Free Republic

VISTA, Calif. -- Two U.S. congressmen want the federal government to study whether Border Patrol checkpoints along interstates in Riverside and San Diego counties should be closed. Republican Reps. Darrel Issa of Vista and Ken Calvert of Riverside said Monday that the checkpoints do little to deter illegal immigration and instead cause major traffic problems on Interstate 5 and Interstate 15, the main arteries connecting San Diego County to Orange and Riverside counties.They have asked the U.S. General Accounting Office to compare per-apprehension costs at those checkpoints to checkpoints along the international border, and to investigate why apprehensions at the...

Muhammad Fakih is trying to eke out a living by entertaining Palestinians as they wait at IDF checkpoints in the West Bank. He decided to use his talent as an impressionist when he discovered that he was being forced to spend hours shuttling between his two wives in Bethlehem and Nablus. He has become so famous among Palestinians stranded at checkpoints that some are dubbing him the "Checkpoint Entertainer." Even many soldiers have come to recognize him. Both Palestinians and soldiers sometimes ask the stonemason to imitate Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat or Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Earlier this week,...

IDF expands humanitarian officers program By JOEL LEYDEN It's 2 p.m. at the Kalandia checkpost on a boiling summer's day. A long, crowded line of Palestinians wait to enter Ramallah. Young Israeli combat soldiers are positioned in front of them, standing behind grey concrete barriers and above on a dusty hilltop sweating inside guard towers. The 18-year-old troops appear ready for anything. They have been trained for terrorism and war and keep a watchful eye out for the unusual. It could be a car with a sniper, a young boy holding a package or a women suicide bomber just waiting...

"Palestinianitis" is the latest neurological disease to hit the world stage. Its main cause is "Palestinian Plight-hood" – a widely disseminated fairytale concocted to replace historical fact. It usually affects narrow-minded, biased individuals, who are seemingly unable to use both sides of their brain to distinguish truth from fiction, right from wrong, and good from evil. The latest victim of "Palestinianitis" was a classic case as shown on Sky News today. The scene opens with our sufferer, who is a school teacher called Nick from the U.K., racing through the streets of Nablus, armed, we are told, with nothing more...

It's 2 p.m. at the Kalandia checkpost on a boiling summer's day. A long, crowded line of Palestinians wait to enter Ramallah. Young Israeli combat soldiers are positioned in front of them, standing behind grey concrete barriers and above on a dusty hilltop sweating inside guard towers. The 18-year-old troops are ready for anything. They have been trained for terrorism and war and keep a watchful eye out for the unusual. It could be a car with a sniper, a young boy holding a package or a women suicide bomber just waiting to make tomorrow's headlines. Then you hear the...

<p>A garden where patients at the Central Teaching Hospital for Children could once stroll is now a cemetery. Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press.</p> <p>BAGHDAD, Iraq - The battle for Baghdad cost the lives of at least 1,101 Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, according to records at the city's 19 largest hospitals.</p>

Greeks and Turks Mingle Peacefully on Cyprus By MARLISE SIMONS A Greek Cypriot uncovered a grave marker in an old Greek Cypriot cemetery in Kyrenia, in Turkish Cyprus. NICOSIA, Cyprus, April 26 — They kept pressing through the narrow checkpoints today, long lines of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, on foot, by car, on motorbikes, winding past the watchtowers and the barbed wire that had kept them apart for nearly 30 years. A trickle at first, now a flood, Greeks and Turks are crossing to see each other's side of this divided Mediterranean island, rushing as if uncertain the sudden opening...

ZAAFARANIYA, Iraq - About 500 Iraqi men, chanting anti-American, pro-Islam slogans, drove in a convoy of trucks, buses and cars out of the Baghdad suburb hit by a huge arms dump blast on Saturday. Reuters correspondent Rosalind Russell saw a first truck carrying six coffins, apparently containing bodies, followed by the rest of the convoy as it passed a US military checkpoint set up after angry residents forced out American troops. “No Americans or Saddam; Yes, Yes to Islam!” the men chanted in Arabic, some of them flying green Islamic flags and banners. Among the slogans were two in English:...

A number of US marines have been killed and others seriously wounded in a suicide bomb attack on a military checkpoint in Baghdad. US marines spokesman Major Matt Baker said that "some" servicemen had been killed, although he could not say how many. US marines who said they witnessed the incident told our correspondent that an Iraqi man had approached the checkpoint and detonated a number of grenades. Smoke can now be seen rising from the scene of the incident. The suicide bomb attack is the second against US troops in Iraq since the war began - in March four...

