A non-profit government watchdog has succeeded in getting the US to release videotapes of a plane striking the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

The conservative group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request in December 2004, which was denied a month later, the group says.

The Pentagon said it could not release the videos in question because they were part of an ongoing investigation against al-Qaeda plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, according to Judicial Watch.

Judicial Watch sued the government over its refusal, saying there was “no legal basis” for it.

Government resistance collapsed after a court sentenced Moussaoui to life in prison for his role in the 9/11 attacks, and they agreed to release the video, a Judicial Watch spokeswoman told the BBC.

Conspiracy theories

Judicial Watch describes itself as a conservative, non-partisan foundation that fights government corruption.

The organisation’s president, Tom Fitton, said in a statement he hoped the release of the footage would “put to rest the conspiracy theories involving American Airlines 77”, the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

His remark was apparently a reference to ideas aired in books such as Thierry Meyssan’s The Pentagate, which argues that a missile, not a plane, struck the headquarters of the US defence department.

The French journalist and left-wing activist claims the US government itself was behind the attacks.

Two books he published on the subject were worldwide bestsellers.

A Pentagon spokesman, Glen Flood, said in 2002 Mr Meyssan’s first book was “a slap in the face and real offence to the American people”.
bbc.co.uk

“What the president has said all along is that he wants to make sure that people who become American citizens have a command of the English language,” Snow said. “It’s as simple as that.”
guardian.co.uk

Oh man, too easy…I won’t say it.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Louisiana raised its Hurricane Katrina death toll by 281 Friday to 1,577 after including more out-of-state evacuees whose deaths were deemed related to the storm or its grueling aftermath.

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals decided that if residents’ deaths were hastened by the stress and trauma associated with relocating – or even an accidental injury during travel – those deaths should be counted in the toll.

“Katrina was a tragedy like no other, and the human toll of the tragedy extends further than our traditional definition of a storm-related death,” said Dr. Louis Cataldie, medical incident commander for Louisiana.

Louisiana officials asked other states to classify evacuees’ deaths as storm-related if they occurred between Aug. 27 – two days before the storm hit – and Oct. 1 and met several general requirements.

During that period, 480 evacuees died in 30 states – mostly Texas, Mississippi and Alabama – of causes found to be related to Katrina. Some of those deaths were reported previously; the state’s toll is up 281 from the last report, in February.
guardian.co.uk

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) – Bolivia outlined on Tuesday its plan to redistribute idle land to the country’s poor peasants, ruling out mass expropriations and proposing instead the swift distribution of state-owned property.

The announcement came two weeks after leftist President Evo Morales nationalized the energy industry, surprising neighboring countries and foreign oil companies that had expected to be consulted before Bolivia took action.

Tuesday’s announcement was another step by Morales’ government to increase state control of the country’s resources, but officials tried to soothe landowners’ fears of arbitrary expropriations by vowing that no productive farmland would be seized.
news.yahoo.com

MOSCOW (AFP) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez plans to visit Russia later this summer after Venezuela signalled interest in buying Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets to replace its US-made F-16s.
news.yahoo.com

U.S. Gov’t Blows it Again: Venezuela to Replace U.S. F-16 Fighters With Russian Su-35s
he U.S. government and it’s wealthy private weapons dealers rarely see an arms deal they do not like – regardless of the paramilitary death squads (e.g. Colombia) and the War Lords (e.g. Africa) in whose hands those weapons end up – and without regard for the innocent people who are maimed and killed by them. The movie, Lord of War, starred by Nicholas Cage, does an excellent job of depicting this U.S./Israeli trafficking in arms throughout the world – a film that can now be rented and one we highly recommend to Axis readers. But passing strange, the U.S. has denied its insatiable appetite for selling weapons in the case of Venezuela, a sovereign, democratic nation in its own hemisphere.

Chavez accused of ties to terrorists
Venezuela has allowed its intelligence service to become a clone of Cuba’s while it shelters groups with ties to Middle East terrorists and allows weapons from its official stockpiles to reach Colombian guerrillas, a senior U.S. official said yesterday.

Those were the principal reasons why the Bush administration blacklisted Venezuela on Monday, saying it has failed to fully cooperate on counterterrorism, Thomas A. Shannon, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

“It’s our hope now that we’ve gotten their attention,” he said of the Venezuelans, who are banned from purchasing U.S. weapons because of the listing. “We hope that we are going to be in a position where we can talk with them and look for how we can improve [our] cooperation.”

NY Times: Seeking United Latin America, Venezuela’s Chavez Is a Divider
BOGOTa, Colombia, May 19 As Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, insinuates himself deeper in the politics of his region, something of a backlash is building among his neighbors.

Mr. Chavez, stridently anti-American, leftist and never short on words, has cast himself as spokesman for a united Latin America free of Washington’s influence. He has backed Bolivia’s recent gas nationalization, set up his own Socialist trade bloc and jumped into the middle of disputes between his neighbors, even when no one has asked.

