{"id":65904,"date":"2004-03-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/03\/19\/comment-lespagne-a-reussi-sa-rda-revolution-in-democrartic-affairs\/"},"modified":"2004-03-19T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-03-19T00:00:00","slug":"comment-lespagne-a-reussi-sa-rda-revolution-in-democrartic-affairs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/03\/19\/comment-lespagne-a-reussi-sa-rda-revolution-in-democrartic-affairs\/","title":{"rendered":"Comment l’Espagne a r\u00e9ussi sa RDA (Revolution in Democrartic Affairs)<\/em><\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Comment l’Espagne a r\u00e9ussi sa RDA (Revolution in Democratic Affairs)<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t19 mars 2004 Nous publions un texte de Inter Press Service (IPS)<\/a>, dont l’un des journalistes les plus appr\u00e9ci\u00e9s est Jim Lobe. Ce texte nous rapporte le processus d’intervention et de manipulation des informations par le gouvernement Aznar, entre le 11 et le 14 mars 2004, essentiellement aupr\u00e8s de l’agence de presse nationale EFE. Selon les r\u00e8gles du march\u00e9 libre dont Aznar est un fan<\/em> av\u00e9r\u00e9, l’intervention gouvernementale chez EFE \u00e9tait constante, massive, grossi\u00e8re, etc.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tMais encore plus, le texte met bien en lumi\u00e8re les conditions tr\u00e8s particuli\u00e8res de cette affaire, et notamment le processus de renversement de l’opinion en Espagne en trois jours, notamment au travers des remarques de Enrique Bustamante, expert socialiste des relations internationales.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t\u00ab While the Spanish media continued to echo the government line that ETA was responsible, thousands of Spaniards took to the streets on Saturday, Mar. 13 to repudiate the attacks and protest the government’s manipulation of the facts.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb Outside PP offices in cities around Spain, demonstrators shouted We Said ‘NO’ to the War! and Your War, Our Corpses.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb Bustamante pointed out that the spontaneous outpouring of anger and grief was prompted by cell-phone, e-mail and Internet messages that circulated widely throughout Spain.<\/em> \u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tLa chose est confirm\u00e9e de diverses sources : il y a eu, pendant ces trois jours, deux Espagne de l’information, celle des grands m\u00e9dias, musel\u00e9e par le gouvernement, et celle de l’information parall\u00e8le, de toute la population. C’est la seconde qui l’a emport\u00e9. Le paradoxe ironique se confirme : la r\u00e9volution de l’information, lanc\u00e9e et entretenue par les grandes autorit\u00e9s de la globalisation et du libre march\u00e9, dont Aznar comme les copains, donne aux populations un outil de lutte d’une efficacit\u00e9 jamais vue. Sorte de Revolution in Democratic Affairs<\/em> (RDA ?), \u00e0 l’image, ironiquement l\u00e0 encore, de la RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs<\/em>) du Pentagone.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Silencing the Truth About the Attacks in Spain<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tBy the Inter Press Service Team, March 19, 2004<\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tA group representing reporters and editors at Spain’s state-run news agency, EFE, says the agency knew about evidence pointing to involvement by Islamic terrorists in the Mar. 11 train bombings in Madrid that very morning, but kept it under wraps due to pressure from the government of Prime Minister Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Aznar.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbEFE knew, from the very morning of (last) Thursday’s attacks in Madrid, about the existence of a cell-phone configured in Arabic and about the van found in Alcal\u00e1 de Henares, and knew that one of the dead was a terrorist,\u00a0\u00bb the committee of EFE employees said in a press release.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tBut \u00a0\u00bbReporting or broadcasting information pointing to involvement by extremist Islamic terrorists that was obtained from primary sources by our national news service writers was expressly prohibited,\u00a0\u00bb the committee said Monday.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe heads of the Madrid Press Association (APM) met Wednesday with the committee of EFE employees, who are now demanding that the agency’s news director, Miguel Plat\u00f3n, resign.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe EFE writers accuse Plat\u00f3n of imposing \u00a0\u00bba regime of manipulation and censorship in this company over the last few days, to favor the interests of the Popular Party (PP) with a view to the Mar. 14 elections.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThey maintained that the government’s manipulation of information was aimed at ensuring a victory at the polls last Sunday by the conservative PP, which ended up being trounced by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tA little over an hour after 10 explosions tore through three commuter trains during the morning rush-hour last Thursday, killing 200 and injuring 1,500, the government blamed the Basque separatist group ETA, and was echoed by the Spanish media, political parties, trade unions and social organizations.