Well, there's some news. Honduras and the Dominican Republic are going to pull their troops out of Iraq, and Thailand is considering doing so. Everybody else in the Coalition is standing firm.

Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro has left Baghdad. He did so by taking an armored car to the airport, after of course getting a special pass from the coalition authorities so he could get through the roadblocks. Originally he wanted an armed escort to the airport, to be provided by either the Spanish embassy or by Coalition armed forces. He says this himself. Question: Is Tommy chickenshit or is Baghdad really that dangerous? In either case, it doesn't look like Tommy got outside the Hotel al Mansur too often while he was its honored guest.

There's an unconfirmed story going around that Al Qaeda was going to try to blow up the Old Trafford stadium in Manchester during the Man U-Liverpool game on Saturday, when 60,000 people would have been there. And there are still those who doubt that Al Qaeda and the Terrorist International's war is against all of us.

According to the White House, Aznar telephoned Bush in order to disapprove of Zap's decision to withdraw the troops. Bush mentioned the "frank" conversation he had with Zap; in diplomatese, "frank" means "angry". The Vangua's writers, Sebi Val and Carmen del Riego, got ahold of Danielle Platka from the American Enterprise Institute, who apparently said it was a "terrible shame" that Spanish troops were leaving Iraq. Of course they managed to mistranslate that. In both American and British English, saying that something is "a shame" is a means of passive criticism; it means you don't like something very much, but you're not going to point fingers at the people responsible. "It's a shame our team lost so many games this year," for example. The correct translation to Spanish would be "una terrible lastima". Sebi and Carmen managed to translate it as "una terrible verguenza", though. "Verguenza" is a pretty strong word in Spanish, and it means "something you should be ashamed of" or "something that makes you lose face or look bad". So instead of Platka saying "It's too bad the Spanish troops are leaving", which is what she meant, they've turned it into "The Spanish should be ashamed of themselves that their troops are leaving". There's a major difference in meaning.

Judge Baltasar Garzon has arraigned four of the Algerians arrested in January 2003 in Catalonia. They were then freed after several months in jail without bail for lack of evidence. Now they've been re-arrested because they may have collaborated with the establishment of the 3/11 terrorist cell. The mobile phone timer of the bomb that didn't go off at Atocha Station was the same brand and manipulated in the same way as the mobile phone timer that was used in the Bali bombing. When these four Algerians were arrested back in 2003, the cops wondered why they had manipulated mobile phones, dismantled digital clocks, and large quantities of electrical cable. The arrestees' defense was that they worked in the electric installation business. They also alleged that a quantity of chemicals found were merely "laundry detergent" and that a "viscous liquid" found was not an ingredient for homemade napalm but a waterproof material used to repair swimming pools. Anyway, their names are Mohamed Tahraoui, the ringleader, Smail Boudjelthi, Ali Kaouka, and Mohamed Nebbar.

The Vanguardia article points out, "The (January 2003) arrests were used by Aznar as an argument to justify his support for the US in the Iraq War." And a damned good argument they seem to have been. These guys were planning to hit Spain all along. They had at least two sleeper cells that could be activated at any time in place long before 3/11 or even 9/11.

In happy news, two of the three unidentified terrorists from the Leganes suicide bombing were identified as Mohamed and Rachid Oulah, whose sister was arrested as a conspirator and is in jail and whose brother is serving time for robbery, which is probably why he wasn't connected with the plot, too. Unidentified terrorist number three is suspected to be Said Berraj. All three had an international arrest warrant out on them. The other speculation going around is that body number three is that of a previously unknown boss of the Tunisian, until now thought to be the director of the 3/11 cell.

As you certainly know, some dirtbags removed the body of Francisco Javier Torronteras, the policeman killed in the Leganes explosion, from his tomb and desecrated it. The police believe that the profaners are family or friends of one or more of the arrested or dead terrorists because of the severe amount of violence done to the body; it was chopped into pieces and burned. They also believe that the desecration was planned because the desecrators knew in advance which of the 15,000 niches in the cemetery belonged to the officer. The only other hypothesis, that of some sort of satanic rite, has already been laughed out of town.