ZAPATERO'S TESTIMONY before the March 11 commission lasted for 15 hours. Of course, many of them were spent because ZP suddenly decided to read in full some reports prepared for him that he had refused to hand to the commissioners before. 'In full' means, for example, including license plate numbers of all cars involved. He accused the former Aznar administration of deceiving the public, and did so in very blunt terms; he said that at the early afternoon of March 11, the day of the attacks, police had dropped the ETA clues because they thought that Islamic terrorists were the culprits. So, according to Zapatero, the fact that Aznar and his ministers said they were investigating both ETA and Islamists was a lie because the police was actually investigating the second possibility.

Just one problem with that: it goes clearly against what each and every chief investigator had said at the same commission some months ago; they insisted that when they found the first clues pointing to Islamic terrorists, they opened a second line of investigation without dropping the ETA line until late Saturday evening. At that time Angel Acebes, Interior minister in Aznar's cabinet, had been in several press conferences televised across the country mentioning the Islamic clues.

The weirdest accusation, which got quite a big echo in the international MSM, is that all the computers in Aznar's offices had been erased prior to the handover. Well, duh. As longs as the documents in print format are there, is it really necessary that the computers, with some private information, phone numbers, drafts of speeches, etc, is given to the successor? Of course not; at least it's not a legal obligation. And this is why this happened just the same when Aznar took over in 1996 from Socialist Felipe Gonzalez.

Moreover, if it's true that there was not "a single document", as Zapatero said yesterday, why did he wait for NINE MONTHS to denounce it? Why himself, and all ministers in the cabinet, had praised in unequivocal terms when the handover took place back in April, that it had been impeccable, and thanked their predecessors in public?

Zapatero was clearly trying to score a political goal.