Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Hugo Chavez in California

He also was asked whether the U.S. government should have concerns about Venezuelan immigrants and whether they might act upon declarations or pronouncements from that country's embassy or consulate.

I think Hugo Chavez has an army of immigrants in California that have contributed to the immigration protests and this is the information for which the US is looking.

-Am

SoCal professor says anti-terror detectives questioned him

By JEREMIAH MARQUEZ
Associated Press
March 10, 2006

LOS ANGELES - A professor of Latin American history on Friday accused federal authorities of intruding on academic freedom after anti-terrorism investigators questioned him about possible ties to the Venezuelan government.

Pomona College professor Miguel Tinker Salas said two Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives working for a federal task force interviewed him at his office Tuesday and asked whether he had contact with Venezuelan Embassy officials or immigrants in the United States.

Salas is a native of Venezuela, a nation with strained relations with the United States.Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez often calls President Bush a terrorist and the White House claims Chavez has eroded democracy. Last month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told U.S. lawmakers that the Venezuelan government posed "one of the biggest problems" in the region and that its ties to Cuba were "particularly dangerous" to democracy in Latin America. Venezuela also has found its closest Middle Eastern ally in Iran.

Chavez insists his government is democratic and accuses Washington of conspiring against him. He says the United States was behind a short-lived 2002 coup, an allegation that U.S. officials reject.

Tinker Salas said the detectives told him he was not the subject of an investigation and led him to believe they were questioning other scholars. However, he was unaware of other California academics who'd been interviewed by government officials.

"They said they we're also going to interview other people and academics to develop a profile of the community," said Tinker Salas, a Latin American history and Chicano studies scholar who specializes in Venezuelan affairs. The FBI declined to say whether the interview was part of a broader effort to gain information from Venezuelans living in the United States. The bureau said it routinely conducts interviews, but being questioned doesn't mean someone is accused of wrongdoing.

"The purpose of the interview was to seek information," the bureau said in a statement. "There was no intent on the part of the FBI ... to place the professor, his students or Pomona College in an uncomfortable situation." According to Tinker Salas, one of the sheriff's detectives identified himself as a member of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, which includes officials from local, state and federal agencies.

Tinker Salas said the detectives' line of questioning focused on publicly available information such as where he went to school and whether there was a Venezuelan consulate in Los Angeles. He also was asked whether the U.S. government should have concerns about Venezuelan immigrants and whether they might act upon declarations or pronouncements from that country's embassy or consulate.

Tinker Salas argued that such interviews could cast a pall on scholarly work.

Officials at the college, located about 40 miles east of Los Angeles in Claremont, were consulting attorneys about "the most effective way to register a strong official protest," the school's president, David Oxtoby, wrote in a letter Thursday to students and faculty.

The Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, D.C., issued a statement Friday calling the interview "a desperate attempt to link Venezuela to terrorism" and pressing the U.S. to explain the incident and its policy toward Venezuela

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Kumf_N6XTyEJ:www.rethinkvenezuela.com/news/03-10-06ap.html+immig....