Barcelona terror warning: 'If the document is indeed false, who created it?'

[Tony Gosling]

How a Dubious CIA Document Is Fueling Tensions in Catalonia
https://theintercept.com/2017/09/30/catalonia-cia-report-mossos-el-periodico/

Zach Campbell 2017-09-30T09:10:11+00:00
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=176209#176209

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. At the
same time, 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 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.

The revelation had huge implications—if true, it
would represent a case of gross negligence on the
part of the Catalan police and evidence that
Catalonia’s president, interior minister, and
police chief had lied to the public. But El
Periodico’s initial story unraveled quickly: Soon
after its publication, local journalists
questioned the veracity of the document.
Supposedly authored by the CIA, it was plagued
with spelling and formatting errors typical of
Spanish speakers. Even WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange tweeted that he thought it looked fake.

The publication of the document raises many
questions. If it is indeed fake, was it created
by El Periódico, or did the newspaper get spun a
fabrication by an outside source who was intent
on undermining trust in Catalonia’s authorities?
Just over one month after the attacks in
Barcelona and prior to Catalonia’s impending
referendum, The Intercept has delved into the
strange case in an effort to shine light on the
murky origins of the alleged CIA report.

The story started as a blip in the live coverage
of the attack on Aug. 17, 2017. Less than one
hour after a large van had rammed through crowds
of people on Las Ramblas, El Periódico published
an entry on its live blog stating that the “CIA
warned the Mossos two months ago that Barcelona,
specifically [Las Ramblas], could be the location
of a terrorist attack like the attack that
happened today.” At the time, dead bodies were
still scattered across the street’s pedestrian center.

El Periódico wasn’t the only Spanish newspaper
publishing articles trying to prove that police
had been warned of a potential attack. In the
days following the incident, for example, El País
ran a story stating that Belgian intelligence had
alerted the Mossos about one of the attackers
earlier this year. But the El País report was
quickly debunked. Still, the Spanish and Catalan
press were eager for the police negligence story.

El Periódico published the first document on Aug.
31, which it claimed was a section of a CIA
report about a potential attack in Barcelona.
Days earlier, Catalonia’s president and interior
minister had both made public statements saying
that there had been no warning from the CIA, in
response to El Periódico’s post on the day of the attack.

As the backlash continued, Hernàndez revised his
story again. The published document, he said,
wasn’t an original after all—the newspaper had
created it based on the text of the original.
Hernàndez maintained that his source had, just
before publishing, requested that the original
document not be published. So El Periódico mocked-up its own version.

Hernàndez stands by his reporting on the case. He
said in an interview with The Intercept that the
only error El Periódico made was to not initially
state that the purported CIA document was an
inauthentic version that the newspaper’s staff had recreated.

According to Hernàndez, he first heard about the
alleged CIA notice from two sources in the
Catalan government on two separate occasions in
late May. (In interviews with other media,
Hernàndez has said these two conversations took
place in June.) The first source, he says, tipped
him off to the existence of the warning, and the
second, a day later, read him its contents. Both
sources said the warning was from the CIA and had
been sent to the Mossos raising alarm about a
potential attack in Barcelona. Hernàndez says he
was not physically shown the document in either meeting.

Journalists at El Periódico began investigating
further, Hernàndez says, after the Catalan
president, interior minister and police chief
denied the existence of a CIA warning in the days
following the attack. That’s when, he says, they
obtained the alleged document. Hernàndez would
not discuss whether or not he tried to verify the
document with sources in the U.S.
“This is a debate between truth and lies.”

“We had two sources,” Hernandez explains, “so
either they both deceived us in the moment, and
this warning was never sent and was an invention,
or [the Catalan officials] deceived the public by
denying the existence of the warning.”

Hernàndez’s battle seems almost personal: “If on
Aug. 20, the president of the [Catalan
government] hadn’t denied the existence of the
warning, we wouldn’t have looked further into
it,” he says. “This is a debate between truth and lies.”

The CIA and Office of the Director of National
Intelligence did not respond to repeated requests
for comment. Press officers from the National
Counterterrorism Center refused to speak about the case.

