Although a precise breakdown of ethnic numbers is not available, the Pentagon’s list of dead and wounded has included dozens of Spanish names. While they are still under- represented in the armed forces as a whole – they made up 9.4 per cent of enlisted men in 2001, compared with 13.4 per cent of the general population – they are over-represented in jobs that involve handling weapons (17.7 per cent).In Iraq, the first US casualty was a Latino non- citizen, a Guatemalan orphan raised in Los Angeles called Jose Gutierrez. [These people are] going to provide them with the means to carry out future wars.”Recent statistics from the Pew Hispanic Centre, a non-partisan think-tank, show that Latinos are already doing the most dangerous combat jobs in disproportionate numbers. That was the figure cited recently by John McLaurin, a deputy assistant secretary of the army, as the size of the “Hispanic … recruiting market”, and it has also been bandied about in the pages of the Army Times.But while officials praise the willingness of Mexican Americans and other Latinos, the strategy has been denounced by anti-war groups as a cynical exploitation of impoverished young men who are lined up to be little more than cannon fodder.Rick Jahnkow, of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft, said: “They are vulnerable economically That’s why they are targeting them. More than 37,000 non-citizens, almost all Latino, are currently enlisted.

Recruiters have even crossed the border into Mexico – to the fury of the Mexican authorities – to look for school-leavers who may have US residency papers.The aim, according to Pentagon officials, is to boost the Latino numbers in the military from roughly 10 per cent to as much as 22 per cent. With the casualty rate in Iraq growing by the day and President George Bush’s worldwide “war on terrorism” showing no signs of abating, a stretched United States military is turning increasingly to Latinos – including tens of thousands of non-citizen immigrants – to do the fighting and dying on its behalf. “By telling only half of the story of the Middle East to the grand jury and by basing an indictment for racketeering on one side of the story, the government seeks to criminalise the conduct of those who disagree with it.”. “It is clear that the express purpose of the indictment is to chill any support for the Palestinian cause and any additional advocacy in favour of the rights of Arabs,” he wrote. In February, Mr al-Arian was indicted on charges that he was the chief North American pointman for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.He was fired from his job, denied bail and placed in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day pending a trial that is not due to start until 2005 at the earliest.Amnesty International and others have denounced the terms of his detention, saying they are tantamount to a presumption of guilt before trial.Mr al-Arian said the prosecutors had no understanding of Middle East politics. A Palestinian university professor being held in solitary confinement on terrorism charges in Florida has urged a federal judge to throw out his case, saying it amounted to a “thoughtless slaughter of First Amendment rights” and sought to criminalise him solely for his political beliefs. She spent much of the 1950s living in poverty with her mother in a one-room flat and only reclaimed her career in the 1970s with her photographic essay on the Nubians.

In the 1980s the German film world grudgingly acknowledged her role as a pioneering documentary maker.Yet even last year, she was investigated for “denying the Holocaust” after she claimed she did not know Gypsies were taken from concentration camps to serve as extras and then sent back to their deaths State prosecutors eventually dropped the case.. Yet despite allegations that she was Hitler’s lover, she claimed to have known nothing about the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and insisted she learned about the concentration camps only after the war.”I always see more of the good and the beautiful than the ugly and the sick,” she said.Riefenstahl spent three years under allied arrest after 1945 before being cleared. “I don’t know what I should apologise for,” she said last year. In Germany the film has been banned since 1945.Cinemas wishing to show it need to obtain special permission.It was followed in 1936 by her documentary on the Berlin Olympic games, Olympia, which won her similar acclaim.Blind to the political aspect of her Nazi film career in later years, she remained unrepentant. She wrote to him offering her talents and the Nazi party engaged her to make films of its Nuremberg rallies.Triumph of the Will, which depicts thousands of goose-stepping Nazi Brownshirts and German civilians spellbound by Hitler, won awards at the Venice and Paris film festivals. “She never denied being an admirer of Hitler but equally she denied that her work was useful to his regime.

She took refuge in naivety.”Riefenstahl heard Hitler speak for the first time at a rally in 1932 and described the experience as so overwhelming that she felt “paralysed”. Last year she released a new film based on her activities as a scuba diver,Impressions under Water.Yet throughout her post-war career she was never able to rid herself of the reputation gained during the 1930s as Hitler’s favourite filmmaker and willing author of some of the Nazi’s most powerful propaganda.”Her work was particularly repellent because it served National Socialism,” said Rainer Oter, a German biographer of Riefenstahl. It was, however, one of the most controversial careers in German cinema history. “Her heart simply stopped.”Mrs Riefenstahl, one of the last famous Nazi-era figures, was an active filmmaker almost right up until her death. Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi film director who achieved world fame with Triumph of the Will, her hypnotic propaganda portrait of a 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, has died aged 101.
Her friends yesterday announced her death at her home near the Starnberger lake, south of Munich, just over a fortnight after her birthday.”She died in her sleep at home on Monday night,” her companion, Horst Kettner, told the German magazine Bunte. And Jihad Ballout, a spokesman for al-Jazeera, said Mr Alouni’s continued detention was “shocking”. Mr Ballout said al-Jazeera was doing its best to clear the journalist’s name..