Bono is just the Minister of Defence, but I have to agree that Zapatero's goverment is fighting for all the good causes.

Regarding Catalonia's autonomy statute, this is not something that the Catalan parliament can do on their own. They submitted a draft to the national Parliament and it is not being debated and amended. If it is passed, it will have the rank of Ley Orgánica, second only to the Constitution itself. As such, it cannot contradict the constitution. It would then be possible to file an unconstitutionality appeal before the Constitutional Court, whose ruling would stand. So Lt. Gen. Mena is out of line in any case.

It may be of interest in this case that Mena was due to retire in march, so he may have felt that he did not have anything to lose, or he might really not have realised the impact that his words would have.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman