Mayhem in Madrid: Cui Bono?(The Last Word)

"The appalling thing," remarked Lord Acton of the French Revolution, "is not the tumult, but the design. Through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of calculating organization. The managers remain studiously concealed and masked; but there is no doubt about their presence from the first." When international terrorists devastated one of Europe's greatest cities last week, television viewers were deluged--as with the events of September 11, 2001--by the tumultuous images of smoking wreckage, the dead and wounded, and the throngs of traumatized survivors.

Before the debris settled came the first arrests. The prime suspects in the Madrid attacks appear to be known terrorists with connections to last year's Casablanca suicide bombings and the events of 9-11. One of the first to be detained, Jamal Zougam, a Moroccan phone salesman, was identified as a likely terrorist as early as August 2001, when Spanish police searched his Madrid apartment. Among Zougam's effects investigators found a video of Mujaheddin fighters in Russian Daghestan and the phone numbers of three members of the al-Qaeda cell allegedly run by Imad Yarkas--who is in jail in Spain under suspicion of having helped to plan the September 11th attacks on the United States. The Moroccan government had warned Spain that Zougam, who was recruited by al-Qaeda as far back as 1997, was in the country. Yet in spite of the damning evidence, Zougam and his half-brother, Mohamed Chaoui, another Moroccan with a shady dossier, were ignored by Spanish authorities in a roundup of 35 suspected al-Qaeda members last September--a roundup that netted Yarkas himself.

Whiffs of official foreknowledge? Perhaps. But in all the tumult--the death, destruction and recriminations--what is the design? Conventional wisdom, retailed by the major media, assures us that the Madrid bombings were an act of retribution against the conservative Aznar government, one of President Bush's staunchest allies in the war on terrorism and the ongoing occupation of Iraq. For his alliance with Bush, Aznar paid a high political price. Shortly after the horrific attacks, thousands of Spanish protesters swept into the streets of Spain's major cities to protest both the attacks and the policies of the incumbent Spanish government. Aznar and his party were voted out of power a few days later, blamed for bringing down the wrath of Islamic terrorists on hundreds of innocent civilians. Spain's prime minister-elect, Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has already pledged to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, or so the media mandarins would have us believe.

But Zapatero--contrary to the official ...