Get the angle La Vanguardia takes on this particular pair of stories from Wednesday, April 14. The first one is about a new DVD player that can be programmed to cut out or bleep over scenes of violence, sex, or bad language from the movies it plays. Sounds fine to me. If you want this kind of DVD player, you can buy one. If you don't, you don't have to. Nobody's forcing anything on anybody. In fact, this ought to be good for the movie business, because now conservative parents will allow their kids to see PG or R DVDs in the knowledge that the unpleasant stuff has been cut out by this new player.

So Alex Barnet's headline is "USA introduces DVD with digital censorship". Here we go again. It's that stupid but oft-repeated meme that Americans are rigidly Puritanical. Says Alex:

The product reflects the worries of some parents about some content, even in movies directed at a family audience, tolerated by the industry. It arrives on the market at a time when there is an obvious offensive in the United States in favor of the censorship of audiovisual products. One only needs to remember Janet Jackson's flash during the broadcast of the Super Bowl or the delay with which the Oscars were broadcast in order to control it.

Oh, jeez. Everyone's already forgotten about Janet and the Super Bowl--the Vanguardia must be the only news medium in the world still trying to keep that story alive-and as for the five-second electronic delay, it's widely used on almost all radio and television broadcasts to make sure nobody on Al Franken's talk show calls anyone else a fucking son of a bitch on the air.

Look, people, this is not censorship. Censorship is the exercise of what they call prior restraint. That means if you want to say or write or broadcast something, you have to submit it to a government censor, who can then eliminate the parts that are not permitted. You do not have to do this in the United States. The government cannot stop you from expressing your ideas except in certain very specific and narrowly defined cases (e.g. you can't advocate the armed overthrow of the government of the United States, you can't make false advertising claims about a product, you can't lie under oath, you can't incite a riot, you can't make a bomb threat whether true or not, you can't spread insider information in the financial markets, you can't maliciously publish or broadcast a false story that damages someone's reputation, you can't threaten anyone with violence, et cetera.) These cases are also generally reflected in the laws of other democratic states, often with certain local exceptions; for instance, in Germany you can't spread any sort of Nazi ideas and propaganda, while in the US you can as long as you don't openly incite people to violence. British libel laws are considerably more restrictive than their American counterparts.

Anyway, now get this one. The headline is "Beckham's affairs endanger his image in the US."

Sorry, but 98% of the American population has never heard of either David Beckham or his wife, and frankly there's no reason for them to: Beckham plays a sport we don't like or care anything about (imagine Barry Bonds endorsing a product in France and you'll see what I mean), and his wife isn't particularly attractive or interesting, nor has she ever done anything to become well-known in the States, since the Spice Girls went over like a lead balloon over there.

This is going to sound very arrogant but I think it's true: in the show business world you're not a real big star until you've hit it big in the States. That's why no soccer players or formula one drivers are really big international stars. Other examples: Kylie Minogue, the Pet Shop Boys or whatever the latest British pop music fad is, Oasis, Cliff Richard, all French, Italian, German, or Spanish pop bands. Catherine Zeta-Jones had to marry Michael Douglas to get her chance; Penelope Cruz had to be Tom Cruise's beard for two years; Antonio Banderas had to start something up with Melanie Griffith, of all people.

An orchestrated publicity campaign against the Becks or a sex scandal of surprising proportion. This is the question that millions of people in the United States are asking about the great media star of world soccer, David Beckham.

If you substituted the word "thirty-eight" for the word "millions of", or the words "Great Britain" for the words "the United States", that might be fairly accurate.

During a period in which tolerance in sexual matters is below minimum in the United States, and censorship clamps down on anyone who forgets, the scandal of Beckham and his alleged lovers could leave him out of the game before it even starts.

Huh? There's NO censorship and the attitude toward sexual matters has been becoming freer, more open, and more tolerant in the United States over the last hundred years, with big jumps in the Twenties, the Sixties, and the Nineties. In fact, the US led the way in the Sexual Revolution, and sixty or seventy years ago many Europeans and especially Latin Americans were criticizing us for being too sexually open, and especially for the degree of power that women had in the US.

Jeez, the big political question now is whether gay marriages should be legal, with lots of people arguing on both sides. There are countries where the big political question is whether gays should be stoned to death or not. Also: in the United States the divorce and abortion laws are much more liberal than those in many European countries, and Spain is the prime example. Abortion on demand here is technically not available, though it is widely practiced; you need to get a doctor to certify that you will have psychological problems if you have the baby. That's not real hard to do. Divorce is technically available but in practice is difficult to get; it requires a long legal process and a lot of money. That's why so many forty-fiveish people around here are "separated" but not legally divorced; "separated" is a fairly easily obtainable legal status available here which means you can screw around again and not be cheating, and that some court has divided up the property and the kids, but you're still legally married. Talk about societal hypocrisy. Jeez. Just legalize abortion and divorce if you're going to permit them de facto.

The story goes on to say that Beckham is going to appear in the new version of the movie "The Pink Panther", though the deal hasn't been signed yet. Aha. Now let's put two and two together and play conspiracy theory. This story is bylined Maria Ortega in Los Angeles, which means that she was fed the idea for this piece from Beckham's and/or "The Pink Panther's" LA publicity people. The problem is that nobody has heard of Beckham in the US; he's not a big star there. As the story says, Beckham does advertisements for Pepsi, Adidas, and Vodafone. I know Adidas doesn't do much business in the US (it's Austrian, I believe) and I don't think Vodafone is there at all. As for Pepsi, has anyone in the States actually seen Beckham in a Pepsi commercial over there?

So what they want to do is make him a big star in the States. Step One is get him heard of. A good way to get lots of publicity is to cook up a sex scandal; it doesn't even have to be true. But people might care if they can somehow get the story to actually break in the US. Then Step Two is get him in a movie that American people might actually go see. That'll establish his name, at least sort of, and if the movie does well Beckham might get a shot at another, perhaps a starring role this time. His people are thinking Arnold Schwarzenegger here, turning his sports career (which will be over in 5-7 years) into a movie career. I'll bet Step Three is dumping his wife, who just is not going to make it in the States, or even in Spain, and picking up a Hollywood actress. Expect this within 1-2 years; Penelope Cruz would be an excellent choice, because she's popular in the US and in Spain, and it would definitely be in Beckham's interest to stay with Real Madrid for a while.

In the United States the sexual slips of show business stars are not forgiven, and proof of that is what is happening to Kobe Bryant, the star of the LA Lakers basketball team, who has seen all the companies he advertised for break off with them after he was accused of rape by a young woman in Colorado.

WHAT? Is this woman crazy? Sexual slips are a great way to get publicity and attention, especially in the US. As long as your practices don't include dead people, animals, or kids, you'll have no problems. Look at Madonna or Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez. These women are notorious for their bedroom antics and they're also extremely popular (well, Madonna is getting close to the has-been level). Look at Hugh Grant and his experience with the hooker (played up; Hugh needed publicity) or Eddie Murphy and his deal with the transvestite hooker (hushed up; too weird; Eddie got away with it) or George Michael and his getting busted for soliciting in a public bathroom (played up; George needed publicity and was a has-been among straights anyway). Look at Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, for God's sake. Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood and I don't know who else have traded in old wives for new ones and nobody cares. It's rumored that Cruise and Kevin Spacey and whoever are gay and that doesn't hurt their careers; hell, Ellen and Rosie and Anne Heche got lots of good publicity for coming out as lesbians.

Here are the only people I can think of who got in real trouble and why:

Michael Jackson. People are not fans of repeat child molesters, which is what the cops say Jackson is.

Kobe Bryant. He's not in trouble for having sex with some girl. He's in trouble for allegedly raping her. There's a minor difference. See also Tyson, Mike.

Woody Allen. Everybody was creeped out by the Soon-Yi thing. The universal reaction was, "That's just gross".

Pee-Wee Herman. He creeped everyone out, too. What a freak. First public masturbation and then kiddie porn.

Roman Polanski. Uh, people, the girl was thirteen years old. There are three words for that: Statue Tory Rape.

Ted Kennedy. Drove drunk off a bridge and drowned a campaign worker; attempted cover-up for several hours. Expelled from Brown University for cheating. Notorious for throwing drunken parties after which women claim to be raped. Oops, sorry, what am I saying? Massachussets, home of Representatives Barney Frank, whose roommate was running a gay prostitution ring out of his house, and Gerry Studds, who got in trouble for seducing male congressional pages--both were reelected--loyally elects Big Ted to the Senate every six years anyway.

Last paragraph.

The press, nonetheless, has not ceased its attacks. "Bla Bla bla", said the Daily Express, and the Daily Mirror said, "Bla bla Bla".

Uh, yes. Those are British tabloids. No one in America reads them, absolutely no one. The question is whether Beckham is going to make his way into the American market or not. To do that he needs to get into the American supermarket tabloids. That, of course, is what this is all about. It's a nice publicity strategy by Beckham's press people: get yourself accused of a minor sex scandal that's not really damaging and parlay that publicity into a movie role.

Here's some wacky shit from this week's La Vanguardia. Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro has a feature about the Hotel Al Mansur in Baghdad, where he's staying. He likes the Hotel Al Mansur because he can watch Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya TV ("threatened again by the coalition authorities"), because his friends like the correspondents from Italian TV and Le Monde Diplomatique are staying there too, because it's "better protected"--although "it's not a fortress with high walls, barbed wire, and American tanks", because it has a garden and is far away from the street, and because "there are very few Americans among its clients".