Some nations are beginning to take umbrage. The mere association with Mr. Chavez has helped reverse the leads of presidential candidates in Mexico and Peru. Officials from Mexico to Nicaragua, Peru and Brazil have expressed rising impatience at what they see as Mr. Chavez’s meddling and grandstanding, often at their expense.

Diplomatic sparring has broken into the open. Last month, after very public sniping between Mr. Chavez and Peru’s president, Alejandro Toledo, the country withdrew its ambassador from Caracas, citing “flagrant interference” in its affairs.

“He goes around shooting from the hip and shooting his mouth off, and that has caused tensions,” Jorge G. Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister, said by phone from New York, where he is teaching at New York University. “The difference now is that he’s picking fights with his friends, not just his adversaries.”

Some of Mr. Chavez’s gestures, like his tendency to tweak the Bush administration, or the aid projects he has bankrolled with Venezuela’s oil money, still leave him popular, particularly among the poor.

But increasingly, the very image of the Venezuelan leader has come to stand for a style of caustic nationalism that many in the region fear, as the divisions provoked by the man who professes to want to unify his region have widened.

“He is beginning to overreach, wanting to be involved in everything,” said Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “It’s a matter of egomania at work here.”

Mr. Chavez, for instance, has taken the uncompromising stand that governments must choose either his vision of continental unity or free trade with Washington, which Mr. Chavez blames for impoverishing the region. “You either have one or the other,” he said. “Either we’re a united community or we’re not.”

Spoken like a true Divider. I’ll go for ‘The Divider’ over ‘The Decider’ any day.

MEXICO CITY – Police enraged by the kidnapping of six officers club unarmed detainees. A bloody battle between steelworkers and police leaves two miners dead. Drug lords post the heads of decapitated police on a fence to show who’s in charge.

Less than two months before Mexicans elect their next president, many fear the country is teetering on the edge of chaos, a perception that could hurt the ruling National Action Party’s chances of keeping the presidency and benefit Mexico’s once-powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose candidate has been trailing badly.

Some blame President Vicente Fox for a weak government. Others say rivals are instigating the violence to create that impression, hoping to hurt National Action candidate Felipe Calderon, who has a slight lead in recent polls.

A poll published Friday in Excelsior newspaper found 50 percent of respondents feared the government was on the brink of losing control. The polling company Parametria conducted face-to-face interviews at 1,000 homes across Mexico. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

The conflicts are “a warning sign,” said Yamel Nares, Parametria’s research director.

Security is the top concern for Mexicans, and Fox has struggled to reform Mexico’s notoriously corrupt police. Meanwhile, drug-related bloodshed has accelerated, with some cities seeing killings almost daily.

In April, suspected drug lords posted the heads of two police officers on a wall outside a government building where four drug traffickers died in a Jan. 27 shootout with officers in the Pacific resort of Acapulco.

A sign nearby read: “So that you learn to respect.”

Last week, Zapatista rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos said Mexico was in a “state of rage,” and warned that tensions were similar to those that preceded the Zapatistas’ brief armed uprising in January 1994 in the southern state of Chiapas.

He said his group is committed to peace, but many fear his increased public profile after years of hiding out in the jungle could foreshadow greater polarization among Mexican voters.

The masked leader said a May 3 clash that left a teenager dead and scores injured in San Salvador Atenco, 15 miles northeast of Mexico City, is an example of the growing tensions.

Marcos has been leading nearly daily demonstrations in the town following the incident, which began when a radical group of townspeople kidnapped and beat six policemen in a dispute over unlicensed flower vendors. Police responded with rage the next day. Television crews captured officers repeatedly beating unarmed protesters, and several detained women alleged officers raped them.

The clash followed another bloody battle between steelworkers and police trying to break up an illegal strike at a plant in Lazaro Cardenas last month. Unions later threatened to shut down the country.

George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary, said the violence reflects Fox’s lack of leadership.

“The state has become much weaker under his watch,” Grayson said.

Recent polls show Calderon has overtaken longtime presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whom opponents have portrayed as a leftist demagogue similar to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

But that could change if PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo can convince voters that Mexico was more stable under his party’s 71-year reign, which ended with Fox’s victory in 2000. Mexican law bars presidents from seeking re-election.

Madrazo has tried to paint himself as the law-and-order candidate „ though so far his poll numbers have remained well behind those of Calderon and Lopez Obrador.

“It’s not going to help Lopez Obrador who has been associated with the rabble rousers, but Madrazo can come out and say with his party at least Mexico had continued stability,” Grayson said.

Gerardo Aranda, a tourism guide in Mexico City, said he won’t go back to the PRI, but he doesn’t know who he will vote for.

“No one really knows now what could happen next,” he said. “All the candidates are bad. … There is so much anger toward the government, everyone is against everything.”
news.yahoo.com

JERUSALEM – America can look to Israel as a valuable test case as it contemplates construction of a fence along the Mexican border.

