Word: gals
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...Dirty War, Clean Hands (Cork University Press; 472 pages) is subtitled ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy. The first initials belong to the group that uses violence to try to force the separation of the Basque region from Spain; the second stand for the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (Antiterrorist Liberation Groups), which set out to fight ETA's fire with fire via shootings, bombings and kidnappings. And Spanish democracy is the victim of both...
...GAL began counter attacking ETA in 1983, killing a total of 27 people, most of them across the border in France, where ETA members frequently lie low after perpetrating their atrocities. The GAL toll is a drop in the ocean of blood shed by ETA - some 800 deaths in a reign of terror that has wracked Spain for more than three decades. The GAL operated about one tenth of that time, but what makes them so sinister is that they were not, as at first it appeared, a bunch of far-right fanatics fed up with the law's inability...
...incumbent José María Aznar in 1996, and various inquiries have not found grounds to charge González with a single offense. Not so his former Interior Minister, José Barrionuevo, or his former State Security Director, Rafael Vera; both were convicted over the first GAL-claimed crime, a 1983 kidnapping...
...Dirty War, Clean Hands - the latter referring to the peaceful majority and to certain judges - is a balanced, finely documented tale of how easily democratic institutions can run off the rails. Including inteviews with some of the top figures in the GAL scandal, it is also gripping, often more like reading John le Carré than history. It should be translated into Spanish, French and any language spoken where democracy is taken for granted...
...fantasy language of film, it was the most natural thing for a fella and a gal to burst into song. Just about everybody sang: Cagney, Gable, the Marx Brothers, every cowboy from Gene Autry to John Wayne. And when the stars didn't sing, they danced. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers not only taught the nation new steps but, dancing cheek to cheek, they put love in motion. They defined la belle, la perfectly swell romance...