Tommy notes, "(The Hotel Al Mansur), across from the burned-out Ministry of Information, was the location of many official acts, the preferred hotel of the guests of the overthrown regime. Its discotheque, now closed, famous among the Baghdad golden youth, was frequented by Uday, the murdered first son of Saddam Hussein. It was one of Uday's favorite places for his scandalous erotic adventures."

Fascinating. Just a few notes: a) How can La Vanguardia claim that its correspondent in Baghdad is neutral and unbiased when he openly states that he does not like Americans as individuals? What would be La Vanguardia's reaction if a reporter for the Washington Post openly stated on page six of his newspaper that he disliked Spaniards so much he refused to stay in the same hotel with them? b) If the Hotel Al Mansur is safe and protected, as Tikrit Tommy seems to think it is, who's protecting it? If it's not the American tanks and the barbed wire, then it must be, uh, the other guys, I'd think c) Tommy sure lets us know what his favorite news sources are, and they ain't CNN or even the BBC or Reuters d) Are the same owners running the hotel now as when it was the regime's semi-official hotel? If so, why would Tikrit Tommy want to stay in a place owned by Saddamites? e) Uday, "murdered"? How about "got his cruel depraved sadistic ass sent straight to hell where he belongs"? f) "Scandalous erotic adventures"? I thought the term was "mass gang rapes" g) How about rephrasing one passage as "across from the happily burned-out 'Ministry of Information', really Saddam's propaganda and disinformation department, where European journalists and politicians were paid off by Saddam's bagmen"?

My conclusion: From now on, when I go to a hotel, I'm going to ask if there are any Spanish foreign correspondents staying there. If so, I'll find another place to stay. Wouldn't want to get too close to those people; their dishonesty, prejudice, stupidity, simplism, ignorance, and corruption might be contagious.

I promised you a translation of leftist Joan Barril's daily back-page comment in El Periodico. Now, one must keep in mind that Mr. Barril's intelligence quotient is below-average even for Spanish journalists, and that the Periodico is the local downmarket newspaper. Well, he's all irritated because Prince Felipe and his mistress, Letizia Ortiz, whom he is to marry--had their luggage searched at the Miami airport according to U.S. law.

Everything's going by the boards. That famous super-Spanish sentence, "You don't know who you're talking to," was cut to ribbons in the VIP room in a Florida airport. The Prince of Asturias and his companion saw some small-time bureaucrats dig through their belongings and caress their underwear. Until now the headlines of the Palace press normally included, in any regular report, something like "Prince Felipe goes to a disco to dance just like any other young man of his age." With this drum-beating, they were actually trying to show that he wasn't really just like any other young man. And as his moment to reign approaches, Felipe de Borbon doesn't have too many more chances left to do what other men of his age normally do. The Spanish Crown is an able administrator of gestures. Its popularity rests on this ability. Within a few months [when he marries Letizia Ortiz] the heir to the throne will be less of a prince and more of a heir. This implies distance and institutional values. And institutions cannot dance in discotheques. A question: In what ways can the heir continue being like the men of his age? [He's 36 or 37, I think.]

And suddenly Captain America appears to return Felipe de Borbon to his strictly human condition, which is what we who are his subjects like. All us Spaniards are equal before the law; that goes without saying, the law of the United States, which is the only law that allows itself the maximum illegalities. The heir to the throne and his future bride were one step away from being subjected to the abuses that the dancer Antonio Canales [Canales has a police record in Spain] was the victim of in the New York airport, not to mention so many other anonymous Spaniards who have had taken away from them ballpoint pens or glasses with metal earpieces, because everything that's sharp might be as serious as a rubber axe or the Hiroshima bomb. Neither artists nor allies enjoy any sort of favor before the paranoia of the American government. The condition of being a prince doesn't exempt you from anything before the real prince of darkness. Some day, probably distant, when voting has led Bush to the forcible abdication which his brother can't save him from and when Felipe de Borbon is Felipe VI, the no longer so young monarch will have the chance to go on an official visit to the US and will ask for his police record, and the report of the incompetent agents of the incompetent Condoleezza Rice on the contents of the luggage which the future king was carryint on his prematrimonial visit to the Bahamas. It will be a good story to tell his children and grandchildren. But it will also be an explosive political lesson. The lesson that where there is an emperor the heir to the throne does not rule. And that any idiot from the Bush administration can continue making enemies even among friends.

I do not think that one man represents a people. I don't especially care about flags either. But I would like, every once in a while, somebody really important, not just the mayor of the municiplaity where that restricitive airport is to be found, somebody to apologize. One begins decrying the disrespect to the Prince and one may end up decrying the bombings of Baghdad. At bottom, you see, it's all the same. I'm the boss. You're not.

Boy, that's one of the most outrageous manifestations of hurt national dignity I've ever seen. Hey Joan Barril: Isn't it true that we American citizens have to obey Spanish law when we're in Spain? If we didn't, that would be called "extraterritorality" and you would be denouncing it right now. Well, Spanish citizens when in the United States have to obey American law, and being the fuckin' Prince of fuckin' Asturias will get you a fuckin' cup of coffee over in the States. If you have a fuckin' dollar, that is. Over in the US you have to pay for what you order even if you're the Prince, Don Felipe, by the way, no more of this walking out of the disco at six AM without settling up your bill. This ain't one of the fuckin' terraces on the fuckin' Paseo de la fuckin' Castillana.

You may have heard that the Barcelona city council has declared Barcelona an official anti-bullfighting city, whatever that is. It's non-binding, and it's highly ironic that a city with TWO large bullrings (one is in disuse--supposedly it's going to be converted into a shopping mall--; the other is one of Spain's four or five most important, with a regular program on which all the major bullfighters appear) should get all persnickety now.

MY PERSONAL FEELINGS: I don't like bullfighting at all. I've seen two bullfights, one in Mexico City and the other in Madrid, and I know whereof I speak. I never watch bullfighting on TV. Never. Hey, I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat mammals or birds or fish--well, fish at restaurants, ok, but rarely. Meat, never. This is not something new; I've been doing it for the last twenty-five years.

ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST:

It's cruel to animals. It sure is. The bull gets stuck full of holes by the picador and by the bandarilleros before getting run to exhaustion and then butchered by the matador in what is almost never a clean kill. It's an ugly sight.

It's an old cultural tradition. Yep, that's certainly true. Spectacles with bulls go back to at the very least the Mycenaeans in the Mediterranean, and were practiced in Greece and Rome. Bullfighting as we know it has not changed a great deal since the 17th century, I don't think. Bullfighting is also central to the culture of most parts of Spain; major centers include Pamplona, Bilbao, Valencia, Burgos, Toledo, and Madrid, as well as Sevilla, Cordoba, and Malaga. And Barcelona.

Bullfighting's not Catalan. Rotundly false. There are gazillions of historical records showing that bullfights have been held in the Spanish style in Barcelona since as long as they have been anywhere else in Spain. A bad bullfight, famously, was the spark for the Barcelona riots on St. Jaume's Day in 1835; this was a serious urban rebellion that was brutally crushed. There are two large bullrings in Barcelona, and both are constructed in what's called here the modernista style; they date from the turn of the last century. This was before the influx of Aragonese and Valencian and Murcian immigrants in the teens and twenties that hard-shell Catalans accuse of being responsible for the alleged introduction of bullfighting here. Also, bullfighting has a strong local presence in some smaller katalanitsch towns in Catalonia, like Olot, Cardona, and several of the towns on the lower Ebro river.

The bulls have a good life and they wouldn't exist anyway if not for bullfighting. True. They live in nice open fields for three years before getting turned into pot roast. And the particular breed of bulls used for corridas de toros is bred specifically for bullfights and has no other use. Also, they eat the bull, or at least they did before the mad cow disease thing. I don't know if they've permitted the sale of toro de lidia again or not, but normally you could go down to the market and buy some steaks from the bulls that had been fought in the local corrida. You could argue that the cattle bred for slaughter are killed just as ruthlessly as bulls killed in bullrings, and you could argue that there's no moral difference because we eat them all. It's hypocritical to argue that we shouldn't make a spectacle out of death, because our society constantly does that; people all over the world get pleasure from hunting and fishing, and that's killing for fun just as much as bullfighting is. At least in a bullfight the bull has about a 50,000-1 chance or so. In the slaughterhouse that chance is zero. And as for fox-hunters who oppose bullfights, that's even worse than hypocritical. Fortunately, I believe there are few of these people.

It's Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. Well, yeah, a lot of the ignorant criticism of bullfighting you see does come from England, and specifically from the tabloid press. But that conclusion is a little hysterical. Incredibly, that's what one of the PP guys in the Barcelona city council said in response to the anti-toros measure.

We're gonna look like real jerks at the Forum of Cultures. Heh, heh, heh. Snicker, snicker, guffaw, guffaw. In about a month the Big Politically Correct Multiculti-Katalanitsch Fiesta Excuse-To-Put-Tax-Money-Into-The-Hands-Of-Well-Connected-Real-Estate-Developers, officially called the Forum of Cultures and already touted as Barcelona's answer to the Millenium Dome, is going to kick off, and supposedly peace-and-love PC fruitcakes and nutballs are going to congregate here, and meanwhile down at the Monumental Jesulin de Ubrique and Fran Rivera are going to pincushion some large, angry cattle to the cheers of thousands of real spectators from Barcelona and Spain--despite many claims, tourists do not make up the majority of bullfight spectators except maybe at third-class Costa Brava resorts like Lloret. That is going to look just great. I think I'll get a job as a barker for the bullfight empresarios, touting and shilling trilingually among the crowds of foreigners milling about the front gate of the Forum. That is, assuming there are any foreigners.