However, in response to a request under the
Freedom of Information Act, the National
Counterterrorism Center did state that it had no
record of any communications sent in 2017 between
its office, Spanish counterterrorism police, or the Mossos.

Hernandez argues that the communication was
classified, and thus there would have been no
record available under FOIA. But Sally Nicholson,
FOIA Chief for the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, the agency responsible for
National Counterterrorism Center records, says
that in the case of her agency, that is not how it works.

“If there had been communications but they were
classified, the FOIA response would have said
so,” Nicholson explains. “If you have a request
for something that an agency can’t admit to
doing, can’t confirm or deny, you still get that
answer. You’ll get ‘we can’t confirm or deny,
because just by confirming or denying it would give out a classified fact.’”

“If we had an exclusion for records, we would
cite the exclusion in the response,” Nicholson
adds, “in this case, there are no exclusions that are being cited.”
People stroll on Las Ramblas in Barcelona on
April 23, 2017. Photo: Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images

Las Ramblas is like Barcelona’s Times Square—one
of the city’s central streets and tourist
destinations. As much now as before the attack,
the street’s pedestrian walkway, which leads from
the city’s central square to the Mediterranean
sea, is constantly packed with tourists, street
vendors, restaurants and the occasional artist.
Even before the attack, police flanked either
side of the entrance, sporting submachine guns and military-style police vans.

After the attack, police quickly found plans for
what would have been a larger, more deadly
atrocity: the detonation of a rental truck full
of gas canisters next to the Sagrada Familia,
another one of Barcelona’s famous landmarks. That
plan was foiled when the person modifying the gas
canisters set them off prematurely in a house
about 120 miles south of Barcelona.

For people on both sides of the Catalan
independence movement, the Barcelona attack came
to represent a grave example of the other sides’
failings, explains Josep Àngel Guimerà, a
journalism professor at the Autonomous University
of Barcelona. Separatist press argued that there
was a lack of communication between Spanish and
Catalan counterterrorism police, says Guimerà.
For unionists—with the help of El Periódico’s
reporting—the attack came to represent the
failings of the Catalan police and three top
figures in the independence movement.

Guimerà notes that journalists on both sides of
the movement were quick to react to the
publication of the alleged CIA report. “All of
the media that stand opposed to the Catalan
independence movement believed Enric [Hernàndez,
the director of El Periódico]. And all of those
that support the movement doubted him,” says
Guimerà. “There was an almost-automatic response
on behalf of the media to believe the warning or not.”

Another issue is that Spanish media don’t
typically fact-check their articles or
investigations, says María Ramírez, a journalist
with two decades of experience working for
Spanish media. Ramírez is quick to add that
individual journalists do often scrutinize and
fact-check their own work, but it’s not a common practice.

“There is no newspaper in Spain that has
processes of fact-checking like in the U.S.,“
Ramírez, now a journalism fellow at Harvard,
explains. “Typically [Spanish journalists], when
a source passes them a document, will publish it
and that’s it. It would be much more valuable to
find another source and build a narrative to explain.”

“If you just publish without checking,” she adds,
“you’re not doing your job for readers.”

Beyond that lies another question: If the
document is indeed false, who created it?

Journalist Carlos Enrique Bayo, head of
investigations at Madrid-based news organization
Público, has been working on cases like these for
a year and a half. In 2016, he and a colleague,
Patricia López, obtained explosive recordings of
conversations that took place inside the office
of Spain’s then-Minister of Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz.

The publication of the conversations—in which
Fernández Díaz and the former head of the Catalan
anti-fraud office can be heard discussing a
secret political police force—triggered a major
investigation in the Spanish Congress.
Congressional investigators verified that
Fernández Díaz had, during his tenure as Spain’s
interior minister, created a covert police unit
tasked with obstructing corruption investigations
into the conservative People’s Party, which has
been in government in Spain since 2011. According
to the congressional probe, the political police
also worked to investigate Fernández Díaz’s
opponents, among them people involved with the
rising leftist-populist movement in Spain and the
independence movement in Catalonia.