The Jewish state is largely achieving its goal of keeping out Palestinian suicide bombers through a sprawling complex of fences, electric sensors and concrete slabs that snake in and out of the West Bank. But building the barrier has been a gut-wrenching process, fraught with political and diplomatic hurdles, that has worsened Israel’s relations with its neighbors.

To be sure, there are key differences. Most important, the Israeli structure frequently juts into territory claimed by the Palestinians. The American fence would run along a recognized border.
msnbc.msn.com

The Mexican War of 1848 was a big land-grab. The Southwest of the US is a lot like the West Bank.

The United States on Thursday published a draft of a new international treaty that would forbid the production of fissionable materials for use in nuclear weapons, overriding Israel’s objections to the proposed document.

The draft, which was presented to the UN Disarmament Commission in Geneva, aims to “freeze” existing stocks of fissionable materials worldwide in order to keep them from expanding.

Although Washington sent messages to Israel assuring it that it has nothing to fear from the treaty, Jerusalem is worried by any move that might erode its policy of nuclear ambiguity and generate future pressures on it over its nuclear program. As a result, Israel made a last-minute effort to persuade the U.S. not to submit the draft for discussion: The chairman and deputy chairman of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, Gideon Frank and Eli Levita, were in Washington last week, where they are believed to have raised this issue with their American counterparts.
haaretz.com

And why pray-tell is Israel allowed to maintain a policy of ‘nuclear ambiguity’? Where is the IAEA?

DAMASCUS – Alarms are ringing in London that the British army is being severely defeated in Iraq, as the city of Basra (where its 7th Armored Brigade has been based since 2003) slips rapidly into uncontrollable sectarian violence.

Basra has always been troublesome. From there, two uprisings were launched against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 1999, only to be crushed with great force by the currently imprisoned dictator. British officials, though, refuse to accept the reality that since entering the city on April 6, 2003, they have done nothing to eradicate sectarian militias, and violence is now exploding in the southern Iraqi city, with nobody able to bring it to a halt.

Unrest escalated when a British helicopter was shot down in Basra on May 6 by a shoulder-launched missile, killing five British
troops. British Defense Minister Des Browne, learning from his US counterpart Donald Rumsfeld, played down the event, calling it “an isolated incident” that had been “magnified” by the press. Coinciding with Browne’s statement was a roadside bomb that killed two British soldiers in Basra this Monday, bringing the number of British deaths in Iraq since 2003 to 111.

British troops can no longer travel on foot, for fear of ambushes, and have to use helicopters as taxis. As London digests this “magnified” reality, it plans to present the Iraqi police force in the south with 814 new cars, costing a total of US$145 million.

Basra, a predominantly Shi’ite city, has been won over from the British by the rebel-cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The young rebel gained the minds and hearts of the inhabitants of Basra when he began his rebellion against the Americans, and then-prime minister Iyad Allawi, in 2004. The people of Basra originally welcomed the British as liberators, but the expression on everybody’s face was: “Thank you for what you did and for helping us get rid of Saddam. Now, when are you leaving?”

Muqtada found an excited crowd willing to listen to his anti-Anglo-American rhetoric in 2004-05 and was able to recruit members of the British-trained Iraqi police force in Basra into his Mehdi Army, where they now serve as undercover agents for Muqtada. By day, they officially patrol the streets and gather information about logistics, and by night, they don the costume of the Mehdi Army and pick fights with traditional enemies of Muqtada.

Today, Muqtada’s pictures are plastered all over the streets of Basra, in the police station and in the homes of private citizens, who pray for his long life and good health, claiming that he is saving them from both the occupation and the Sunni community. He has particular influence among the city’s poor and youth.

A Basra under Muqtada’s control, however, means a mini-theocracy in Iraq. Alcohol is banned and veiling is becoming a must. Women are warned to put the veil on when they venture outdoors in Basra to avoid being harrassed by armed militias. Merchants who sold alcohol have been executed or attacked.
atimes.com

WASHINGTON, May 17 President Bush’s top advisers have recommended a broad new approach to dealing with North Korea that would include beginning negotiations on a peace treaty, even while efforts to dismantle the country’s nuclear program are still under way, senior administration officials and Asian diplomats say.

Aides say Mr. Bush is very likely to approve the new approach, which has been hotly debated among different factions within the administration. But he will not do so unless North Korea returns to multinational negotiations over its nuclear program. The talks have been stalled since September.

North Koreans have long demanded a peace treaty, which would replace the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War.

For several years after he first took office, Mr. Bush vowed not to end North Korea’s economic and diplomatic isolation until it entirely dismantled its nuclear program. That stance later softened, and the administration said some benefits to North Korea could begin to flow as significant dismantlement took place. Now, if the president allows talks about a peace treaty to take place on a parallel track with six-nation talks on disarmament, it will signal another major change of tactics.

The decision to consider a change may have been influenced in part by growing concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. One senior Asian official who has been briefed on the administration’s discussions about what to do next said, “There is a sense that they can’t leave Korea out there as a model for what the Iranians hope to become a nuclear state that can say no to outside pressure.”
nytimes.com