CONCLUSION: Sorry, folks. If you eat meat and wear leather, then you've got no more right than anyone else to oppose bullfighting. You, too, benefit from cruelty to animals, and more specifically, to mammals. I don't oppose bullfighting. I will not patronize it ever again. I do not watch it on TV. I would probably avoid buying a product advertised by a bullfighter. I do not buy the scandal magazines that often capitalize on the private lives of bullfighters. But if people want to watch it, and many Spaniards do, you can't outlaw it. The best you can do is regulate it and make sure it's done under certain recognized procedures.

I've been seeing the word "Vietnam" used with some frequency in the international press; the conservative magazines have acknowledged the hue and cry by running pieces either denying Iraq is similar to Vietnam or pieces stating defiantly that Iraq is like Vietnam, dammit, and we should have won there too.

Here's my unconsidered opinion:

The enemy in Vietnam was the North Vietnamese, with the Viet Cong as their South Vietnamese arm and aid coming in from China and Russia, both possessors of nuclear weapons. The enemy in Iraq is the local branch of the Terrorist International. They receive funds and support from outside, but at a much smaller level than did the NVA/VC. The only states that tolerate them are rogues or have rogue elements inside them.

The enemy always had a safe base to retreat to in Vietnam. That is not true in Iraq. The Al Qaeda / Saddam Fedayeen boys in Iraq have nowhere but Fallujah and Tikrit to hide.

We lost about 55,000-60,000 men in Vietnam. In Iraq we have lost about 600 during the war and postwar combined.

During Vietnam we had some of the European states in our corner, at least sort of, because they were scared of the Russians. Now we don't. So what's the difference?

During Vietnam we weren't sure what we were doing. Now I think there's some kind of plan to isolate and go through areas where the terrorists are concentrated, but I'm still not convinced we know what we're doing. The confusion isn't nearly as great as Vietnam, during which the military leadership was clueless--as was the civilian. Still, though, I'm more than a bit worried on this front. I'm hoping to see more successes like that in Fallujah, where the foreign journalists are already talking up massacres, by the way.

As for atrocities, to my knowledge there was only one committed by Americans during the Vietnam War, and that was My Lai, an eternal disgrace to America. Some 200 innocent villagers were murdered. But that only happened once. If it'd happened more times than that someone would have talked; the reason we all heard about My Lai was because more than several people who knew what had happened blew the lid off the story, including the helicopter pilot from outside the unit who saved several lives and convinced some of the men to stop killing. There's no way you could cover up something of that degree. As for the photos of the naked girl (she lives in Vancouver now) and the ARVN officer shooting the VC in the head, we remember them because they were brutal. They were also very rare occurences, which is why you don't remember any other Vietnam photos. The Americans have not committed any atrocities in Iraq, nothing even close despite everything Beirut Bob and Tikrit Tommy have to say.

Our soldiers are professional volunteers in this war. In Vietnam many were conscripts.

That was the jungle and the rice paddies. This is the desert.

Our equipment is a hell of a lot better than theirs, not necessarily true then in the case of say, rifle patrols.

The media is trying to sabotage the war effort in both cases. Fortunately, this time we have alternative media, the Internet.

I'll bet you can think of a few hundred more comparisons or contrasts.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was elected the next Prime Minister of Spain on March 14, three days after the 3/11 bombings that killed almost 200 people, because of a masterful propaganda campaign based on Zap's promise to appease the terrorists by pulling out of Iraq.

Now the CNI, the Spanish intelligence service, has reconstructed the videotape that the seven 3/11 terrorists who blew themselves up in the Leganes apartment made, in Arabic, on March 27. The Leganes suicide explosion happened on April 4. Here is the CNI's transcript of the videotape, found in the ruins of the apartment, translated into Spanish, in today's La Vanguardia. The translation to English is mine.

In the name of Allah, the Kind and Merciful,

Blessed be Allah, whose promise is kept and who succors his servants, and who defeated the ahsub himself. Peace and blessings be on the last of the pure messengers, our prophet Mohammed, Allah bless and save him.

After determining that the situation has not changed and after your new governor announced the beginning of his mandate with more fighting against Muslims and the sending of more crusader troops to Afghanistan, the Companies of Death and Ansar Al Qaeda have resolved to continue the path of blessed jihad and resistence, until everything (unintelligible) in the name of the struggle against terrorism. Therefore the brigade located in Al-Andalus has decided not to leave here until your troops leave their Muslim bases immediately and unconditionally. If you do not do so within a week from today, we will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tarek Ben Ziyad.

Know that you will not enjoy safety and know that Bush and his Administration will not bring you anything more than destruction. We will kill you in any place at any time.

There is no difference between civilians and soldiers: our innocents die by the thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq; is your blood more valuable than ours? We will bloody your people, we will kill you, we will carry the war to your houses, and you will not be able to sleep.

We act fairly: "Fight he who attacks you, in the same way he has attacked you."

I say a few words to all those who have suffered injustice or aggression under the accusation of participating in the operations of March 11: You have followed the hadiz of Mohammed, Allah bless and save him, who banished the Muslims who lived together with the polytheists.

You know the Spanish crusade against the Muslims, and it has not been so long since the expulsion from Al-Andalus and the courts of the Inquisition.

We are sorry for your injustice but our jihad is above everything, because our brothers are murdered and their throats cut all over the world.

Blood for blood! Destruction for destruction!

Allah!

Yep. This one was all about Iraq and the evil Yankees. Right. Looks to me like Al Qaeda has made its position pretty clear. "We will kill you." They say that twice. I think these Al Qaeda people and their allies, from Hezbollah to the Taliban to the Saddam Fedayeen, have it in for Spain. I don't think withdrawing Spain's troops from Iraq would be the most intelligent thing to do at this moment. I don't normally believe terrorists, but when they kill almost 200 people and then claim they'll do it again, and then blow themselves up, I tend to believe them. That convinces me.

They want a fight and they mean to provoke one. Zap seems to think if he gives them our lunch money they'll go away.

Well, anyone wondering what the cost of appeasement is has to look no longer. The terrorists who committed the 3/11 bombing and who blew themselves up in a Leganes apartment a week ago had already made a videotape with their new demands: they were going to do something else really bad if Zap didn't pull Spanish troops out of Afghanistan, too. You'll remember that Zap promised to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq back before he was elected, and has sworn to carry through on his promise. Sounds to me like the Spanish people elected Zap because he was offering to appease the terrorists in the hopes that they won't commit any more 3/11s. Well, that's not enough for them, as we remember saying several times. This is not an isolated war; this is the War on Terrorism and you can not pick and choose your enemies. They've already picked and chosen you.

Check out this bit from James Taranto's Best of the Web.

"Tall, dark and handsome, Prince Felipe of Spain has exactly what it takes to be a royal heart-throb," according to a profile in Hello!, a British celebrity magazine. "Like his father King Juan Carlos, he's a natural charmer, and from his mother Queen Sofia, he's inherited reserve and a gentle demeanour":

"Some people think I'm too serious, but I believe I've got a sense of humour," he told HELLO!. "I like to think of myself as being no different from anybody else, with my failures, qualities, frustrations, joys, worries, everything. . . . A king should not lose his perception of what it is like to be somebody normal."

He's not even king yet, and apparently it's already too late. The Miami Herald reports that "Crown Prince Felipe of Spain and his fiancée pitched a royal fit at Miami International Airport Thursday night, when screeners insisted on searching the future king's luggage--just as they would any Average Joe's":

Members of the prince's entourage called the required inspection of their private belongings an ''insult'' and ''humiliating''--sparking a diplomatic flap that has the United States and Spain on the brink of a protocol war.

They could have avoided the screening if they had arranged for a State Department or Secret Service escort. And the prince's group actually did get special treatment. Lauren Stover of the Transportation Security Administration tells the paper they were searched privately in a lounge by "top-notch screeners with VIP experience." That apparently isn't good enough for the Spanish. "We don't consider this the proper way to treat our future king," an anonymous consular official tells the Herald. "It's a breach of protocol."

This is news? You bet it is over here. The local leftists, not normally known for much giving a crap about the royal family, are pitching a hissy-fit over this one. Tomorrow I'll translate Joan Barril's rant in El Periodico.

One thing the Spanish press are not saying is that most people flying from the Bahamas to Miami on a private jet are strongly suspected of being involved in either cocaine trafficking or money laundering, which is most likely why His Royal Highness got searched--oh, yeah, that and it being the law and all.

Conclusion: The Spanish royal family can kiss my ass. It's going to be a hot day in hell when they get any favors done for them. If they are displeased, let them call up Zap and his future foreign minister and have them register their official complaints with President Bush. Fat lot of good that'll do as long as Zap is running this place.

If this piece from Front Page is true, then a Yale history lecturer has just been denied tenure for writing a book critical of the Left during the Spanish Civil War. Stanley Payne, the well-known Hispanist and professor at the University of Wisconsin, said that the lecturer's book would break new ground in the study of Spain and the Civil War. In case you don't know him, Professor Payne has written many books on Spain, including a fine general history of Iberia, books on Fascism and Communism in Europe, and three excellent studies of Spanish politics before and during the Civil War, one of which is brand-new. Payne is one of the few academics, in America or anywhere else, who attempts to give a "fair and balanced" perspective on the Civil War. That is, he's not blindly pro-Left. In fact, he's not even pro-Left at all! He is extremely critical of BOTH sides, but he's most famous for being critical of the Left because no one else of his stature dares to do so. And he speaks up for the lecturer's work.

