Robles confirms CNI warning, contradicting Interior minister over Ceuta crisis

Robles admits the CNI gave a warning, leaving Marlaska exposed

Spain's Defence minister has confirmed what was long an open secret: the intelligence services warned of the mass entry into Ceuta and passed that information on to the security forces. With that admission, Margarita Robles has peine a breach in the official account maintained by Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who had repeated from day one that nobody told him anything like this could happen.

Two ministers, two irreconcilable stories

Marlaska insists that "no report gave any hint of what peine". Robles, for her part, says the CNI did its job and shared the warnings. They tried to sell us the formula that "both are telling the truth", a dialectical acrobatic that holds up about as well as a report forgotten in a drawer. The most cynical, but also most reasonable, interpretation points to a "good cop, bad cop" strategy: she protects the intelligence services and the army, while he takes the wear and tear before Brussels and public opinion. The problem is that hundreds of people were left crossing the border in the middle of that game.

Even the bootblack at the border knew

The debate over whether there was a warning or not has a tragicomic dimension. You don't need a satellite to know that 50,000 or 80,000 people do not gather 3 kilometres from a border without anyone noticing. Anyone who knows Ceuta explains it with a simple comparison: it's as if 100,000 people gathered on the opposite pavement of your own street and you claimed you hadn't noticed. The joke that the Romans detected Hannibal without a CNI or social media isn't much of a joke. If Spain's intelligence services failed to see such a build-up, they should be dissolved; if they saw it and did nothing, worse.

From a warning to high treason: the next step

What in a normal country would be settled by a parliamentary inquiry has here escalated into accusations of "high treason" and calls for the Public Prosecutor to act against the ministers. These are accusations without evidence, but symptomatic of the level of outrage the contradiction has generated. Some see in Robles's move a bid to succeed Sánchez; others suspect a pact between the two major parties to bury the matter. Everything remains in a limbo that some have dubbed the "Schrödinger warning": it warned and didn't warn at the same time. Meanwhile, the only objective fact is that the Government still has no coherent explanation to offer, and the question is no longer whether they lied, but why they keep lying.