In both cases, congressional investigators found
that Spanish police had leaked falsified
documents to the press in order to discredit the
then-Interior Minister’s adversaries. Bayo notes
that one of those police, José Luis Olivera, now
leads CITCO, the counterterrorism agency that
supposedly received the purported U.S.
intelligence document published by El Periódico.
(CITCO did not respond to requests for comment.)

Is this a smoking gun? Bayo says no, it is not.
But, he adds, it is strange that “right now, a
document would appear, written in terrible
English, that they say was sent by U.S.
intelligence directly to the Mossos, when
evidently intelligence agencies typically speak among each other.”

Josep Àngel Guimerà, the journalism professor,
agrees. While it is impossible to be certain
about what happened, he says he blames a
politically-minded leak and journalists who don’t fact check.

“I’m sure there is a report somewhere that says
generally that Las Ramblas is a target,” Guimerà
remarks. But, he adds: “Out of one grain of sand,
there are people here that have tried to build a mountain.”


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. At the
same time, 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 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.

The revelation had huge implications—if true, it
would represent a case of gross negligence on the
part of the Catalan police and evidence that
Catalonia’s president, interior minister, and
police chief had lied to the public. But El
Periodico’s initial story unraveled quickly: Soon
after its publication, local journalists
questioned the veracity of the document.
Supposedly authored by the CIA, it was plagued
with spelling and formatting errors typical of
Spanish speakers. Even WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange tweeted that he thought it looked fake.

The publication of the document raises many
questions. If it is indeed fake, was it created
by El Periódico, or did the newspaper get spun a
fabrication by an outside source who was intent
on undermining trust in Catalonia’s authorities?
Just over one month after the attacks in
Barcelona and prior to Catalonia’s impending
referendum, The Intercept has delved into the
strange case in an effort to shine light on the
murky origins of the alleged CIA report.

The story started as a blip in the live coverage
of the attack on Aug. 17, 2017. Less than one
hour after a large van had rammed through crowds
of people on Las Ramblas, El Periódico published
an entry on its live blog stating that the “CIA
warned the Mossos two months ago that Barcelona,
specifically [Las Ramblas], could be the location
of a terrorist attack like the attack that
happened today.” At the time, dead bodies were
still scattered across the street’s pedestrian center.

El Periódico wasn’t the only Spanish newspaper
publishing articles trying to prove that police
had been warned of a potential attack. In the
days following the incident, for example, El País
ran a story stating that Belgian intelligence had
alerted the Mossos about one of the attackers
earlier this year. But the El País report was
quickly debunked. Still, the Spanish and Catalan
press were eager for the police negligence story.

El Periódico published the first document on Aug.
31, which it claimed was a section of a CIA
report about a potential attack in Barcelona.
Days earlier, Catalonia’s president and interior
minister had both made public statements saying
that there had been no warning from the CIA, in
response to El Periódico’s post on the day of the attack.

Josep Lluís Trapero, head of the Mossos, held a
press conference to say the same, though he added
one small detail—the Mossos did receive a warning
in May about a potential attack in Barcelona, but
it wasn’t from the CIA and it was sent to all
levels of Spanish police. Trapero said that the
Mossos, alongside the Spanish national police,
military police and counterterrorism officials,
had all determined the notice to be of “very low
quality.” And either way, Trapero insisted, El Periódico’s document was false.

Still, the story was picked up all over Spain and
internationally. Politicians and journalists
accused Catalonia’s president, interior minister,
and police chief of lying to the public about the
alleged CIA warning. Each of the three officials
were responsible for critical aspects of Catalan
governance and all three supported the
independence movement. With the Oct. 1 referendum
looming, the accusations of negligence and
misinformation were significant and damaging.

Enric Hernàndez, director of El Periódico,
backpedaled in response to questions about the
document’s veracity. In an interview with a
Catalan radio station on the same day he
published the purported CIA warning, Hernàndez
stated that the document was authored by the CIA,
but said that it was the U.S. National
Counterterrorism Center, not the CIA, that had
sent the warning to the Catalan police.