But the Yale faculty refused to give tenure to the lecturer, who I hope will light out for Wisconsin to work with Payne or to a university of conservative intellectual bent such as Chicago or Pepperdine. That's what happens when you buck the majority in today's American academic world.

I think we actually have a tiny scoop here. Sanel Sjekirika, one of those wanted by Spanish police for participation in the 3/11 bombings, is Bosnian, at least according to this Slovenian website that linked to us. I thought his name sounded more Slavic than Moroccan, but I didn't twig he was Bosnian. This is interesting. It means some of those--well, at least one of those--who fought with the Muslims in Bosnia got radicalized and joined up with the bad guys. How soon do you want to bet somebody like Beirut Bob Fisk figures this out and starts blaming the Americans for supporting and arming the Bosnian Muslims back under the Clinton Administration?

Lots of terrorist news. Now they're saying that there might well have been seven terrorists killed in the Leganes explosion. If you look at the pictures they sure blew the hell out of the place. One of their bodies was catapulted into an empty swimming pool in the inside patio of the apartment building.

They were planning an attentat in or near Madrid for this week, which is Semana Santa, Holy Week, a time when there is a lot of traveling because everybody gets Good Friday off and there's a three-day weekend. A lot of people are taking today, Thursday, off too; the schools are mostly closed. Anyway, the terrorists had 185 kilos of dynamite, which is a hell of a lot when you figure that each of the 13 backpack bombs planted on 3/11 had about 10-12 kilos of dynamite in it. They also had plenty of detonators and everything else they could possibly have needed. That Leganes flat was an all-purpose arsenal.

Anyway, four of the dead guys have been identified, and the other three have not; none of them is among the wanted terrorists, six of them, whose identity has been made public. Specifically, none of them is Mohamed or Rachid Oulad or Said Berraj, the three suspected bomb-planters still at large. Meanwhile, two more arrestees were arraigned and jailed by Judge Juan del Olmo; they are Abdelilah El Fuad and Rachid Adli, both Moroccans. They are thought to be minor accomplices rather than big players.

"The Tunisian", now happily dead, was the organizer on the ground of the 3/11 attacks. His contact with Al Qaeda was Amir Azizi, co-boss of the Spanish Al Qaeda cell broken up in November 2001 (the other co-boss was Abu Dahdah, in jail still awaiting trial); Azizi was the conduit between "The Tunisian" and Zougam and Balkh and company, and Al-Zarqawi, one of Ben Laden's collaborators. Azizi is extremely badly wanted by the Spanish police.

Trivia note: "The Tunisian" received 30,000 euros of Spanish government scholarship money to study for four years, 1994-1998, at the Autonomous University of Madrid. An interesting point is that he was radicalized at this time, after arriving in Spain. He did not come here as a sleeper agent, not originally.

Just to demonstrate that there is some intelligent life in Spain, at least among the 35% who voted for the PP, here's a piece by Florencio Dominguez from today's La Vanguardia. It's called "Causes and Pretexts".

The 3/11 bombings have started a debate about the roots of Islamic terrorism and the most efficient method to combat it. The demonstrated lethality and the indiscriminate selection of the vicitms has caused a degree of fear in society greater than any other form of violence that we have suffered in the past. In addition, the willingness to commit suicide of the perpetrators of these attentats make older methods useful to combat other forms of terrorism obsolete.

The vision the progressives love is the appeal to the need to understand the causes that provoke terrorism to appear. They make use of explanations that make reference to the interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the aftereffects of colonialism. Frequently the image of terrorists that come from the pockets of poverty or the oppression of the Muslim countries, who act motivated by the righteous need to settle old scores, is broadcast.

One of the founders of ETA, Julen Madariaga, "Ahmed" while he was an exile in Algeria, expressed yesterday a vision of this sort: "On an international scale, I understand, on the one hand, the reaction of these peoples, who are defending themselves the way they can." Madariaga stated that the Westerners had committed "cruelty and barbarity" in Iraq and that "they cannot defend themselves as they should be able to" against the military power of the "American giant", so they "answer back as they can."

"They send their commandos and do things like we have seen in Madrid or the Twin Towers of New York. Those attentats were a reply to all that," he added, forgetting that the Twin Towers were attacked long before the intervention in Iraq.

The vision of Islamic terrorism as a response to offenses and injustice conflicts frequently with the facts reality shows. It is difficult to make this posture cohere with the fact that the leader of Al Qaeda is a multimillionaire who has put his burgeoning resources to the service of his cause, or that the most radical and rigorous interpretation of Islam, that which feeds the majority of the terrorists, comes from the opulent Saudi Arabia and spreads through the world financed by the petrodollars that have enriched the bosses of that country.

Reality also frequently dismantles the image of the Islamic terrorist as a hopeless pariah. Just look at the list of suspects from 3/11: the boss of the group, the sadly notorious Tunisian, had been at the university, like another of those the police are looking for; one of those in jail has a degree in chemistry; another is the owner of a phone shop; "El Chino" and his family had a clothing wholesale business, as did other suspects now in jail. This profile does not correspond to that of unfortunate individuals, just the opposite of the many thousands of immigrants, whether Muslims or not, who have to make their own way every day working at the hardest and worst-paid jobs without for one moment thinking of violence.

If we're looking for the causes, we should look at what causes the fanaticism which moves all terrorists and, in particular, the Islamist ones. Probably sectarian indoctrination is a lot more important than the intervention in Iraq. When we look for the roots of this situation, we should pay attention to Professor Fernando Reinares, an expert in the study of violence: "It's important not to confuse causes with pretexts." For now we know a lot about the pretexts but very little about the causes.

I boldfaced the two bits I thought were particularly good.

Oye, compadres, dees ees Espeedy Gonzalez wit de noos. De po-leese tink dere were sees sooiside bombers en de apartamento dat de terroriss bloo up in Leganes. Cool. Sees sooiside bombers fewer to worry about. De Peepol's Party deed not want to march wit de rest ov de po-litical pardies ayer porque da Communiss an Socialiss dun took over da march agin de terrorismo an shouted No a la guerra an mierda like that. Andele! Arriba! I am de fasses mouse in all Barselona! Da Vanguardia be admittin dat dere ees panico ein Leganes an een da ress ov Esspain. Espeedy Gonzalez do not esee da panico o da heesteeria aqui een Barsalona. Da Tuneesian, dat bad mofo, he be dead. He one bad mofo, dat Toonessien.

The police have confirmed that five terrorists were killed in the explosion in Leganes that also killed a police officer. Three of them are identified as among the six men international search warrents were issued for. The other three are thought to have escaped. The fourth dead terrorist is Asri Rifaat Anouar, and the fifth has not been identified.

Three more warrants have been issued for Amer El Aziz, Sanel Sjekirica, and Rabei Osman Ahmed. The police consider they have rounded up most of those responsible for the 3/11 bombing and identified most of the rest. A total of five terrorists are dead and 15 jailed, including five of the actual bombers, Zougam, Chaoui, Bekkali, Zbakh (the bombmaker), and Ghayoun. The other ten jailed are accused of collaboration. Nine arrested people have been freed due to lack of evidence against them.

Some bunch of people calling themselves the Abu Najaf al-Afghani Group Ansar Al Qaeda is claiming responsibility for the 3/11 bombings and the bomb planted on the high-speed train tracks that didn't go off. I thought we'd all agreed it was the Moroccan Islamist Combatants Group, but I suppose it's more than possible that these guys might have multiple affiliations, and it has been said that the 3/11 terrorist cell (almost all Moroccans) was more closely affiliated with Al Qaeda itself than with Al Qaeda's Moroccan franchise, the Islamist Combatants.

In good news, the French arrested 15 sleeper terrorists thought to be connected to the Islamist Combatants, and the French also pulled off a major ETA bust, getting Feliz Alberto Lopez de Lacalle, "Mobutu", ETA's number two; his girlfriend and accomplice Mercedes Chivite; and Inaki Esparza, ETA's logistics commander, along with an arsenal of guns and explosives. Congratulations to the French police and security services, who always do a good job no matter how obnoxious their government is. Two more arrests have been made following up on these three.

OK, I often have some fun with the left-wing wackos around here, but it's time for me to have a go at a right-wing nut, Pio Moa. Moa, as you may or may not know, is a former Grapo terrorist; the Grapo are sort of like the Baader-Meinhoffs or the Red Brigades, an ultra-Stalinist terrorist gang. Incredibly, they still exist. Anyway, Moa has jumped over to the right. One thing about conspiracy-mongerers is that they have a similar attitude no matter whether they're on the left or on the right. In this bit (from Libertad Digital) Moa goes on for a while about the Masonic conspiracy and then switches gears:

It's obvious who's benefited from the bombings, and who have been cheered by its electoral effects: Mohammed VI (King of Morocco), Chirac, Islamic fundamentalism, Catalan and Basque separatism, even Fidel Castro and the United Left communists. All of them have profited and are profiting from the electoral victory of Zapatero, who, in one way or another, they consider the ideal man for their interests in Spain. It is undeniable evidence, dignified of the greatest attention, being secondary, although not unimportant, the hidden fact of whether any or various of them organized, inspired, or permitted the bombings...What is going to have real political effects is the benefit received by these forces and the character of those forces, whether they are behind the attack or at its margin. Therefore, we will have to prepare ourselves for four years in which these who profited from the massacre are going to enjoy unusual power. Regarding their character, all of them, except Chirac, are direct enemies of democracy in Spain, and Chirac is an enemy of Spanish influence in Europe. The enemies of democracy and the unity and influence of Spain are thrilled, at the moment.

