Quotes of the Day

It's hunting season for investigative commissions. In Washington and London, two separate inquiries are pinning down how the allied intelligence services got it so wrong on Iraqi WMD. And in Madrid, a parliamentary investigation is probing the government's response to the devastating March 11 terrorist attacks — and trying to answer the question that has bedeviled Spain ever since: Did the government of Prime Minister José María Aznar mislead the public about who was behind the blasts?

New evidence suggests it may have. At 1:30 p.m. on 3/11, just six hours after bombs exploded on four Madrid commuter trains, killing 191, then Interior Minister Angel Acebes told a press conference that Spanish police and his Ministry had "no doubt that the [Basque] terrorist gang ETA is responsible for this attack." But last week the chief of the police investigation, Jesús de la Morena, told a very different story. Just 90 minutes before Acebes' statement, de la Morena testified, he informed top Interior Ministry officials that he "was skeptical that ETA was responsible ... We didn't know who it was, but we all doubted it was ETA." It was not until two days later — when evidence from a cell phone attached to an unexploded bomb eventually led police to a phone store run by a Moroccan, and their first arrests — that Acebes admitted terrorists linked to al-Qaeda could be involved. Now 19 alleged jihadists await trial.

Spain's first official inquiry into 3/11 has veered quickly from the events leading up to the attacks to the charge that Aznar's Popular Party (PP) government deliberately focused blame on ETA. The alleged motive: fears that evidence of al-Qaeda involvement would drive the electorate — which bitterly opposed Spain's support for the Iraq war — to vote for the Socialists in elections on March 14. "We are faced with two versions," says Jordi Jané, a representative of the moderate Catalan nationalist CiU party. "A police version and a political version. The police had discounted ETA by Friday morning, while the government — though it opened a second line of investigation into an Islamic attack — continued to blame ETA." Whom will Spaniards believe?

The Socialists (PSOE) contend that voters answered that question on March 14, when they turned out Aznar's government and voted in new Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. But the PP alleges that the Socialists illegally encouraged supposedly spontaneous antigovernment rallies on March 13, which fell within the 24-hour pre-election "period of reflection" during which campaigning is prohibited. The PP demanded the mobile-phone records of Socialist politicians, which they said would reveal their collusion, but parliament's legal advisers told them such a release would breach Spanish privacy-protection laws.

So far, the inquiry has provided riveting political theater but little more. Unless both parties get down to examining how the terrorists carried out the atrocities, it won't do much to thwart future attacks. "It's good to have a commission, but honestly I'm not sure anything useful will come of it," says Juan Avilés, director of the University Institute for the Investigation of Internal Security. "I'm afraid the main question will be a political squabble about who was wrong." Still, neither major party wants to let the blame game get out of hand. They struck a deal to keep both Aznar and Zapatero off the witness docket, which upsets the smaller parties. "It's important for Aznar to appear before us," says the CiU's Jané. "He was the Prime Minister ultimately responsible for all decisions. It's not good that the parties put limits on our hearings."

Judge Juan del Olmo's separate judicial investigation of 3/11 isn't dwelling on politics. The arrest last month in Milan of Egyptian Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, whose fingerprints were found in the house where the bombs were prepared, may have brought police closer to the top of the network's command structure. As important as it is to figure out what happened between March 11 and 14, the inquiry into Ahmed's activities will do more to protect Spain.

• JAMES GRAFF
• Fingerpointing at Spain's 3/11 commission