Madrid, 11 March

Guess what , tI've just read that the Madrid bombings took place 911 days after 9/11.

 

I just calculated it (using Excel) and it's actually 912 days .

Michael.

 

Micheal, did you include leap year?

 

So did I but both start and finish dates are included in that calculation, whereas were only talking about days after the event so therefore its actually 12/9/01 to 11/3/04 inclusive. which does indeed equal 911 days

Also 11/3 is exactly 6 months after 11/9

Apologies for nerdism and for undermining such a tragic event with my nerdism

 

About Madrid and not London or Paris.

Paris would be unlikely, because the French government wasn't too eager to play second fiddle to Bush.

Madrid was far more likely. But London would be the logical target, as Blair supported Bush so vehemently.

So a possibility is that, while it was not done by ETA (the m.o. is quite different, and the Erri Batasuna have denied and repudiated it) there may be links, at a lower level, between the Etarras and Al Kaeda - there must be a lot of free lance psychopaths that are for sale and do the jobs for the best bidder.

Also, this weekend there is a general election in Spain. Does that mean something?

There is some datum suporting the Al Kaeda thesis: one of the victims was a militant; a cassette with coranic verses was found among the débris, an Al Kaeda faction has claimed the authorship.

And, of course, Arabs feel that part of Spain actually belongs to them - the were in Europe until the 15th century (Cordoba, and all that).

On a more personal level. I keep thinking of the families going from hospital to hospital seeking their kin. It is plain horrible.

 

Yep. If I'd forgotten to include it I'd be one day less, not one day more

Put "11 Sep 2001" into one cell in an Excel spreadsheet, say A1, and "11 Mar 2004" into cell A2. Then in another cell put =A2-A1 and you get 912.

Just to check I tried the same thing with "1 Jan 04" and "2 Jan 04" and got a difference of 1.

Someone is clearly stretching the definition of "days difference" in order to make people go "oooohhhh, spooky!"

Michael.

 

I suppose the speculation is inevitable. US intelligence seem keen to downplay the Al-Qaeda possibility ATM, they've learnt their lesson from the Oklahoma bombing I suppose (where Islamic terrorists were immediately blamed).

If it does turn out to be an ETA/Al-Qaeda collaboration there are some hard lessons to learn about the conduct of the "war on terror" IMO, but now is probably not the best time to rehearse those arguments.

-- Ian

 

Damn my flawed logic :banghead:

 

For me, the tapes with verses from Koran sounds a little obvious - almost like planted evidence. Also, Al-Queda don't usually claim responsibility that quickly. OTOH, Al-Queda is a very loose organization so different cells may operate differently.

ETA have had two recent attempts to bomb stations in Madrid foiled, including the capture of a hell of a lot of dynamite, their preferred explosive and the same as used yesterday. Maybe a radical new ETA faction has taken a change of direction. However, how they think this would advance their cause is beyond me!

Back to the personal thing: a lot of the rescue workers apparently heard the mobile phones of the dead ringing as they carried them out - knowing that it's almost certainly a loved one on the other end. Don't know why but that just brought the tragedy home to me

Michael.

 

That's doubtful. The 2 groups apparent agenda's are so different that they would probably not be the best of bedfellows IMO. On the other hand ETA's assistance and knowledge would have been very useful to Al Qaeda in this attack.

At the moment nobody really knows who was responsible which kind of renders all this speculation pretty worthless IMO

 

See, SKY bloody news again :

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-13011649,00.html

:grrr:

 

Cant see anything wrong with that TBH

 

Paul, that's where I sourced the '911 days' comment. It turns out to be 912 days with a little journalistic licence for added impact .

 

There were several UEFA cup games last night featuring Spanish teams.

Celtic played host to Barcelona. Barcelona had requested the game be postponed, and Celtic agreed to their wishes, but UEFA felt it best to play on.