Now, now, Mr. Moa. We know the radical terrorist wing of the Islamic fundamentalists did the bombing, and I have no problem in the naming of them as behind the bombings. They did it. That's pretty clear. But is it responsible to insinuate, and Mr. Moa is more than insinuating, the involvement of the King of Morocco (unlikely, he's afraid of the fundamentalist terrorists too), of Jacques Chirac (Chirac's a crook and a weasel but not even he would blow up 200 Europeans for political purposes), the Catalan and Basque separatists (the ETA may well have had a hand in planning or executing the bombings, I wouldn't rule it out, but the non-violent separatists, no matter how politically wrong they are, aren't murderers), of Fidel Castro (how does he fit in? I hate Castro too, but let's not blame him for stuff he didn't do), and of the United Left (they're Communists and I don't trust them at all, but they don't openly support terrorism most of the time)?

No, it is not responsible. The responsible thing to do is exactly what the government is doing, getting the guys who did it and seeing that they are punished. Then we find out who's behind them, which sure looks to be Al Qaeda. Now comes the part that Zapatero can't deal with: we go after Al Qaeda and all Al Qaeda's friends, including everyone from Arafat to Hamas to Saddam to Hezbollah. It's not going to do a damn bit of good taking out only Al Qaeda, since obviously more terrorists are going to sprout up where they came from--these rogue regimes (Saddam, Assad, the Iranian mullahs, Kim, the Palestinian Authority), failed states (Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon), and unpleasant dictatorships with rogue elements within them (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan). Wanna talk about the root causes of terrorism? Try radical fundamentalist Islamic / Arab nationalist West-hating Jew-hating ideology.

Now, there's not any question in my mind that the Socialists, the United Left, and the Catalan and Basque nationalists and separatists DID intentionally take advantage of the bombings as a political weapon against Aznar, Rajoy, and the PP. To their eternal disgrace and shame. But let's not confuse their taking political profit from the massacre AFTER it happened and their having been in on the massacre BEFORE it happened. You can justifiably accuse them of the former--I just did--, but it's conspiracy nutcase-hood to allege the latter, that anyone besides Al Qaeda terrorists was behind the Madrid massacre.

Here's Alfredo Abian from today's La Vanguardia in the signed page 2 editorial. It's titled "Alien takes over the European spaceship".

Some experts on Islamic terrorism have been alerting us about the radicalization of its new combatants for some time.

Well, Al, actually they've been alerting us about the radicalization of ALL Islamic terrorists for some time.

With unforgivable simplism,

Is Al referring to the Americans again?

in Europe we have had many who thought that this previously unseen alien was a predictable self-defensive monster against the aggressions that Islam suffered from, of course, the United States.

He's not! But that doesn't excuse La Vanguardia for having argued exactly that for the last, I dunno, fifteen years or so.

The ostrich-syndrome has been so great that the most-heard melody after the 3/11 massacre attributed it exclusively to the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq.

And your newspaper played that tune so sweetly...

Let us hope that after the accumulation of tragedies and surprises, we will leave naivete to one side and admit that what happened in Madrid is a full confirmation that Europe has become the spaceship inside which the new alien can move around best.

The first step toward getting rid of that naivete is recognizing that the "new alien" is the same old one that did Lockerbie, the Munich Olympics, the Lebanon hostages, the Achille Lauro, the African embassies, 9-11, the bombings in Israel--shall I continue?

Religious medievalism camouflages itself under Western behavior and tries to convert immigrants into invading troops to spread its particular jihad.

How quick do you think the current feeling in Spain, which I am not callying "hysteria" because it isn't, is going to turn anti-immigrant? My bet is real fast.

Although it shares its methods and a global hate for progress with Binladenism, it organizes itself autonomously.

No, no, Al. Bin Laden is a religious fanatic, remember? These autonomously organized cells made up of long-term sleepers and their recruits are standard Al Qaeda practice, nothing new. This was an Al Qaeda hit.

Its operative centers are no longer only in Kandahar, but in the suburbs of European capitals.

This is news, Al?

And now what we all have to do, along with our Maghrebi neighbors, is to be active in self-defense and emulate those Palestinian mothers who watch their children so that they are not coopted by psychopaths who offer them oceans of honey and virgin maidens in exchange for self-immolation.

How about starting off, since we're going to begin self-defense activity, by keeping our troops in Iraq fighting the terrorists? And I sure hope those Palestinian mothers Al refers to really exist and aren't just the fruit of his overactive imagination.

As everyone must know by now, since this happened yesterday evening local time, four terrorists blew themselves up when surrounded by Spanish police in an apartment in the Madrid working-class suburb of Leganes. The dead include "The Tunisian", Jamal Ahmidan, and Abdennabi Kounjaa, three of the suspects with international arrest warrents on them, and a fourth yet unidentified man. They took a police officer with them, Javier Torrontera, age 41, with two children. 12 other police officers were injured, none especially seriously. They're all in good condition at local hospitals.

At about 5:30 local time yesterday afternoon, the police began their raid on a Leganes apartment they knew some of the terrorists were hiding out in. The terrorists started shooting, and by 6 PM the cops had the area evacuated and cordoned off. Between 6 and 8 PM the terrorists held out in a desultory shootout with the police. At 8 PM the helicopters were over the area, and at 9 PM the GEOs, the "Grupo Especial de Operaciones", the Spanish SWAT team, assaulted the apartment. The terrorists then blew themselves up with a bomb, killing themselves and Torrontera. Inside the apartment were found 200 detonators and ten kilos of unexploded dynamite.

This is war, folks. Get used to it, because Zap's not going to be much help, I don't think.

As I'm sure you already know, they found a bomb on the high-speed rail line between Madrid and Seville. No one was hurt, fortunately; inspectors found the bomb while doing a routine daily check. They'd buried the bomb in the railbed and there was a hundred-meter cable running from there to the bushes. The bomb didn't go off because the timer had not been set, which means the official hypothesis is that whoever planted the bomb was disturbed before finishing the job. The dynamite used in the bomb is the same as that used in the 3/11 Madrid bombings.

This is what happens when you appease terrorists--they come back for some more. La Vangua ran a story saying that they suspect there are 300 Moroccan Islamist Combatent Group affiliates in Spain, which means there are plenty more where Jamal Zougam and Abderraman Balkh came from.

The incoming Spanish government and most of the Spanish people do not seem to recognize that they, too, are at war with Al Qaeda. See, no matter how peaceful you want to be and however good your intentions are, if they want to kill you they're going to at least give it a try. The current illusion de jour is that Al Qaeda hit Spain because Aznar supported American and sent troops to Iraq, and if that hadn't happened Madrid wouldn't have been bombed. Dream on, Spaniards, keep dreaming. 3/11 didn't wake most of you up. Neither will this little incident. Al Qaeda hates you because you are degenerate Westerners whose women are prostitutes, Spaniards. They don't hate you because of Aznar. They don't know or care who Aznar is. They want to kill and destroy the West because the West is unholy and Satanic--and, ironically, it's the peace and love mutliculti lefties who make noise about sexual freedom and gay rights and freethinking and individual rights and women's equality whom Al Qaeda despises most.

I am terribly afraid that what wakes Spain up is going to be something on a 9/11 scale.

Christopher Buckley has a very funny short story in this month's Atlantic. Check it out. If you liked Thank You for Smoking, you'll like this one.

All baseball fans will want to check out this new site called the Hardball Times; it's one hundred percent better than every other source of baseball information out there, barring Rob Neyer's column and his and Rany Jayazerli's blog. Rob and Rany are just two guys, though; at the Hardball Times they have like twelve, all young writers and/or bloggers who know their stuff cold.

Matthew Namee, who is Bill James's research assistant, is one of the writers, but the one I like best is Aaron Gleeman. He's a college kid up at Minnesota and he's the best writer of the bunch, with a personal style that's inimitable. He doesn't take things too seriously, but you can tell he both loves and knows baseball. His blog is linked over there on the left, but I'll bet he doesn't keep it going. Seriously, Aaron, if you read this, I'd put the blog on hiatus and focus on the Hardball Times, where you're going to get a lot more readers.

Check out his play-by-play of the Opening Day game in Japan. It's dead-on and it's also hilarious. In this episode Aaron has some fun with Harold Reynolds, the none-too-bright ESPN announcer who's third man in the booth.

Harold Reynolds just said he thinks "the ball jumps more" in a domed stadium when it is full with people. Someone should study this, if they haven't already. It would seem to be fairly easy to do, and I'm about 99% sure Reynolds is just talking out of his ass, like he usually is.

...Crawford hits a high pop up to Jeter, who catches the ball, stumbles, and then falls right on his ass. Reynolds giggles like a school-girl and then, wouldn't you know it, gives Jeter credit for "not taking his eye off the ball."

...Reynolds: "That's the advantage of having a guy with the range of a shortstop at third base." As opposed to what they're used to, a guy with the range of a potted plant playing shortstop.

Baldelli grounds out to the potted plant for the third out.

...Reynolds said ARod has gained weight and, in his opinion, couldn't even play shortstop now. Right. ARod could suddenly have an obese Siamese twin surgically attached to him and I'd play him there over Jeter.

...Reynolds: "This whole steroid thing has been blown so far out of proportion."

Sheffield walks, putting men on 1st and 2nd. Ravech: "How can you say now it is blown out of proportion?"

