March
11, 2004 (Thursday) A CHILLY morning, biting wind, sunshine; I take Jessica to school. She thrusts her warm little paw into mine as soon as we step out of the front door. She's looking very pale, however, she does not get enough sunshine. [. . .]
The question of who is behind the outrage is puzzling. Jack Straw appears in front of the cameras in Downing Street, wearing his most "solemn" expression; Tony Blair talks of the British people sending their "deep condolences" (he means profound, but he never was a true master of the English language). Television commentators waffle that this is "Europe's 9/11" -- which rather loses a sense of proportion. Straw suggests Al-Qaeda may be behind the bombings, which would be useful to the Straw/Blair duo and to George Bush. Bush appears later before the television cameres, uttering condolences but more incoherent than ever: his pronunciamientos, even when typed out, are quite unintelligible.
The simultaneity of the blasts, all within one or two minutes of 7:40 a.m., does suggest a higher degree of intelligence behind the planning -- something only the IRA or the NATO air forces have been capable of hitherto. IT IS a pity that none of the toady-journalists attending the government press conferences thinks of putting it to Mr Sanctimonious Blair or Mr Lugubrious Straw that the bombing of railroad stations and passenger trains is something which the British and American strategic forces have been practising with some expertise in recent wars, all of them equally illegal. I remember seeing the cruel images provided by a camera placed in the nose cone of an American missile as it streaked towards a passenger train on a bridge in Kosovo -- the final two images being close-ups of terrified faces looking out of the train windows. That was before no less terrified faces looked out of the upper windows of the Twin Towers, of course.
Last April [2003] I already posted a link on the website to a shocking thirty-minute video image of a US gun-ship attack on a mosque in Afghanistan; I can still hear the laconic drawl of the American gunners as they mercilessly hunt down and kill each shadowy figure trying to flee through the surrounding countryside.
It is the hypocrisy of these politicians that gets me
down, after a while. They rely on the short memories of
their voters. It is our duty, out here in the real world, to
remind, even if we cannot hope to see these criminals
called to account.
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David Irving |
It is our duty, out here in the real world, to
remind, even if we cannot hope to see these
criminals called to account.
The
morning news bulletins bring graphic pictures of a shocking
incident a couple of hours ago in Madrid: two hundred
commuters have been killed by ten bombs placed in or under
commuter trains, including two at Atocha station. Of course
I worry briefly as the day wears on about the Madrid part of
my family -- two of the five daughters, and their children:
but they would have phoned hours ago if anything had
happened to one of them. They don't use the trains
anyway.
WITHIN minutes the Spanish government firmly insists the
culprit is the Spanish terrorist organisation ETA
[Euskadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and
Freedom], which is on balance the more likely, as a pair
of ETA terrorists were caught entering the city a week ago
with a vanload of the identical explosives used in this
blast, and were stated at that time to have been about to
bomb trains or railroad stations. Straw splutters, and
"defers" to Madrid's view. The King of Spain makes a very
statesmanlike television broadcast, speaking lucidly and
with real feeling. (He went to the same school as Pilar but
seems to have aged rather faster.)
Was
not the Secretary-General at the time of these NATO outrages
against the people of former Yugoslavia a mousy little
Spaniard, Dr Javier Solana (right), trying to mask
his physical insignificance behind a dagoe's goatee beard?
Did he not rejoice in front of the television cameras over
each successful bombing raid?