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tDecades of terrorist attacks staged by ETA in demand of an independent Basque homeland and two similar aborted attempts made it logical that the group would be viewed as a likely suspect.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe on-line editions of Spain’s main newspapers carried headlines that day with different versions of \u00a0\u00bbMassacre by ETA.\u00a0\u00bb The first IPS report in Spanish was also titled \u00a0\u00bbETA Votes with Bombs and Dead Civilians,\u00a0\u00bb while the headline of the agency’s first article in English was \u00a0\u00bbETA Main Suspect in Rail Blasts, More Than 170 Killed.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tNot until Thursday evening did the government announce that in the town of Alcal\u00e1 de Henares, the starting-point of several of the trains carrying explosives, police found a stolen van carrying detonators and an audiotape of Koranic verses in Arabic.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tInvestigators also found a sports bag containing an unexploded bomb, a detonator and a cell-phone configured in Arabic at one of the sites of the explosions.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tShortly after the government reported the discovery of the van, a London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-QudsAl-Arabi reported that it had received an e-mail in the name of a group with links to the al-Qaeda Islamic terrorist network claiming responsibility for the blasts.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tNevertheless, Aznar personally called the directors of El Pa\u00eds, Jes\u00fas Ceberio, in Madrid, and El Peri\u00f3dico, Antonio Franco, in Barcelona, to tell them there was not the slightest doubt that ETA was responsible.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbIt was then that I, under the conviction that the prime minister of my country was incapable, in the exercise of his duty, to give me assurances about something he was not completely sure about, decided on the headline: ‘ETA’s M-11’,\u00a0\u00bb Franco wrote in an editorial that was posted on the Catalan newspaper’s website.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbThe prime minister gave his word to the heads of the media so they would present the attacks as the work of the ETA terrorist group,\u00a0\u00bb wrote El Pa\u00eds in an editorial on Sunday, the day of the elections, in which the PP, previously expected to win handily, was defeated by Spain’s socialists.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe association of foreign journalists, to which the IPS correspondent in Madrid belongs, also complained that a dozen of its members had received phone calls from the State Secretariat of Communication, \u00a0\u00bbexplicitly requesting that our reports state that ETA was the perpetrator of the attacks.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe association of employees (APM) of the Madrid public TV station also complained of \u00a0\u00bboutright manipulation,\u00a0\u00bb \u00a0\u00bbcensorship,\u00a0\u00bb \u00a0\u00bbfalsification of news,\u00a0\u00bb and the \u00a0\u00bbconcealing\u00a0\u00bb of information.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbIn the future, we demand that ethical standards be respected, so journalists are able to work freely and provide truthful information,\u00a0\u00bb APM president Fernando Gonz\u00e1lez Urbaneja told IPS.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tOn the day of the attacks, Foreign Minister Ana Palacios sent instructions to Spanish embassies around the world. According to El Pa\u00eds, her memo stated: \u00a0\u00bbYou should use any opportunity to confirm ETA’s responsibility for these brutal attacks, hence helping to dissipate any type of doubt that certain interested parties may want to promote.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbThe Interior Ministry has confirmed that ETA was responsible\u00a0\u00bb she added in the message, which she later said was aimed at \u00a0\u00bbproviding guidance\u00a0\u00bb to embassies at their request.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tEven the United Nations Security Council issued a resolution on the day of the attacks blaming ETA, on the insistence of Madrid, which said it had irrefutable evidence of involvement by the Basque separatist group.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe embarrassed Security Council is now preparing to annul the resolution.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tSenior European officials also complained this week that their governments felt misled by the Aznar administration’s insistent blaming of ETA.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tEU Foreign Policy chief Javier Solana, a Spaniard, said in interviews with Spanish television that it seemed certain that ETA was involved because of the characteristics of the attack and the kind of explosive that was used.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe government erroneously reported on the day of the blasts that the explosive was Titadyne dynamite, which ETA used in earlier attacks after stealing several tons of it in France.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbIt is clear that there was pressure,\u00a0\u00bb Enrique Bustamante, international relations expert and member of PSOE prime-minister-elect Jos\u00e9 Luis Rodr\u00edguez Zapatero’s advisory team, told IPS.