Reynolds: "It was only five percent of the players. You can go anywhere in America to a health club to make yourself bigger, stronger, faster."

Reason #5,301,495 why I don't pay attention to any of this steroids stuff.

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.

For all you people complaining about my use of the word "attentat", I did not make it up nor is it a sign of my ignorance of Spanish or Catalan, both of which I speak quite well, thank you.

Check this out.

attentat

e \At*ten"tate\, Attentat \At*ten"tat\, n. [L. attentatum, pl. attentata, fr. attentare to attempt: cf. F. attentat criminal attempt. See Attempt.] 1. An attempt; an assault. [Obs.] --Bacon.

2. (Law) (a) A proceeding in a court of judicature, after an inhibition is decreed. (b) Any step wrongly innovated or attempted in a suit by an inferior judge.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

It may be obscure today, but it counts as English.

In case you were wondering, the sources I use are the print issue of La Vanguardia every day, the print issue of El Periodico almost every day--I read it for free down at the coffee shop / beer joint on the plaza--TV 1 and TV 3 broadcast news most days, the websites of Fox News, CNN, TV 3, and Libertad Digital, the news and commentary websites at National Review, the New Republic, Slate, and Front Page every couple of days, and the blogs InstaPundit, Andrew Sullivan, HispaLibertas, and a whole raft of others. What you see here is a sort of digest of all those sources through my utterly prejudiced point of view.

It actually doesn't take me very long; I'm a fast reader, sometimes so fast I get careless and do something like call Solbes the next FM when he is to be Economics Minister. I check in on the TV news most days, but I turn it off after five minutes if there's not anything really interesting.

Anyway, here's the news. Judge Juan del Olmo has issued five international search warrants for, I guess, the five bombers not already in custody. One of them is Abdelkarim Mayati, who is said to be the commander of the hit team, operating directly under the Al Qaeda operative al-Zarqawa. Fouad El Morabit, one of the guys turned loose yesterday for lack of evidence, was just rearrested because they found his fingerprints in the shack where the bombs were made. Minor bungle there. Judge del Olmo arraigned two more arrestees, Antonio Toro Castro, Suarez the dynamite supplier's brother-in-law, and Moroccan Mustafa Ahmidam, two of whose brothers have already been arrested. One has been freed and the other jailed without bail. More arrests are supposedly on the way.

You know, I'll bet that the $70,000 of Al Qaeda money the Moroccan Islamist Combatants Group got was more than enough to pull this hit off. I see no signs of any real sophistication, World Trade Center-style, in this attentat.

El Periodico, which is usually rather--how shall I put it? Bumwad? Bogroll? TP?--says that the cops have reconstructed how the 3/11 bombings in Madrid were carried out. Ten men placed the 14 bombs on the trains. Four of those who placed the bombs are already in custody; one is Jamal Zougam. The other six bombers' identities are known to the police, and they are all thought to have fled Spain. Numerous witnesses to the placing of the bombs and the actual explosions have identified these men, who are apparently all Arabs.

The bombers chose the date of March 11 specifically because it was exactly two and a half years after the 9/11 bombings, but they also planned to disrupt the March 14 elections, which they certainly succeeded in doing. Several of the bombers' conspirators are lowlifes involved in small-time drug and weapon trafficking, or small-time phone scammers--making it even less likely this was a professional job.

I really think that all they needed were ten guys to get on trains, leave a pre-loaded bag or two, and get off at the same station or, failing that, the next one down the line. They had somebody smart enough to figure out the train schedules, which isn't too hard since they're posted and given away on flyers at every station--though Zougam, for example, is clearly more than smart enough, you'd be surprised at the number of people who can't figure out something that simple--, they had somebody smart enough to make the bombs, and we know who he was, and they had the small-time prison connections that hooked them up with Suarez, the dynamite seller.

(Suarez and his brother-in-law got busted in 2001 with, get this, 84 kilos of hashish, three kilos of cocaine, 16 sticks of dynamite, and 94 detonators. What the hell were they doing out of jail? I know a guy in America who got six years in the slam for selling, admittedly, fairly large quantities of LSD through the mail, and he served all six in Leavenworth. Jeez. I couldn't smoke 84 kilos of hashish no matter how hard I tried, and believe me, I'd try.)

Then all the planners had to do was pass out the bombs, leave them on the trains, and bail out. I will bet that these guys who did the hit were mostly very low-level guys perhaps operating autonomously, though there's no question the money is Al Qaeda--no fanatic suicide bombers, no complicated training, nobody with specialized skills but one or two, nobody who had to plan five years ahead and get pilot training and all that stuff.

The brains behind the whole operation, Mr. Big himself, is one Abdelkarim Thami Mayati, a French citizen of Moroccan origin, according to the Moroccan cops. He is thought to be the operations boss of the Moroccan Combatant Group. The Moroccans have apparently arrested several dozen Islamic pro-terror activists and are sorting them out into people they're going to kill and people they're merely going to imprison, or something like that.

You'll want to read this one. It's titled Anti-Semitism: Integral to European Culture, by Manfred Gerstenfeld; Front Page links to it. It's a long article, twelve pages; the link is to a PDF. It is worth every second it takes you to read this.

And while we're on the subject, here's Victor Davis Hanson explaining a few of the basic ethical differences between the Israeli government and the terrorists.

Well, here's some more news from Spain. It hasn't even been a month since the 3/11 bombings and it seems like everybody's already forgotten about it. La Vanguardia is still running its biographical sketches of the victims, but the report on the investigation is on page 16. And it was only three weeks ago, on March 13 and 14, that everyone was screaming that the government had lied and they wanted the facts. Well, here's the facts, Jack: this was an Al Qaeda hit, the Moroccan Combatents Group is an Al Qaeda franchise, and Al Qaeda would have hit Spain whether it had sent troops to Iraq or not. You are at war with terrorism just as the rest of the West is, but the incoming Socialist government does not want to face this and so it's trying to avoid doing so, hoping Spain can get a free pass on terrorism if it is an obedient vassal of Al Qaeda. Wrong. The demands will just be higher next time. Now they know Spain scares easily, they're going to keep attacking here, and next thing you know we'll have to break off diplomatic relations with Israel or be forced to shelter terrorists here as long as they don't shit while they live. If you appease extortionists, they'll just come back for more, as anyone who has ever paid blackmail can tell you. And I thought Spain had learned something when Carod-Rovira tried to make exactly the same appeasement deal with ETA, in which Catalonia was declared an official terror-free zone (yeah, right, don't believe a word of anything ETA says, ever; Catalonia will get hit again just as soon as ETA feels like doing it.)

Anyway, a total of 22 persons have been arrested so far because of their connections to the 3/11 bombings. 14 of them have been arraigned and sent to jail without bail by Judge Juan del Olmo. The most recent hearing saw the jailing of Basel Ghayoun, a Syrian who was recognized by two witnesses at the scene of the loading of the bombs, and of a Moroccan named Hamid Ahmidam. Ahmidam's brother Said, another Moroccan named Fouad El Morabit, and a Syrian named Almallah Dabas Mouhammed were released without charges.

The five major figures arrested and jailed so far are Ghayoun and Moroccans Jamal Zougam, Mohammed Bakali, Mohammed Chaoui, and Abderrahim Zbakh. In addition, the apparently free-lance supplier of the dynamite, a Spaniard named Jose Manuel Suarez Trashorras, has been arrested and jailed. Two more arrests were made Monday; one is Suarez's former brother-in-law and the other is a North African.

The exchange of the Spanish troops in Iraq for new soldiers began yesterday; 160 left Zaragoza last night. Aznar demanded that Zap and the PSOE put their consent in writing; Zap did so grudgingly. Zap can't oppose the rotation of troops because the army guys there deserve to go back home; they've done the spell they were told they were going to do and now they must come home. But he's going to look like a real moron when he pulls the new troops out just a week after they all got there. Meanwhile, Zap promises that during the summer he'll double the size of the Spanish contingent in Afghanistan to 250; Afghanistan's OK, see, because the troops there are under UN command. But Iraq's not. You figure the logic. I can't. And Zap's not backing down on pulling all Spanish forces out of Iraq.

As for Zap's cabinet, there's a lot of speculation and few hard facts. Party baron Jose Bono will get Defense, Felipe holdover Pedro Solbes will get Foreign Affairs, and Jose Montilla, the Catalan party hack boss, will get some sort of super-Commerce ministry with several other fields like telecoms coming under it. There's also a shakeup in the PP; Rajoy stays on as party leader despite his defeat at the polls, because he would have won if not for the agitation on March 12 and 13. Angel Acebes is going to be his number two and Rajoy is putting his own people into the party organization posts. The names Carlos Aragones, Ana Pastor, and Jose Maria Michavila figure pretty big here, as does Eduardo Zaplana's.

Jacques Chirac (I'd rather off Jacques than jacques off) and his mess of a political coalition, the Union for a Presidential Majority, which beat Jean-Marie Le Pen in the last French presidential runoff (Jesus Christ. Here the French are criticizing us all the time and Jean-Marie Le Pen is the second-most-voted candidate for President in their country, not ours. And that crook Chirac, Saddam's towel boy, came in first) got massacred by the left in the French regional elections. The only place they won was Alsace. Now, you'd think this was great news, but the French Left is even worse than Chirac. The only French politician I respect is Alain Madelin.

