How A Dubious CIA Document Is Fuelling Tensions In Catalonia
TruePublica Editor: Although this article is 11days old it is still worth reading. When the letters C I A turn up you know that political subterfuge, public deception and general duplicitous strategy is in play, even if nothing else, just to confuse.
By Zach Campbell – The Intercept: Tensions are running high in Barcelona. Last month saw a terrorist attack on one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Las Ramblas, which killed a dozen people and injured more than 100. Now, Barcelona and the greater region of Catalonia are a day away from an independence referendum that has pitted the Catalan and Spanish governments against each other in a way unseen since the fall of Francisco Franco’s military dictatorship in the 1970s.
The central government in Madrid is bent on preventing the Oct. 1 referendum: In the last week, Spanish military police have shut down multiple websites associated with the referendum and raided newspaper offices, TV stations, and print shops in search of the ballots and ballot boxes to be used in the vote. The Spanish interior minister has attempted to seize control of the Catalan police. Meanwhile, two ferries docked in Barcelona’s port are housing thousands of riot police that Madrid has said it plans on using to physically stop the vote. Spanish police have arrested at least a dozen members of the Catalan autonomous regional government and others involved with the independence movement, threatening charges of “sedition” and “rebellion.”
Last month, as the referendum fervor was heating up, leading Spanish daily newspaper El Periódico published a document alleging that the CIA had warned the Catalan police about a potential attack in Barcelona. The document stated that three months before the attack, the CIA had warned the Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, of “unsubstantiated information of unknown veracity” pointing to a summer attack in Barcelona. The document (pictured below) named Las Ramblas as a potential target.