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbThis was the first time that the head of government called all of the major media and that censorship and control of information was applied in the official news agency (EFE).\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWhen the SER radio station, the most popular in Spain, reported that \u00a0\u00bb99 percent\u00a0\u00bb of the evidence found by the military intelligence National Information Center pointed to extremist Islamic groups, \u00a0\u00bbthe phone immediately rang, and a ‘denial’ came from the director of the Center himself,\u00a0\u00bb said Bustamante.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWhile the government repeated \u00a0\u00bbETA\u00a0\u00bb over and over again, like a kind of mantra, the evidence that increasingly suggested Islamic involvement continued to pile up.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tAnalysts say the public’s anger at the way the government handled the information arising from the investigation, as well as the fact that Spaniards overwhelmingly opposed Spain’s support for the U.S.-led war on Iraq, led to the Sunday defeat of the PP.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tDespite the fact that surveys indicated that over 80 percent of Spaniards were opposed to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Aznar administration dispatched 1,300 Spanish troops to take part in the occupation.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Madrid train bombings, apparently staged by one of the radical Islamic groups that have threatened to take reprisals against the allies of the George W. Bush administration in that war, reactivated the public’s memory of its opposition to the war.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWhile the Spanish media continued to echo the government line that ETA was responsible, thousands of Spaniards took to the streets on Saturday, Mar. 13 to repudiate the attacks and protest the government’s manipulation of the facts.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tOutside PP offices in cities around Spain, demonstrators shouted \u00a0\u00bbWe Said ‘NO’ to the War!\u00a0\u00bb and \u00a0\u00bbYour War, Our Corpses.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tBustamante pointed out that the spontaneous outpouring of anger and grief was \u00a0\u00bbprompted by cell-phone, e-mail and Internet messages\u00a0\u00bb that circulated widely throughout Spain.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe initial conviction that ETA was responsible might be compared to what occurred after a car-bomb destroyed a U.S. federal building in Oklahoma City on Apr. 19, 1995.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tA total of 169 people were killed in that terrorist attack, for which no one claimed responsibility. Immediately after the blast, the media reported that it was the work of \u00a0\u00bbArab terrorists\u00a0\u00bb a version that continued to be echoed for two days.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tIPS, on the other hand, stated just hours after the explosion that certain signs suggested involvement by far-right white supremacists.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tTimothy McVeigh, who fit that description, was eventually found guilty and put to death for the bomb attack.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbIt was a cultural question,\u00a0\u00bb journalist Jim Lobe told a fellow IPS writer.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbAmericans don’t see their young as capable of the kind of violence that was visited on the federal building, but, through movies, news coverage, and facile assumptions by so-called ‘terrorism’, experts (many of whom are Islamaphobes), and an occasional off-the-record official, the notion that it must have been Middle Eastern or more precisely Arab in origin simply took hold.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbWe in the Washington bureau were 36 hours ahead of the rest of the media in pointing to the (far-right) militias,\u00a0\u00bb said Lobe.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbAs a person from the US west with experience with Posse Comitatus and other far-right groups in the court system, I was convinced that some Americans were perfectly capable of such an outrage, and that the target itself, a federal building, made perfect sense,\u00a0\u00bb he added.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0\u00bbWith Pratap Chatterjee, our former colleague, quickly scoping out sites on the web, we saw the chatter from far-right groups and realized that April 19 was an important anniversary. It was a matter of ‘connecting the dots’,\u00a0\u00bb said Lobe.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit \u00eatre lu avec la mention classique \u00e0 l’esprit, Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only..]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Comment l’Espagne a r\u00e9ussi sa RDA (Revolution in Democratic Affairs) 19 mars 2004 Nous publions un texte de Inter Press Service (IPS), dont l’un des journalistes les plus appr\u00e9ci\u00e9s est Jim Lobe. Ce texte nous rapporte le processus d’intervention et de manipulation des informations par le gouvernement Aznar, entre le 11 et le 14 mars… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[869],"class_list":["post-65904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires","tag-aznar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}