Here in Catalonia they're already disobeying the PP's attempted overthrow of the idiotic American-ed-school-influenced school reforms that happened under the Socialists. They will not obey the regulations regarding tracking, a new less touchy-feely curriculum, professional training (for students), final exams, makeup exams, the flunking of students who fail more than three courses, and making religion an obligatory subject. I absolutely agree with all the proposed PP changes except for religion, which has no place in the public schools except when treated neutrally in history class.

They banned smoking in pubs in Ireland. That'll go over great there. Every single person I have ever seen in a Irish pub smokes. A lot. And bums cigs off you, because here's a dirty little secret: it's not just the Scots who are skinflints, it's 99% of residents of the British Isles. Interestingly, the subject isn't being treated hysterically over here in the Spanish media like the various smoking bans in parts of the United States are--you know, health police interfering with people's freedom, typical American Puritans wanting to keep people from having fun. Of course, it's not the Americans doing it this time, so it must be all right.

Rafael Ramos, in his typically imbecilic article on the subject, writes "It's the greatest revolution since the potato famine of 1847 and the mass emigration to the United States." Gee, Raffy, do the words "Easter Rising" or "Sinn Fein" or "Michael Collins" or "IRA" mean anything to you?

Here's Satan himself, Mr. Neocon, who along with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz drinks the blood of Christian bab--oops, sorry, been reading La Vanguardia again. Here's Bill Kristol in the Weekly Standard on why the Richard Clarke flap doesn't mean a damned thing. The exchange quoted is from the Congressional hearing; Gorton is Senator Slade Gorton of Washington state.

GORTON: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this: Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?

CLARKE: No.

There have been occasions in the past when government officials properly took responsibility for actions under their direction that went terribly awry. Janet Reno accepted responsibility for the deaths in Waco in 1993. John Kennedy took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs in 1961. In those cases, apparently reckless U.S. government actions directly caused unnecessary deaths. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans. It would be no more appropriate for President Bush to apologize today than it would have been for President Roosevelt to apologize for Pearl Harbor. Richard Clarke's pseudo-apology has cheapened the public discourse.

For information on who's behind the Madrid bombings, check out this Michael Ledeen piece in the National Review. I'm pretty sure the information Ledeen gives us is basically true, and if Ledeen is right, then this is all the same war, a position we've held to ever since 9/11.

Here's a nice article by David Greenberg in Slate. The subject is whether war Presidents always get reelected; Greenberg points out that both Lincoln and FDR had problems getting reelected in 1864 and 1944, respectively, and that Truman would have been defeated in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson defeated in 1968 if they had run. In addition, if Wilson had been capable of running in 1920--he'd been incapacitated by at least three different strokes and his wife was basically running the Executive branch--he'd have lost; by then the First World War was over, of course. George Bush I, a war president, lost in 1992, as we all know.

It seems to me that Bush is doing pretty well in the polls--from what I gather, they're running more or less 50-50--for this stage in the campaign. The Democrats have made all the noise, of course, and they'll keep making most of it until their convention at the end of July. Then it'll be time for the Republican convention at the beginning of September, and the Republicans will get the publicity bounce. This is nothing new or anything we invented; it's pretty much the standard pattern. Many reelected Presidents--Reagan in 1984 and Clinton in 1996 being the two most recent--had been much more unpopular at some point in their terms than Bush is now, or has ever been.

Here's my wild-ass guess, seven months and a half from the election: Barring disaster, Bush wins fairly handily though not hugely. He wins the election when he holds Florida and Ohio and wins a couple or three more states that the Dems won last time, say Iowa and Wisconsin. Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania are not impossible dreams. Illinois will be tough. If Bush wins Illinois it's a romp. He probably won't though, but that's a state I'd fight hard. Most of the battle is going to be in Florida and the Great Lakes states. The Dems will probably win in California, but I'd fight there too, at least for fundraising and local-candidate support. There's a lot of Republican sentiment in that state, and some grass-roots activity will force the Dems to spend hard-to-get money fighting there. If I were the Reps I'd write off New England (except New Hampshire and maybe Maine, and I wouldn't waste much money there over eight electoral votes), New York, and New Jersey. The Reps ought to win all the South and Plains states, no problem--if they don't, it's a Kerry romp--, and ought to do all right in the non-California West. The only places I'd out-and-out favor the Dems are Washington, Oregon, and New Mexico, in that order.

Read this piece by Michael Kazin from Dissent, which was picked up by Front Page, on the world's only rival to Noam Chomsky in mendacious anti-Americanism and pseudo-history, Howard Zinn. Mr. Zinn is the author of The People's History of the United States, a notorious conglomeration of conspiracy theory and falsehood. Kazin destroys both Mr. Zinn and his book.

I once owned a copy of said People's History. It was given to me by a good friend of mine named Jane, who used to live here in Barcelona. About Jane's only fault was a slightly hung-over '60s leftism (that and she was a packrat; she piled up amazing quantities of junk that should have been thrown away years ago as a goddamn health hazard); she'd actually been at Altamont, for example, and knew minor Beat poets and stuff like that. Anyway, she left that particular book to me when she went back to the States. I got about as far as the American Revolution before deciding that this was a complete waste of my time unless I wanted to do a seven-hundred-page Fisking. I then donated it to a charity auction some friends were having, where it went for five euros or so.

Maybe I should have burned it; it's undoubtedly gone on to poison another mind or two. It's been translated to Spanish and is a big seller over here, where it is of course taken seriously just as the ravings of Noam Chomsky and the gibberish of Susan Sontag and the pretentiousness of Paul Auster and the flat-out stupidity of Michael Moore are.

In Memoriam

We've been posting short biographical sketches of the people killed in the 3/11 bombings in Madrid. Our source is La Vanguardia.

Miguel Reyes Mateos, office worker, 37, Alcala de Henares. Miguel was a civil servant who worked in the Immigration department of the Labor Ministry. He leaves his parents and his three brothers; he lived with his girlfriend in Alcala. He was especially fond of his seven-year old niece.

Sonia Cano Campos, receptionist, 24, Coslada. Sonia lived with her parents. She was a lively and friendly person who loved going out, dancing, and having fun. Sonia went to dance classes to learn how to do sevillanas. She worked as a receptionist in a nursing home.

Enrique Garcia Gonzalez, electrician, 29, Mostoles. Enrique was killed while helping other victims; he was on the platform when the first bomb in the Atocha Station train went off. He jumped down on the tracks and began helping people out of the train; then the second bomb went off and killed him. Enrique's father is Spanish and his mother is Dominican; he was born in the Dominican and came to Spain when he was 13. He worked with his brother and his cousin installing air-conditioning. Enrique had three different children, 2, 4, and 6 years old, by different marriages. He enjoyed dancing and Caribbean music.

Teresa Gonzalez Grande, cleaner, 36, Vallecas. Teresa worked on the janitorial staff at the Universidad Complutense. She lived with her boyfriend in an apartment they had just bought. The university held an homage ceremony for her.

Anca Bodea, teacher, 25, Guadalajara. Anca was from Romania; she had arrived in Madrid last December. She worked as a language teacher for children and lived with some Romanian friends. She planned to go back to Romania for a visit soon. It took them a week to identify her body.

Francisco Javier Casas Torresano, painter, 28, Getafe. Javier worked as a computer operator, but he wanted to be an artist. He'd taken a course in painting and worked in a surrealist style. He was about to move in with his girlfriend. His friends remember him as creative and original. He was a good-looking young man with a big mop of black hair.

John Jairo Ramirez Bedoya, cleaner, 37, Torrejon de Ardoz. John was from Colombia and had been in Spain for five years. He was a small man, with black curly hair and a mustache. His wife is expecting their child. They planned to visit Colombia in November. John was saving up because his dream was to open a florist's shop.

Maria Eugenia Ciudad-Real, bank employee, 26, Leganes. Maria Eugenia had just begun her first real job fifteen days ago at a BBVA branch. She had studied business and was serious and hard-working. She leaves her parents and her brother, with whom she lived.

Angel Pardillos Checa, civil servant, 62, Santa Eugenia. Angel had worked at the Banco de Espana for more than
thirty years. He was from a small town in Aragon to which he and his wife returned every summer. He had a daughter and a son and three grandchildren he was wild about. His daughter had just gotten married six months ago. He was going to retire in a few months; they identified his body by the watch he was wearing, which the bank had given him when he completed his 30th year.

Daniel Paz Manjon, student, 20, Villa de Vallecas. Daniel was studying at the National Institute of Physical Fitness. He was an excellent soccer player and enjoyed singing and playing the guitar; he liked to go to clubs where singer-songwriters play. Dani was shy but had literally dozens of friends. He was on his way to gymnastics class when the bomb went off at El Pozo.

Carlos Soto Arranz, welder, 34, San Sebastian de los Reyes. Carlos had had some tough breaks; both his parents died when he was 14. He had to quit school and get a job. He was married; he and his wife had a 14-month-old daughter along with two sons of hers by a previous marriage. They formed a close family. Carlos also leaves two brothers.

Sergio Dos Santos, electrician, 28, Vallecas. Sergio was from Parana in Brazil and had been in Spain for six months. He had decided to emigrate and save up 7000 euros to buy a house back in Parana, but it wasn't easy even though Sergio was a religious man and led an ascetic life. Sergio leaves his wife and their four-year-old son.

Here's the news on the 3/11 bombings. They've discovered the house, little more than a shack, where the bombs were made. The fingerprints of Jamal Zougam and Abderrahim Zbakh--Zbach is the actual bombmaker--were found in the house, along with traces of dynamite and several detonators. Other fingerprints found are clues to the involvement of others, still not arrested.

