as Spain goes, international search warrants have been issued for six suspects wanted for the 3/11 bombings. Their photographs are posted at Libertad Digital accompanying this article, which is worth reading if you know Spanish. Their names are Rashid and Mohammed Ouled Akcha, Abdennabi "Abdullah" Kounjaa, Jamal "El Chino" Ahmidan, and Said Barraj, all Moroccans, and Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, known as "The Tunisian".

Judge Juan del Olmo jailed Antonio Toro Castro for conspiring with his brother to sell the dynamite and freed Mustafa Ahmidam for lack of evidence.

La Vanguardia's Santiago Tarin says this is what the investigators currently think: The bombers, of whom there may have been up to thirty in the plot, were a group of sleepers working cover jobs as waiters or construction workers or running phone shops. They have been in Spain for several years, which makes it clear that they had planned something here long before Spain sent troops to Iraq. The sleepers are mostly rank-and-file members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatents Group, which is an Al Qaeda franchise. These people were apparently more closely linked to Al Qaeda than to the leaders of the Combatents Group in Morocco, however.

The attacks were planned here in Spain. The sleepers received the order from Al Qaeda leadership in either Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Malaysia in about November of last year. They were merely ordered to do something nasty; they chose the objective and decided how to carry it out. They'd been actively planning the attentat for two and a half months, since about January 1. They got hold of Jose Emilio Suarez and swapped him thirty kilos of hashish (value: 2000 euros) for 110 kilos of dynamite on February 28. They took the dynamite to the shack in Morata de Tajuna, where they assembled the bombs on March 10. On the morning of March 11 eight of them drove in two cars, one the van identified the day of the bombings and the other of which the cops are still looking for, to the Alcala de Henares train station and placed the 13 bags on the trains. As Tarin quotes one of the investigators, "Cheap and easy. A lot of blood, very easy."

It looks to me like they've solved the case, if all this is true. Yep, the very Administration supposedly voted out by the people as a protest against their "manipulation of information" has figured out who did it, when, how, and why, three weeks after the attacks. Not bad at all for a bunch of so-called mendacious liars and bungling incompetents.