Hernàndez added that the warning had also been
sent to other Spanish police forces. When asked
why he had singled out the Mossos for criticism,
he avoided the question. And he bizarrely blamed
email encryption for the typos and formatting
errors that had appeared in the document.

The following day, Sept. 1, Hernàndez published
another article about the alleged CIA warning,
including what he called a complete version of
the document. The document was similar to the
original, with some of the typos corrected. The
accompanying article no longer mentioned the CIA,
and instead adopted a more generic term:
“American intelligence.” Hernandez said the
document had been sent from the National
Counterterrorism Center to the Mossos and also to
CITCO, Spanish counterterrorism police.

As the backlash continued, Hernàndez revised his
story again. The published document, he said,
wasn’t an original after all—the newspaper had
created it based on the text of the original.
Hernàndez maintained that his source had, just
before publishing, requested that the original
document not be published. So El Periódico mocked-up its own version.
Josep Lluis Trapero, chief of the Catalan
regional police “Mossos D’Esquadra” and Interior
Minister for the Catalan government Joaquim Forn,
left, give a press conference in Barcelona on
Aug. 31, 2017. Photo: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images

Hernàndez stands by his reporting on the case. He
said in an interview with The Intercept that the
only error El Periódico made was to not initially
state that the purported CIA document was an
inauthentic version that the newspaper’s staff had recreated.

According to Hernàndez, he first heard about the
alleged CIA notice from two sources in the
Catalan government on two separate occasions in
late May. (In interviews with other media,
Hernàndez has said these two conversations took
place in June.) The first source, he says, tipped
him off to the existence of the warning, and the
second, a day later, read him its contents. Both
sources said the warning was from the CIA and had
been sent to the Mossos raising alarm about a
potential attack in Barcelona. Hernàndez says he
was not physically shown the document in either meeting.

Journalists at El Periódico began investigating
further, Hernàndez says, after the Catalan
president, interior minister and police chief
denied the existence of a CIA warning in the days
following the attack. That’s when, he says, they
obtained the alleged document. Hernàndez would
not discuss whether or not he tried to verify the
document with sources in the U.S.
“This is a debate between truth and lies.”

“We had two sources,” Hernandez explains, “so
either they both deceived us in the moment, and
this warning was never sent and was an invention,
or [the Catalan officials] deceived the public by
denying the existence of the warning.”

Hernàndez’s battle seems almost personal: “If on
Aug. 20, the president of the [Catalan
government] hadn’t denied the existence of the
warning, we wouldn’t have looked further into
it,” he says. “This is a debate between truth and lies.”

The CIA and Office of the Director of National
Intelligence did not respond to repeated requests
for comment. Press officers from the National
Counterterrorism Center refused to speak about the case.

However, in response to a request under the
Freedom of Information Act, the National
Counterterrorism Center did state that it had no
record of any communications sent in 2017 between
its office, Spanish counterterrorism police, or the Mossos.

Hernandez argues that the communication was
classified, and thus there would have been no
record available under FOIA. But Sally Nicholson,
FOIA Chief for the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, the agency responsible for
National Counterterrorism Center records, says
that in the case of her agency, that is not how it works.

“If there had been communications but they were
classified, the FOIA response would have said
so,” Nicholson explains. “If you have a request
for something that an agency can’t admit to
doing, can’t confirm or deny, you still get that
answer. You’ll get ‘we can’t confirm or deny,
because just by confirming or denying it would give out a classified fact.’”

“If we had an exclusion for records, we would
cite the exclusion in the response,” Nicholson
adds, “in this case, there are no exclusions that are being cited.”
People stroll on Las Ramblas in Barcelona on
April 23, 2017. Photo: Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images

Las Ramblas is like Barcelona’s Times Square—one
of the city’s central streets and tourist
destinations. As much now as before the attack,
the street’s pedestrian walkway, which leads from
the city’s central square to the Mediterranean
sea, is constantly packed with tourists, street
vendors, restaurants and the occasional artist.
Even before the attack, police flanked either
side of the entrance, sporting submachine guns and military-style police vans.

