Who stole the Spanish election?

Posted by Geoff Beck on May 18, 2005, 10:57 PM | #

First a post by ‘Gays for Jesus’ and now a post featuring the warmonger Frank Gaffney at the NR, oh my. This causes me to recall Sullivan’s Law: Organizations that are not explicity rightist will overtime become leftist.

I think Effra will have an embolism if he sees this.

Posted by daveg on May 19, 2005, 02:05 PM | #

I was in Spain at the time of the bombing and the whole spin that it shifted the election is neocon spin.  The socialists were going to win regardless.  Spains involvement with the war was very unpopular prior to the bombing.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on May 19, 2005, 03:19 PM | #

My Spanish friend who’s a long-time member of Opus Dei thought the Socialists stole the election.  Is Opus Dei Neocon now?

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 19, 2005, 03:38 PM | #

Martin,

There are nutcases on the internet that argue that 9-11 was carried out by Bush and Cheney or by Bush and Cheney in conjunction with Israeli Agents. You will be amazed at how widespread these thories are. Do you take those seriously too?

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 19, 2005, 03:47 PM | #

3-11 was a classic Al Qaeda operation.

Posted by daveg on May 19, 2005, 03:53 PM | #

I have no doubt that some votes were tainted, but polls were showing the socialits leading before 3-11, so it probably wasn’t necessary.

The conservative blew it by playing lap dog to Bush.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on May 19, 2005, 04:08 PM | #

In order for the operation not to have been a sting, it seems to me that one of two things must be the case:

(i) The Spanish Socialists are upright, scrupulously honest and unquestionably democratic, and would never stoop to such a thing in spite of their historic roots in 1930s Stalinism and civil war.

(ii) The Madrid police force is scrupulously careful in its vetting procedures, particularly when the applicant in question is a recent Moslem immigrant, and would unquestionably weed out any applicant with Al Qaeda or other terrorist ties.

Which of these two do you believe?

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 19, 2005, 04:18 PM | #

So who did it?

Posted by ben tillman on May 19, 2005, 04:23 PM | #

There are nutcases on the internet that argue that 9-11 was carried out by Bush and Cheney or by Bush and Cheney in conjunction with Israeli Agents. You will be amazed at how widespread these thories are. Do you take those seriously too?

Nutcases?  It is a certainty that the Mossad and at least certain segments of the US government had foreknowledge of the attack on 9/11/01.  That is different from saying that the attack was “carried out” by Bush & Cheney (or Bush, Cheney & Israeli agents), but I infer that you are making no such distinction.

Posted by daveg on May 19, 2005, 05:04 PM | #

I don’t think he precluded the idea that Israel had some prior knowledge that 9-11 was being planned.  A good case for this has been made at www.antiwar.com, amoung other place.

But that is not the same as claiming Bush/Israel carried out the act, which is a nutcase argument.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 19, 2005, 05:27 PM | #

It is a certainty that the Mossad and at least certain segments of the US government had foreknowledge of the attack on 9/11/01.

Ben,

There is a huge distinction between Bush, Cheney and the US Government conspiring to murder its own citizens and some agencies within the US Government having a few leads but nothing concrete.

As for Mossad, I have nothing before me to convince me that they knew. What proof do we have before we make the allegation that Mossad knew of the 9-11 attacks?

Also, about 400-500 of the 9-11 victims were reportedly Jewish. Why would Mossad want to keep their mouths shut and let 500 Jews die at the hand of terrorists (for starters)?

Posted by Geoff Beck on May 19, 2005, 06:11 PM | #

Daveg is right, it was the association with Bush that - in part - sunk Aznar.

I wonder what might have happened if Aznar had an opponent that was anti-war AND was to the right of Aznar.

Posted by ben tillman on May 19, 2005, 06:18 PM | #

There is a huge distinction between Bush, Cheney and the US Government conspiring to murder its own citizens and some agencies within the US Government having a few leads but nothing concrete.

Yes, that is a significant distinction.  But stating the US government “ha[d] a few leads but nothing concrete” vastly understates the level of complicity.  Persons within the government facilitated the attacks by countermanding the procedures that would have prevented such attacks.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 19, 2005, 06:25 PM | #

Persons within the government facilitated the attacks by countermanding the procedures that would have prevented such attacks.

Such as?

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 19, 2005, 06:35 PM | #

Daveg is right, it was the association with Bush that - in part - sunk Aznar.

Not just the association but the decision to get Spain into the Iraq quagmire. The war was always unpopular in Spain (even more than in Britain).

Posted by Matra on May 19, 2005, 08:06 PM | #

According to even the non-neocon press, like the BBC, the polls showed that Aznar’s conservative successor would win despite the unpopular war. This is the first time I’ve heard otherwise.

Posted by ben tillman on May 20, 2005, 12:26 PM | #

Such as?

The procedures in place for intercepting and, if necessary, shooting down renegade aircraft.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 21, 2005, 01:34 PM | #

Ben,

That was not deliberate. It was massive incompetence.

Check this out. A lot of people don’t realise how ineffectual government becomes when it bloats to this degree. Government then becomes an end in itself. That is precisely what happened on 9-11.

You remember how, on 9/ll, the Air Force couldn’t manage to get a single fighter up in time to intercept the hijacked planes, right? Turns out there was a total of 12—TWELVE—fighters assigned to defend the whole of the US. And those were—you guessed it—National Guard. So America was guarded by 12 planes piloted by dentists, claims adjusters or copier repairmen.

Then yesterday the USAF admitted something even more sickening: if they had managed to get any fighters into the air in time (which they didn’t), they were planning to order the pilots to crash their planes into the hijacked airliners, because there were no air-to-air weapons to arm them with.

American kamikazes! Sure, it’s a good movie title—but Christ, didn’t all of us wage-slave suckers pay billions of tax dollars for whole arsenals full of every air-to-air weapon Raytheon or Lockheed or Hughes ever came up with? Didn’t the USAF brag up the AMRAAM (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile), the “Slammer,” as the biggest thing since look-down shoot-down?

The AMRAAM ($400,000 per unit) has been in service since 1991. It’s had 12 separate production runs. More than 800 have been test-fired. There are tens of thousands of them sitting in bunkers all over the world.

Fighter pilots love the AMRAAM, brag about how it can accelerate to Mach 4 in a second and hit chaff-dropping targets 30k away. It’s so aggressive and deadly that pilots call it the “Go Get’em Fido” missile.

But where was Fido when those Akbars were crashing a Boeing into the Pentagon? They were all over the world—with one exception: there were none available to defend America. Apparently nobody thought of saving a few missiles for “homeland defense.”

It’s like a sick joke: the same USAF penpushers who lobbied the AMRAAM through Congress were sitting in the Pentagon when a hijacked jet smashed into it. And even after that—after a whole wing of their own HQ was hit and burning—the Pentagon still couldn’t find a single AMRAAM-armed fighter jet to send up.

Hell, the USAF didn’t really even need AMRAAMs. Sidewinders would’ve done fine—even the Sparrow, the dog of American AA missiles, would’ve worked against a slow blimp target like a passenger jet. A burst from a 20mm nose cannon would’ve done the job. But they couldn’t even manage that.

You can look through a thousand years of military history and you’ll never find a strategic failure as complete as that.