Islamic terrorists across Europe partner with NATO in its Syria proxy war. "Western" governments now commonly partner with terrorists as report finds Spanish State complicit in August 2017 Barcelona terror attack. EU hopes people will still like Middle East “wars”-Alejandro Lopez, wsws.org

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European Union and others “fear the implications of the discrediting of imperialist wars in the Middle East.”…Imam “Es-Satty had contacts with Islamist forces across Europe involved in the NATO-led proxy war against Syria.” 

9/10/19, “Scandal erupts over Público exposure of state complicity in Barcelona attack,” Alejandro Lopez, wsws.org 

“Part I: Podemos and the Catalan nationalists cover for Spanish intelligence” 

“In the month since the online daily Público revealed that Spanish and European intelligence intensively monitored the perpetrators of the August 2017 Barcelona terror attack up until the very day it took place, a bitter battle has unfolded within the Spanish media and political establishment. The Público report provided detailed evidence, based on internal documents, of official foreknowledge of the attack, which was led by a Spanish intelligence asset. Yet the ruling establishment is uniting to denounce the report and pour scorn on the idea that an official conspiracy took place. 

In July, Público published a four-part report after a year-long investigation into relations between Imam Abdelbaki Es-Satty, the leader of the terror cell, and the National Intelligence Centre (CNI). Público based its report on CNI sources and confidential reports on [Iman] Es-Satty and his cell, excerpts of which it published on its site. Refuting the official account that these attackers flew under the radar, surprising Europe’s intelligence agencies as they prepared the deadliest terrorist attack in Spain since Al Qaeda’s 2004 Madrid bombings, Público’s documentation shows that: 

*The CNI recruited Es-Satty as an informer at least as far back as 2014, using a Gmail account for communications between Es-Satty and his CNI handler. 

*The intelligence services falsified his legal files to prevent his expulsion after he was found guilty of drug-trafficking. He even received aid from the CNI to install him as an Imam in the small Catalan town of Ripoll, although he was known to have been radicalised for a long time, as far back as 2004, when he was linked to the attacks in Casablanca on 16 May 2003. 

*The CNI wiped Es-Satty’s record so that Ripoll’s Muslim community would not be aware of his history; this also hindered Catalan regional police as they began to investigate the attacks. 

“The CNI knew the movements of some of the cell’s members in France, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, and monitored phone conversations between them. Es-Satty had contacts with Islamist forces across Europe involved in the NATO-led proxy war against Syria, including jihadist circles in Belgium. The CNI’s intense monitoring of his cell required the collaboration of European intelligence agencies, including French intelligence, which has acknowledged that it spied on members of Es-Satty’s cell who travelled to Paris shortly before the Barcelona attack. 

*The CNI devoted an extraordinary level of surveillance to members of the cell, including those who had no criminal record until the day of the attacks. The CNI, Público writes, was “listening to and transcribing all conversations between those young Muslims, who were not supposedly yet related to any jihadist plot—executing the most exhaustive possible intelligence controls, which require considerable material and human resources.” 

*After the attack, CNI officers involved in dealing with Es-Satty were posted to a remote African country, and another was “moved to the capital of a Latin American country with his family.” 

The Público report is politically devastating. To date, there has been no attempt by any of its detractors to examine or discredit the documents upon which it is based. It provides powerful evidence that the Spanish government, which was publicly seeking a pretext to impose martial law before the October 2017 declaration of Catalan independence, knew a terror cell existed in Barcelona but decided not to act to dismantle it, at the cost of hundreds of casualties. This has far-reaching political implications. 

The turn to police-state forms of rule and the official legitimization of fascism now underway in Spain and across Europe are based on state criminality and political lies. After the cell carried out its attack, the CNI attempted to hide the evidence of their complicity. And as Spanish police brutally attacked peaceful voters in the Catalan referendum, the Spanish ruling class shifted drastically to the right, promoting the pro-fascist and anti-Catalan nationalist Vox party…. 

The Catalan nationalists,…the Spanish capitalist state, and the European Union—fear the implications of the discrediting of imperialist wars in the Middle East and of the Spanish state apparatus. They are adapting to the rapid shift of the bourgeoisie towards authoritarian and fascistic forms of rule.”




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