Free Republic

Two 16-year-old girls from New York City were arrested last month and charged with immigration violations after the F.B.I. asserted that they intended to become suicide bombers, according to a government document. A spokesman for one of their families, however, said the accusation was false and said the government had probably misinterpreted a school essay written by one of the girls. The girls are both in the country illegally, one born in Guinea and the other from Bangladesh, and are being held in a family detention center in Leesport, in southeastern Pennsylvania, according to the document, provided by a federal...

EDITORIAL: AN INSECURE NATION After the Sept. 11 attacks, it was shocking to learn how easily the hijackers entered the country. What is shocking today is how little progress has been made in securing our borders. Terrorists may well be entering the country by crossing from Mexico or Canada. But it is just as likely that they are coming in the way the Sept. 11 hijackers did: at airports, slipping through the Swiss-cheese security system now in place. Until this year, immigration officials routinely handed phony travel documents back to people caught trying to enter illegally, and even now visitors...

WASHINGTON, March 15 - The Department of Homeland Security, trying to focus antiterrorism spending better nationwide, has identified a dozen possible strikes it views as most plausible or devastating, including detonation of a nuclear device in a major city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings and a truck bombing of a sports arena. The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack. They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000;...