El confidente y el terrorista

Stopping criminals before they commit a crime is not only the plot of Minority Report, the famous film by Steven Spielberg. It is also the faith that, since the attack on the Twin Towers, drives the misnamed "war on terror." Not only the detainees (guilty or innocent, that seems secondary), but the very concept of crime and even factual reality creak in its gears. The preventive report in Spain boasts of more than eight hundred detainees, but eight out of ten have been acquitted. Beyond the field of jihadism, this chronicle deals with the quality of information, its importance for life. The true stories that the authors rescue (and that at times seem like something out of science fiction) explore the intersection between propaganda and life. In that blind spot, the story of a mother who denounced her ex-husband for traveling to Afghanistan in 2001 without anyone paying attention to her takes place; that of some police officers who are experts in the use of photocopiers in a montage that alarmed the United States; that of an informer whose false testimony allowed eleven immigrants from Barcelona's Raval to be convicted; and that of some beardless terrorists and their leader, the imam of Ripoll, who went unnoticed by the police radar until the attack on La Rambla in 2017.