Pain without answers

Shards of twisted metal scattered by rails. Bodies strewn across platforms. One body blown onto a roof. Severed arms and legs. People screaming and running, blood pouring from wounds on some.

Later, the bodies of the dead, some with cell phones ringing unanswered as frantic relatives try to contact them, being carried away by rescue workers.

"I won't forget this ever. I've seen horror," said Enrique Sanchez, an ambulance worker.

I had thought to title this something like "George Bush makes the world a safer place, chapter 74" or some such - but I decided I couldn't be sarcastic about the worst terrorist attack in Spain's history, which at the most recent count I've seen has left nearly 200 dead and 1,200 more injured.

A total of ten bombs went off in a 15-minute period during Thursday's morning rush hour in four train stations in Madrid. The carnage would have been even worse had police not found and safely detonated three more bombs.

The question that seems to be of greatest concern to officials now is who is responsible. Spanish officials immediately blamed the radical Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, "Basque Homeland and Freedom").

"There is no doubt Eta is responsible," said Spain's interior minister.

"Eta had been looking for a massacre in Spain," the minister, Angel Acebes, said after an emergency cabinet meeting.

"Unfortunately, today it achieved its goal," he told a news conference, saying the security services were certain Eta was behind the blasts.

One of the reasons for pointing to ETA is that the bombers used titadine, a kind of compressed dynamite also found in a bomb-laden van intercepted last month as it headed for Madrid, in an incident blamed at the time on the group.

However, by Thursday evening Acebes was saying that

a tip had led the police to a stolen van in the town of Alcalá de Henares, 35 kilometers, or 25 miles, west of Madrid, a point of departure for the trains that bore the bombs. The van, he said, held seven or eight detonators and some Arabic tapes of verses from the Koran. Acebes, while still asserting that ETA was viewed as the No. 1 suspect, said the discovery had opened "a new line of investigation."

Adding to the suspicion of Islamic terrorists was the fact that

[t]he Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi said it had received a claim of responsibility issued in the name of al-Qaida. The e-mail claim, signed by the shadowy Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, was received at the newspaper's London offices and said the brigade's "death squad" had penetrated "one of the pillars of the crusade alliance, Spain."

"This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America's ally in its war against Islam," the claim said.

However,

[t]he United States believes Al-Masri sometimes falsely claims to be acting on behalf of al-Qaida. The group took credit for blackouts in the United States and London last year. ...

A U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was too early to determine who was responsible. The official noted that al-Qaida usually does not take responsibility for attacks.

In fact, little is known about al-Masri; one source even suggested it could be little more than one person with a computer trying to take credit for events.

At the same time, there is reason to doubt that ETA was the source of the attacks.

Customarily, ETA plants small bombs to strike selected targets, usually along the coast, phones in warnings to the police ahead of time and takes responsibility for the blasts afterward. But the attacks this time ... were well-coordinated, involved a number of terrorists and led to a huge loss of life.

Such coordination in particular is regarded as a hallmark of what might be called an al-Qaeda style. In addition, ETA has been hard hit by arrests in both Spain and France over the last few years, so much so that "many people predicted it had reached a nadir and would soon die out." Basque politicians argued that the massive loss of civilian life was not in keeping with ETA's previous attacks, which had tended to concentrate on police stations and similar targets - previous bombings whose greatest death toll was 21.

But it's possible that may be changing and the very successes there have been against ETA may be producing a more desperate, more radical, more freelancing membership.

[Parliament member Gustavo de] Aristegui, himself a Basque, said in a telephone interview that the planting of bombs was not new to ETA but just seemed that way because previous attempts had been thwarted by the police, who have successfully infiltrated it.

"They've been trying to do this for years," he said. "They tried to plant two huge bombs just after the 14-month truce expired in September 1999. Each one was over 700 kilos," or 1,500 pounds. On Dec. 24, police averted a bombing attempt at Chamartín, another railroad station, arresting two people they suspect of being ETA members. And on Feb. 29, the police stopped a van filled with 530 kilograms of explosives on a back road in Cuenca, southeast of Madrid. They arrested two young men they described as ETA members and said one had said they had planned to attack two conservative newspapers situated in an industrial area of the capital.

Back on November 21 I raised the idea, which terrorist investigators shared, that al-Qaeda was becoming more of a "brand name," an idea rather than an organization. No one knows yet who was responsible for Thursday's bloodshed, but it seems to me that one very dark possibility is that there has been an additional step of removal and non-Islamic groups, who may share little if any of al-Qaeda's politics or philosophy, are nonetheless schooling themselves in its methods.

The fantasy of the entire "war on terrorism" is that it can be "won" by arresting, killing, or otherwise dismantling the leadership of certain specific groups, just like in "regular" warfare among nations. But here, all that seems to do is to turn a few coordinated networks into a mass of uncoordinated little pieces, each one capable of inflicting serious damage and by their very splintered and almost anonymous nature, that much harder to track down. And so we go from bad to worse.

We have to face the truth that we will never "rid the world" of terrorism, even by the narrow definition of it maintained by nation states, which exempt themselves from that rubric. Short of divine intervention - on which I do not count - there will always be those prepared to inflict pain on innocents for their own gain. What we can do, indeed all we can do, is minimize it. Doing that will require strenuous application of the one tool we have thus far refused to employ: I say now, as I have said before, that the only true answer to terrorism, ultimately the only effective "weapon" against terrorism, is justice, a justice that may well mean sacrifices on the part of the haves - and in terms of the world as a whole, that includes virtually all of us - in favor of the have-nots. Not sacrifices of freedoms or philosophies, but of finances.

So I invite you to ask yourself how much you would be prepared to inconvenience yourself, how many (for example) of our high-tech goodies we'd be willing to give up or pay more for, in order to bring that justice to others.

In the meantime, the one thing that is clear here is that, in the words of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, "March 11, 2004, now holds its place in the history of infamy."