"Good fences make good neighbors. Fences don't make bad neighbors." Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala)
Alabama, what's wrong with you people?
Today's New York Times hits the nail on the head. Our nations efforts to curtail illegal immigration can only mean one thing: big money for the usual suspects.
The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.
The same companies make windfall profits everytime. Come one over. It's gets better. And by that, I mean worse.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and now the border.
Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan --like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment -- the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.
[snip]
Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders -- a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.
"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."
Basically a free reign on what they want to do. And how much cash is on the table?
The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them -- all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.
That's billion. With a B. But we aren't militarizing the border, are we?
The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear.
Oh...
Cue the typical refrain. It must be Clinton's fault.
Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.
Nice.
Your thoughts?