After the attack, police quickly found plans for
what would have been a larger, more deadly
atrocity: the detonation of a rental truck full
of gas canisters next to the Sagrada Familia,
another one of Barcelona’s famous landmarks. That
plan was foiled when the person modifying the gas
canisters set them off prematurely in a house
about 120 miles south of Barcelona.

For people on both sides of the Catalan
independence movement, the Barcelona attack came
to represent a grave example of the other sides’
failings, explains Josep Àngel Guimerà, a
journalism professor at the Autonomous University
of Barcelona. Separatist press argued that there
was a lack of communication between Spanish and
Catalan counterterrorism police, says Guimerà.
For unionists—with the help of El Periódico’s
reporting—the attack came to represent the
failings of the Catalan police and three top
figures in the independence movement.

Guimerà notes that journalists on both sides of
the movement were quick to react to the
publication of the alleged CIA report. “All of
the media that stand opposed to the Catalan
independence movement believed Enric [Hernàndez,
the director of El Periódico]. And all of those
that support the movement doubted him,” says
Guimerà. “There was an almost-automatic response
on behalf of the media to believe the warning or not.”

Another issue is that Spanish media don’t
typically fact-check their articles or
investigations, says María Ramírez, a journalist
with two decades of experience working for
Spanish media. Ramírez is quick to add that
individual journalists do often scrutinize and
fact-check their own work, but it’s not a common practice.

“There is no newspaper in Spain that has
processes of fact-checking like in the U.S.,“
Ramírez, now a journalism fellow at Harvard,
explains. “Typically [Spanish journalists], when
a source passes them a document, will publish it
and that’s it. It would be much more valuable to
find another source and build a narrative to explain.”

“If you just publish without checking,” she adds,
“you’re not doing your job for readers.”

Beyond that lies another question: If the
document is indeed false, who created it?
A police officer patrols on Las Ramblas on Aug.
18, 2017, following a terror attack in Barcelona.
Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images

Journalist Carlos Enrique Bayo, head of
investigations at Madrid-based news organization
Público, has been working on cases like these for
a year and a half. In 2016, he and a colleague,
Patricia López, obtained explosive recordings of
conversations that took place inside the office
of Spain’s then-Minister of Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz.

The publication of the conversations—in which
Fernández Díaz and the former head of the Catalan
anti-fraud office can be heard discussing a
secret political police force—triggered a major
investigation in the Spanish Congress.
Congressional investigators verified that
Fernández Díaz had, during his tenure as Spain’s
interior minister, created a covert police unit
tasked with obstructing corruption investigations
into the conservative People’s Party, which has
been in government in Spain since 2011. According
to the congressional probe, the political police
also worked to investigate Fernández Díaz’s
opponents, among them people involved with the
rising leftist-populist movement in Spain and the
independence movement in Catalonia.

In both cases, congressional investigators found
that Spanish police had leaked falsified
documents to the press in order to discredit the
then-Interior Minister’s adversaries. Bayo notes
that one of those police, José Luis Olivera, now
leads CITCO, the counterterrorism agency that
supposedly received the purported U.S.
intelligence document published by El Periódico.
(CITCO did not respond to requests for comment.)

Is this a smoking gun? Bayo says no, it is not.
But, he adds, it is strange that “right now, a
document would appear, written in terrible
English, that they say was sent by U.S.
intelligence directly to the Mossos, when
evidently intelligence agencies typically speak among each other.”

Josep Àngel Guimerà, the journalism professor,
agrees. While it is impossible to be certain
about what happened, he says he blames a
politically-minded leak and journalists who don’t fact check.

“I’m sure there is a report somewhere that says
generally that Las Ramblas is a target,” Guimerà
remarks. But, he adds: “Out of one grain of sand,
there are people here that have tried to build a mountain.”

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"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered
that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that
shall not be made known. What I tell you in
darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27

Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
Covetousnesse be gon: Come, Truth and Love arise.
Patience take the Crown; throw Anger out of dores:
Cast out Hypocrisie and Lust, which follows whores:
Then England sit in rest; Thy sorrows will have end;
Thy Sons will live in peace, and each will be a friend.
http://tinyurl.com/6ct7zh6