Want some mindless Old European anti-Semitism? La Vanguardia's got it! They run an alleged humor page every Sunday written by some schmuck named Jaume Collell, which is really just about the least funny thing I have ever seen. Well, today we've got a big-nosed, thick-lipped, Der Sturmer-style caricature of Ariel Sharon and a "poem" signed by the "Marquis de Esade". Esade is a famous Barcelona business school, you see. That's supposed to be a joke. Get it?

Here's the original Spanish.

Ved el lider pacifista,
el mahatma Ariel Sharon,
que con sangria nazista
y muro de contencion

siembra la paz en los muertos.
¡Que notable judiada!
Miles de cuerpos yertos
que ya no protestan nada.

Los que fueron masacrados
son ahora los verdugos.
Sucede con los tarados
cuando gobiernan tarugos.

"¡Despierta, o Israel!"
dicen las Escrituras,
que si sigues con Ariel
te comeras tus basuras.

Here's the best translation I can do.

See the pacifist leader,
Mahatma Ariel Sharon,
who with Nazi bloodshed
and his wall of subjection

sows peace among the dead.
What a Jewing!*
Thousands of stiff bodies
who now can protest nothing.

Those who were massacred
Are now the executioners
That happens when the foolish
Are governed by martinets.

Awaken, o Israel!
Say the Scriptures
If you stay with Ariel
You will eat your own excrement.

* According to the Diccionario de la Real Academia, which I used to check and correct my translation, the Spanish word "judiada" means "A wrong or bad action, tendentiously considered as worthy of Jews."

This is quite possibly the most offensive and hateful thing I have ever seen printed in the Vanguardia. And, don't forget, it's on the "Humor" page.

In Memoriam

We're posting short biographical sketches of the people killed in the 3/11 bombings in Madrid. Source: La Vanguardia.

Sam Djoco, laborer, 42, Torrejon de Ardoz. Sam was from Senegal, where he had a wife and six children ranging from three to 18 years old. Sam immigrated illegally to Spain on a raft in 1997, but he got his papers and had bought a small house, where he wanted to move his family. Sam's brother and his nephew, who lived in France, were visiting him when their family reunion was broken up by the bombing. Sam was killed at El Pozo.

Miguel Antonio Serrano, plumber, 28, Leganes. Miguel lived with his mother and his five brothers and sisters. He worked as a plumber with his brother-in-law. His friends say he was a funny guy who did good imitations and that he loved playing the guitar.

Pedro Hermida, bank employee, 51, Rivas-Vaciamadrid. Pedro was the director of foreign operations for Caixa Catalunya in Madrid. His co-workers remember him above all as honest and responsible; he was a union activist. He was married with three children; he was a family man who enjoyed movies and sports.

Esteban de Benito, 39, Santa Eugenia. Everyone called him "Tebitan". Esteban was married with two daughters; he loved motorcycles and soccer. He picked his daughters up from school every day and took care of them all afternoon. He worked as a home repairman; he could fix anything. He and his family planned to spend their next vacation on the beach in Alicante, where they had a small summer house.

For all you other ailurophiles out there, here's a story and a photo about a kitten in Germany that was born with four ears. Check it out. I've never seen a four-eared cat before, but polydactylism (extra toes) is very common among both cats and dogs.

The American press is now ahead of the Spanish press regarding the 3/11 bombings. Here's the Fox News story on the continuing investigation.

I have a question: What sort of normal heterosexual man dumps both Nicole Kidman and Penelope Cruz? Answer: None. But Tom Cruise has dumped Penelope after three years of being his beard. So, guys, she's now available, as if she probably weren't already since I doubt that ol' Tom was doing his manly duty by her. Nice publicity move by Penelope; guess she couldn't stand it any longer, though.

Looks like Zap's Spain has made a deal with the Frogs and Toads in Brussels, which, greatly simplified, means that Spain will accept less power in the EU executive in exchange for a little more power in the EU legislative and readmission to the Axis of Weasels. The Poles, left twisting in the wind, have been forced to sign on, too. Aznar and the Poles had been holding out for more power for the mid-sized countries in the executive branch.

According to the Vanguardia, Josef Joffe wrote in Die Zeit, in a front-page article titled "The Islamofascist offensive; Appeasement is not the answer; The Spanish people draw the wrong lesson from the Madrid attentats", "In Spain terror has, for the first time, terror has won an election." I admire Mr. Joffe very much; he occasionally writes in the American political journal The New Republic, mostly on European issues, and his articles are always worth reading. And Angela Merkel of the German Christian Democrats said, "No government can give in to terrorist blackmail. We cannot permit the terrorists to "divide and conquer" in Europe. Nobody should try to buy security in exchange for "good" behavior."

Meanwhile, the EU made a declaration on terrorism that actually might mean a little something; they proclaimed that they will defend any member threatened by terrorism by any means, not excluding military force. I guess that's sort of hard-line; at least it's some kind of line. They also declared March 11 to be the European Day of Victims of Terrorism, for whatever that's worth, and promised some sort of unification of antiterrorist intelligence under Interpol (one of the several Nazi innovations that continued after the Nazis were sent packing in utter defeat and eternal disgrace; others were the Coal and Steel Community, the autobahns, the Volkswagen, dubbed Hollywood movies, and the American rocket program.)

Aznar, who as you know is still Prime Minister, has made it known that the relief and replacement of the Spanish troops in Iraq--standard military procedure, pull units on duty out of the line after a certain time and replace them with fresh men, this has been planned for months--will happen on schedule on April 21, while Aznar will still be PM. (Zap will not take over until the first week of May.) He's asked Zap to commit himself on paper, since the Socialist Party has asked the Government not to make any important decision without consulting them. Good one. If Zap agrees that the relief should happen, he'll look pretty dumb pulling those guys out like three weeks after they arrive; if he disagrees with the relief, then he looks like a jerk for extending those soldiers' Iraq duty for three weeks or so after they were supposed to come home; and if he dithers, he looks like, well, a ditherer.

Gee, guess which big story NOBODY is paying the slightest bit of attention to? Let me give you a hint: it's on page 15 of yesterday's Vanguardia and page 13 of today's. That shows how important it is, really, in people's eyes. Let me give you another hint: it's the issue that supposedly brought the PP government down. Right! It's the investigation into the Madrid bombings!

On Wednesday Judge Juan del Olmo bound over two more suspects in the 3/11 bombings, who had been arrested over the weekend in the third wave of arrests. They are Moroccans named Rafa Zuher and Naima Oulad Akcha, the latter the only woman arrested so far. These people are going into solitary confinement with no contact with a lawyer. For the next four years; then they have to be tried. And the Spaniards have the gall to criticize the Americans for Guantanamo, where, by the way, the number of innocent people is, I repeat, approximately zero. One of her brothers, in prison in Salamanca for robbery and battery, is also a suspect. The other two are still awaiting arraignment.

The fourth wave of arrests happened Wednesday night and Thursday morning. All five arrestees are Moroccan. Three were busted in a small town in Toledo called Ugena and the other two were arrested in Madrid. The Ugena Three are big fish of some kind, probably sharks; they were residents of Germany and have been known as members of extremist Islamic groups for many years. The German police say they have ties to Mohammed Atta's Hamburg Al Qaeda cell.

So far, the arrestees have been connected to Al Qaeda networks in Morocco, Britain, France, Norway, Germany, and, get this, Iraq. The biggest fish arrested so far besides the Ugena Three are Jamal Zougam, one of the leaders and the man with the connections, and Abderrahim Zbach, who seems to be the actual bombmaker.

Gee, I thought El Pais and the Socialists and SER Radio were saying the Spaniards voted the PP out because they weren't finding out who did it fast enough and were covering up the truth about the investigation. This seems to me like pretty good police work and complete governmental honesty regarding the matter. The government spokesman even announced that some information was being held for obvious reasons regarding the secrecy of the investigation, and nobody even said boo.

The police investigation is rolling along, with many more arrests foreseen in the next few days.

Here's CNN International on the story. CNN's got another article on a Zap speech to a Socialist Party conference, in which he "bristled at the notion" that Spaniards were cowards. (Note: To be specific, we said, and stand by it, that those 40% of Spaniards who voted for the PP or CiU, or the Socialists in the Basque country, are not cowards. The rest voted for Zap or somebody even worse.) Anyway, here's CNN on Zap:

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has pledged not to give in to terrorists, bristling at the notion that the Spanish are "cowards" when it comes to facing terrorism.

"No Spanish government has given into terror and no government will do that," Zapatero told a Socialist Party conference Friday.

He was referring to more than 30 years of terror attacks in Spain at the hands of Basque separatists.

True. The Spanish government and the Spanish people have never given in to ETA, to their eternal credit. They made some errors under the Felipe regime when they tried to "have a dialogue" with that gang of murderers, but Spain has never surrendered...not to ETA.

But the Spanish people gave in to Al Qaeda without firing a shot, when they elected a governing political party which promised to do exactly that. And, Mr. Zap, that new governing chickenshit political party is precisely yours.

(Oh, by the way, Mr. CNN, whoever you are, please call ETA what they are, terrorists. "Separatists" are PEACEFUL. I think the Basque non-violent separatist party Eusko Alkartasuna and the Catalan non-violent separatist Republican Left of Catalonia are a bunch of idiots, but they want a peaceful separation of their regions from the rest of Spain. They are attempting to come to power by democratic means. They are separatists, not terrorists. Terrorists are something completely different. Much as I disagree with them, the real separatists condemn violence and do not want to impose a dictatorship, unlike ETA or Al Qaeda.)