Thread: Borderline Dereliction Of Duty

Borderline Dereliction Of Duty
Posted 02/22/2010 06:53 PM ET



A surveillance tower at the border near Nogales, Arizona, stands watch with cameras and sensors to detect illegal crossings into the U.S. To date,... View Enlarged Image

Border: The 2006 Secure Fence Act mandated the "possible" construction of a long wall to protect our frontier. Four years later, no wall, just a new seven-year delay. This is an embarrassment.

It was almost a prelude to the Tea Parties now sweeping the nation. Millions of Americans, reacting to brazen demonstrations on U.S. soil by illegal immigrants, mobilized themselves to rouse Congress to do something about millions of illegal immigrants pouring into the U.S.

Citizen activists shut down the Capitol Hill switchboard with their calls, formed border watches and marched in the streets. As a result, a shaken Congress scrapped its widely detested McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration bill with its amnestylike features in 2005. Instead, it passed Rep. Duncan Hunter's Secure Fence Act of 2006.

"We hear you, loud and clear," said reform bill advocate John McCain. Today, it's a different attitude from Congress and the government that carries out its laws.

Knowing the potency of popular sentiment, the government hasn't had the nerve to seek to repeal the fence outright. But all signs suggest that it never wanted this built.

With bureaucratic delays, cost overruns, general incompetence and a "can't do" spirit, officials have effectively scuppered the fence without politically costly legislation.

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that electronic portions of the 1,951-mile fence bordering Mexico, slated for completion by 2011, won't be ready for another seven years. Radar, cameras, satellite signals — all the things that were supposedly "better" than a real fence, we find, are about as viable as wind power and switchgrass ethanol.

"It was a great idea, but it didn't work," Mark Borkowski, chief of the electronic fence program, told the L.A. Times.

This is dereliction of duty — and an embarrassment, too.

The fact is, fences work. Activists and bureaucrats argue that they don't work perfectly, but even scalable barriers slow down illegal border activity — unlike Homeland Security's current alternative, which is doing nothing.

Don't believe us? Name the last time a suicide bomb blew up in an Israeli pizza parlor killing dozens. The Israeli-West Bank barrier, begun in 2002, is nearly finished after a focused effort to build something to keep terrorists out.

The 450-mile wall has already cut terrorism by 90%, and the region is finally seeing a period of, if not peace, at least an end to indiscriminate warfare on civilians and independent economic activity in Palestine.

Others have seen how it works and done the same — with speed. Morocco had a problem on its southern border with Polisario terrorists, so in 1987 it built a 10-foot sand wall known as the Berm, spanning 1,677 miles. Bunkers and land mines were added to discourage invaders.

Saudi Arabia, too, had a problem with illegal immigrants and al-Qaida terrorists on its southern border — some 400,000 illegals from Yemen had already crossed over. So from 2003 to 2008 it built the Saudi-Yemen Barrier, even against flak from the Bush administration.

Today, the 1,100-mile southern border has a network of sandbags, concrete-filled pipelines and electronic detection equipment. The result was effective enough to encourage the Saudis to begin another on their northern border.

These countries, all poorer in resources and expertise than the U.S., managed to actually get something done fast enough to make a difference to a pressing problem.

It took the U.S. a tad more than eight years from the announcement in 1961 to put a man on the moon. Now we can't build a fence in seven?

The long string of delays renders a fence meaningless. Seven years, the exact remaining duration of two Obama administration terms, suggests that the president is delaying the fence while preparing to enact a comprehensive immigration reform centered around amnesty for illegals.

That's not border control. That's politics. And it leaves our border unguarded at a bad time.


http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysi ... ?id=521868

The "virtual fence is not working out as big contractors, such as Boeing, have hoped. A low tech double layer fence with a few sensors, and a few drones would work fine. The high tech stuff was Pie in the Sky.