No music was played in the pre-match build up and singing seemed to be at a minimum. The traditional singing of You'll Never Walk Alone was given an introduction and dedicated to the people effected by the horrific events. It's always a powerful thing to hear 60'000 people singing it, but when dedicated as it was, quite spine tingling.

There was also a minutes silence. However, there was quite a bit of noise from the barca fans during it! At first I thought it was from our fans and was embarassed and shocked! But you could hear it was spanish voices, and it was later mentioned that it was indeed from the barca supporters! Not sure what was being shouted. But as sometimes happens at these things, it was probably one or two people, then you end up with half the ground telling them to be quiet, and thus making MOre noise themselves!

Not sure if this link works?

http://www.servecast.com/asx/celtic/mail/ynwa.asx

 

this 911 / 912 thing, has anyone factored in the exact times of each attack and the zime zone differences between spain and new york? if so would that tip the balance?
cheers


julian

 

There's a political dimension to whether it was ETA or Al-Queda which I hadn't thought about until now. Spain has a general election on Sunday and, whilst it's never easy to judge the way these things influence people, it would probably be in the ruling right-wing Popular Party's interest for people to think it was ETA as Aznar's government have been really cracking down on them. If it turned out to be Al-Queda that wouldn't reflect so well on the PP because it was Aznar who backed the war in Iraq despite massive popular opposition.

No wonder the Spanish government has been trying to push the ETA angle hard. What's more it's sickening that they are stooping to political scheming at a time like this

Michael.

 

Politicians will be politicians. It usually is disgusting but there it is.

FWIW I think it was to big to be ETA's doing; also ETA denied it with very strong words (of course, if one has been reading Agatha Christie (or Daniel Dennett ) one can always think that they did it in order to deny it so as to denigrate the government so as to win morally. But I really think this is too far fetched. Also the MO is so different that I really think it was something else.

But why Madrid? in Europe London would be the favoured target (if you consider England to be Europe, that is :JPS:; Madrid would be the second one. And Rome perhaps the third one (recall the extremely well informed (!) Berlusconi allegations of our culture's superiority over the Muslim world).

There are rumours that there are plans for a new attack on the USA, but there's nothing new in that.

Anyway, if you are a football fan, better watch the cup on TV. Lisbon may well be on line, too. As to me, I hate football, but I happen to live in Lisbon!! And at a choice point for an attack! (Just kidding, I'm not really worried for myself or my family).

Very disturbing times.

 

So Al-Qaeda are now operating in Spain? If this is true, then how long do we wait before the Americans invade, kill thousands of innocent civilians and occupy the country with a puppet government?.....all as part of 'our' ongoing War on Terror of course. Whoops, I forgot, there's no large supplies of natural resources like gas or oil in Spain....looks like another backwards step for the phony War on Terror, more and more people are needlessly getting butchered and the world is in an increasing state of fear (or so the media would have us believe).

If this was Al-Qaeda, then are we next on the list? The US, UK and Spain were the three main players in the 'Coalition of the Willing' during the last Gulf War, so this may have some basis - I haven't been paying much attention to the media, has this been mentioned at all? You've just got to wonder where all this is going, and how many more are going to have to die :newbie:

 

I agree with what Miclealeab and rds have said. I certainly think its too big for Eta alone to carry out. Indeed the type of detonators and exposives are not charateistic of Eta.

I am also not that surprised that it has happened in Spain rather than say London. Doesnt Spain have a long history of clashing with the Muslim culture? In addition, last year a group of Algerian Muslims were arrested in spain after a raid found lots of suspicious equipment that could be for bomb making such as modified mobile phones (the way the Madrid bombs were detonated). After a while they were all released without charge.

Also in 2001 Spain hosted an 8 day conference in Bilbao where top Al queda operatives met with Mohammed Atta to finalise details for the september 11 attack. It seems as if Islamic terrorists have quite a foothold in Spain.

I believe we have to be prepared for more of these type of attacks and they could happen anywhere.

 

As far as radical Islamic terrorsists are concerned it will keep going until western society has been destroyed.