The FAES foundation, led by José María Aznar, has defended this Monday the management of the terrorist attacks of 11-M, which today marks 20 years, which was carried out at the time by the government chaired by Aznar himself, in the face of the criticism that They come from various media outlets and political parties that accuse him of attributing responsibility for the attacks to ETA, knowing that it was not, with the aim of not losing the general elections that were held three days later, which was the case.
“Twenty years later, we reiterate that that Government did not ignore any police or intelligence report that contradicted its attitude or its communication policy during those days” in which it maintained that the main hypothesis was ETA, says a document signed by the Analysis Group. FAES which is available on the foundation’s website.
“The CNI leadership denied information at the time that attributed to it, as of Thursday the 11th or Friday the 12th, solid knowledge of the Islamic track,” recalls the FAES, which concludes that “never, ever did any official document that definitively ruled out ETA authorship and unhesitatingly affirmed jihadist responsibility.”
Aznar’s foundation recognizes that the article responds to the purpose of exercising the right of reply “in the face of the embarrassment of seeing lying professionals, disguised as vestals, insisting on ‘Aznar’s lies on 11-M'” and admits that He will not remain silent “so that no one says that he who remains silent grants.” “We neither keep true facts silent nor accept repeated lies,” he insists.
The document, titled Twenty Years Later: For the Victims. With the Constitution. For the defeat of terrorism and which alludes to the banner with which they paraded in many places in Spain to condemn the attack, he takes the opportunity to attack the current Government by pointing out that one of the slogans coined that March must be recognized as “ragingly topical.” black on the left”: “the Spaniards deserve a government that does not lie to them”, words spoken those days by Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, former vice president and former Minister of the Interior in the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and that Aznar now pours on the Pedro Sánchez’s executive for the amnesty to the process.
The FAES regrets that even today “the controversial takes precedence over the institutional; the spirit of division over concord; mendacious manipulation over rigorous criticism” after what it considers “weeks of warming up in certain left-wing media outlets,” at which who is accused of not having wanted to commemorate a “mournful anniversary”, but rather “feeding an old ember, stoking the embers and fanning the fire, in case the smoke could cover up strictly current shames.”
The organization chaired by Aznar denounces that they want to hold the PP and the executive chaired by it “responsible for having deliberately lied after the massacre; out of pure electoral calculation (…) insisting on the authorship of ETA when it knew that the hypothesis jihadist was correct, that Government would have wanted to perpetrate a massive deception by disconnecting the attacks from the Spanish participation in the intervention in Iraq, the cause of them according to this narrative, story or, better yet, story”. The FAES assures that this thesis “resists increasingly worse the scalpel of criticism, no matter how summary it may be” and insists that not even the then government “was aware of the evidence that it is accused of hiding; nor in its actions did it fail to attend to the indications that were available at all times”, while understanding that “the Iraq=attacks equation” does not hold up at all.
And to support all this, the FAES gives an account of public appearances or conversations with journalists, both by Aznar himself and members of his government such as the then Minister of the Interior, Ángel Acebes, and even relies on press information, editorials or statements by politicians of other colors that were the first to attribute the massacre to ETA.
At this point, the document attributes the Government’s belief in ETA responsibility to the fact that the attack was “similar” to the one the gang had planned three months earlier, to the fact that the Civil Guard, ten days earlier, had intercepted a full ETA van. of explosives in Cuenca and the fact that those responsible for the CNI informed the government that same afternoon that “no intelligence service contacted (North American, Israeli and Egyptian among others) has clues or indications about the attack.” “At that moment, everything: the explosive, the initial analysis of the CNI and the absence of alternative information from other services, points to ETA, assures Aznar’s foundation.
Likewise, the note maintains that twenty years after these attacks, which left 193 dead and almost 2,000 injured, “a lot of blood” has been spilled at the hands of jihadists in Europe, thus disconnecting the effect of the war in Iraq, which Spain supported. , about the terrorist attack. “France, Germany, the United Kingdom, remind us that Islamic terrorism does not attack the West for what it does, but for what it is,” points out the FAES to remember that, “in Spain, between 1996 and 2004, 121 were arrested. people linked to jihadism: the country with the highest number of arrests.”
