Dear Editor,
The March 11 terrorism attack on Spain did affect the March 14 election, but not because the Spanish people were frightened into submission.
It was because they felt they had been lied to.
Almost immediately after the attack, government officials blamed the attack on the ETA, a Basque separatist group.
They pressured the media into supporting this view and gave out misleading evidence that supported it while withholding evidence that didn’t.
When the news broke that Al-Qaeda may have been involved, it, along with Aznar’s support of the war in Iraq (despite as high as 90 percent of the Spanish population being against it), sealed the election for the Socialists.
The Populist Party would likely still be in control if it wasn’t for their mistake.
It will be interesting to see what happens with our own elections in November considering the information that has come out lately, like the Richard Clarke testimony and the drastically increased cost of the new Medicare Bill that even has Congressional Republicans claiming the Bush administration lied to them.
David Leyden

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