<p>The University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed a portable vehicle-barrier system to protect U.S. troops stationed at roadway checkpoints in Iraq from suicide bombers and terrorists.</p> <p>Six U.S. soldiers already have been killed at road checkpoints in Iraq.</p>

They carried the bodies of the children out first. There was a girl of about 12, whom the Marines wrapped in her black abaya cloak.Next off the shattered minibus was her brother, a boy of about four, whom the Marines covered in a sports jacket. A sister, about six years old, had fallen between the seats. They placed her beside her siblings on a blanket.The children's mother and grandfather also died on the bus late Friday night when they failed to stop at a Marine roadblock while fleeing Baghdad. Four other Iraqis also died trying to speed past in other...

America's 'digital division' heads for Saddam's stronghold By Donald Macintyre in Qatar 07 April 2003 Units from the hi-tech US 4th Infantry Division, which was blocked by a decision of the Ankara parliament from entering Iraq from Turkey, have begun a 350-mile dash north from Kuwait towards Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home stronghold some 100 miles north of Baghdad. Deployed in combat for the first time since the Vietnam War, the 4th Infantry is seen as a counterweight to Iraqi forces to the north of the capital and could be used if pro-Saddam forces tried to stage a last stand in...

A Riverside man is now facing federal charges after authorities say he slammed his car through a barrier at March Air Force Base. We have new information tonight as that man was arrested yesterday. Eid Elwir-elwir is being charged with damaging government property. Authorities say the 26-year-old Venezuelan-born US citizen drove his car through a razor-wire barricade at the base and then crashed into a chain-link fence at the entrance on Monday. The FBI says he shouted anti-American slogans at the marine sentries who arrested him, and claimed he was being oppressed because he's a Muslim.

<p>April 6 — The new ability of U.S. military forces to move at will in Baghdad — demonstrated especially by yesterday’s startling “thunder run” of 70-ton Army tanks through the heart of the city — suggests that a major “tipping point” has been reached: U.S. troops no longer are fighting a conventional enemy and are waging a less intense but still dangerous “checkpoint war.”</p>

HonestReporting Communique 04 April 2003 "TALE OF TWO CHECKPOINTS" * * * Dear HonestReporting Member, On Monday, two days after a checkpoint suicide bomb killed four American soldiers, U.S. forces shot and killed 11 Iraqi family members when their vehicle failed to stop at an army checkpoint. This fateful incident parallels similar events in Israel, where the IDF -- like the Americans -- works the difficult balance between ensuring the safety of its soldiers and avoiding civilian casualties. But when it comes to press coverage, the parallels end. For nearly three years, Israel has been lambasted in the media for...

Have been listening to CBS Radio News, about 1 1/2 hours ago, they had a direct report from a CBS Embedded with the Marines, who said that a Mercedes-Benz failed to stop at a checkpoint, and a .50 cal machine gun ventilated both the Benz and the driver. Said driver turned out to be the commander of the Al Nida division. Since then no mention of it for an hour until just now a newsreader on the channel said that the Marines had shot an Iraqi General at a checkpoint who had Saddam's phone number on him.

The tragic incident in Najaf on Monday, where U.S. soldiers were forced to fire on a vehicle, resulting in the deaths of seven women and children, will no doubt add fuel to the fire of anti-Americanism. What will be lost in the hand-wringing is the fact that if it weren’t for the dishonorable methods of some Iraqi fighters, Coalition soldiers would not be compelled to respond in this manner. Events like these are not only regrettable, but wrenching, especially for the soldiers who are involved. If Iraqi fighters hadn’t started employing tactics such as fake surrenders, suicide bombings, wearing civilian...

<p>U.S. military officials said there is growing evidence that the seven Iraqi civilians killed by American soldiers at a checkpoint Monday were coerced into carrying out a suicide mission.</p> <p>Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, acknowledged in his daily press briefing yesterday that several Muslim clerics are reporting that checkpoint charges by Iraqi civilians are being "done under duress."</p>

A Shiite Muslim cleric in Iraq claims the driver of the van at a U.S. checkpoint in which at least seven women and children were killed was forced to disobey the soldiers' orders to stop, thereby causing the civilian deaths, reports Fox News Channel. Mohammed Barkir Al-Mohari said in a translated videotape that the incident outside Najaf in southern Iraq on Monday was purposely set up to give Saddam's regime grist for criticizing the United States. After delivering repeated warnings to stop, U.S. soldiers fired on the van, which carried 13 people, according to the Pentagon, when the driver failed...

TENSIONS between Britain and the US over the conduct of the Iraq war were growing last night as British commanders voiced their dismay at American soldiers’ heavy-handed tactics. The strains burst into the open after US troops fired on a civilian vehicle, killing the driver, hours after seven Iraqi women and children were shot dead at a checkpoint. An Apache helicopter was also said to have blown up a lorry, killing 15 members of a single family, yesterday. Such killings highlighted a series of military and political differences that senior British government sources say are creating “hairline cracks in...