Thread: Texas-Mexico border now combat zone say 2 U.S. generals

Texas-Mexico border now combat zone say two retired U.S. generals in new report

Jack Dennis, San Antonio Headlines Examiner
September 26, 2011 - Like this? Subscribe to get instant updates.

Tired of hearing from Obama White House that the Texas-Mexico border is more secure than ever, the Texas Department of Agriculture, along with the Department of Public Safety, hired two retired U.S. generals to evaluate the true status.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples today released “Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment,â€

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Texas is the frontline in this escalating war, and the potential consequences of our responses will affect our entire nation.

Jack can be contacted at jackdennistexas@yahoo.com.

I'm not sure that Texas is more the frontline in the border war than Nogales or Douglas or Naco or San Diego Co. - or places in Luna and Dona Ana counties that I've never heard of.

But Texas does have 5/8 of the U.S. border with Mexico, and an even larger fraction of the crime-fighting resources of the four border states. Texas has the largest STATE law enforcement deployment against drug and human smuggling, so it is reasonable to expect Texas to mount the largest STATE armed forces response to the border war and against the invasion of the U.S. and the control of border counties by the cartels.

Nevertheless, the border is like a levee. If Texas were to seal her southern border, that would be wonderful for Texas. But the illegal traffic would increase 166% in the other three states combined, and it would almost certainly increase disproportionately in adjoining New Mexico.

Originally Posted by MinutemanCDC_SC

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Texas is the frontline in this escalating war, and the potential consequences of our responses will affect our entire nation.

Jack can be contacted at jackdennistexas@yahoo.com.

I'm not sure that Texas is more the frontline in the border war than Nogales or Douglas or Naco or San Diego Co. - or places in Luna and Dona Ana counties that I've never heard of.

But Texas does have 5/8 of the U.S. border with Mexico, and an even larger fraction of the crime-fighting resources of the four border states. Texas has the largest STATE law enforcement deployment against drug and human smuggling, so it is reasonable to expect Texas to mount the largest STATE armed forces response to the border war and against the invasion of the U.S. and the control of border counties by the cartels.

Minuteman, I might agree with you except for the fact that much of what happens not only in Texas but among the other border states is hidden by the MSM and the government. ( mod edit)

That's not our groups.

Report cites anecdotes to show spillover border violence

ByJeremy Schwartz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Published: 9:28 p.m. Monday, Sept. 26, 2011

Two retired Army generals on Monday released a largely anecdotal report painting a horrific picture of violence on the Texas border with Mexico, the latest entrant in the increasingly politicized question of whether violence from Mexico's brutal drug war is spilling over into Texas.

The report, paid for by the Texas Departments of Agriculture and Public Safety, accused federal officials of being in denial about the level of violence and called for more federal funding to bring additional staffing and technology to the border. The report also warned that cartels are seeking to use the Texas border as a sanctuary zone to ship huge amounts of drugs to the rest of the United States.

But some border officials said the $80,000 report presented an exaggerated view of the situation along the Texas border.

"If you're going to describe a location as a war zone, you better have your facts together," said Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas. "We're not in a siege along the border."

The report concluded that conditions "along both sides of the Texas-Mexico border are tantamount to living in a war zone in which civil authorities, law enforcement agencies as well as citizens are under attack around the clock."

While the report argued that violence is increasing along the border, it relied largely on anonymous anecdotes from Texas ranchers and farmers, who described a wave of intimidation, threats and break-ins from traffickers and illegal immigrants.

"What we've learned is that the evidence of where a war is going begins with anecdotal evidence," said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, who co-authored the report with retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was national drug policy director under President Bill Clinton. "You don't wait for the statistics to be rolled out."

Federal crime statistics from cities and counties along the Southwest border have not shown spikes in violence, and last year the Congressional Research Service found that FBI statistics do not indicate whether there has been spillover from the violence raging in Mexico. Officials along the border have presented differing accounts of drug cartel-related violence.

The issue of spillover violence has increasingly pitted Republican lawmakers and leaders, including Gov. Rick Perry, against President Barack Obama's administration.

"Our pleas for help are being met with denial and lame jokes," Texas Agriculture Secretary Todd Staples said Monday. "The threat grows more violent every day, and more resources are needed."

In May, Obama traveled to El Paso and declared the border more secure than ever, accusing Republicans of using the issue of border security to delay discussion of immigration reform.

"Maybe they'll say we need a moat," Obama said at the time. "Or alligators in the moat. They'll never be satisfied."

Earlier this month, Perry blasted Obama during a presidential debate as either having poor "intel" or being an "abject liar."

During a news conference after the report was released, McCaffrey raised eyebrows when he spoke of "hundreds of people murdered on our side of the frontier," a statistic that far exceeded the 22 killings between January 2010 and May 2011 identified by the Department of Public Safety as being related to drug cartels. When asked about the number, McCaffrey pointed to statements from a Brooks County rancher, who told reporters that hundreds of bodies had been found in the county in recent years.

Most of the bodies were those of illegal immigrants crossing the brush trying to avoid the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias and not victims of direct assaults, according to the Brooks County sheriff's department.

Some drug war experts say that even as Mexican cartels increase their role in drug distribution within the United States, it is unlikely that the U.S. will see the kind of large-scale violence affecting Mexico, where about 40,000 people have been killed in drug violence since 2006.

"It's not in the cartels' best interest to draw attention to themselves" in the U.S., Sylvia Longmire, a drug war expert and consultant to law enforcement agencies, said in an interview before the report was released. "The more subtle they are about it, the better they are able to reach their goal."

jschwartz@statesman.com; 912-2942

http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-pol ... 81101.html

Tired of hearing from Obama White House that the Texas-Mexico border is more secure than ever, the Texas Department of Agriculture, along with the Department of Public Safety, hired two retired U.S. generals to evaluate the true status.

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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/ ... _been.html

Added to Homepage:
http://www.alipac.us/article-6623--0-0.html

This woman and, her boss both need to be slapped in the mouth, for the multitudes of lies they tell, concerning the border being safe. if it is so safe, then why don't Obama take his lying behind down there. this man just can't seem to help himself with the amount of lying that he does. I can't stand the man

Yep real safe border....just like he created millions of jobs. Obama would not know the truth if it bit him in the butt. I doubt Obama could successfully run a hot dog vending cart.

Report paints border of fear outside El Paso

By Zahira Torres \ AUSTIN BUREAU
Posted: 09/27/2011 08:03:11 AM MDT


AUSTIN -- If you want to understand the fear and threats of spillover violence in Texas border cities, talk to the people who live there -- unless they are from El Paso, the co-author of a new border security report suggested on Monday.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a military historian and strategist, joined Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples in the release of a state-commissioned report that compares living and conducting business in Texas border counties to war zones.

Scales said observers cannot rely too heavily on FBI crime statistics that indicate border communities are among the safest in the nation because statistics lag behind the real-time anecdotes that can be provided by border sheriffs, ranchers, farmers, and businessmen. He said it is border residents who can attest to how Mexican drug cartel violence is affecting their livelihood in Texas.

But Scales then scoffed at statements from El Paso political leaders and authorities who say that the ongoing violence in its sister city of Juárez has not spilled over and that the majority of people in the state's largest border city feel safe.

"Fill up your gas tank, get away from El Paso and federal authorities and drive down and talk to border sheriffs, judges, lawyers, bankers, merchants, ranchers and farmers and I guarantee you, you will get a completely different view," Scales said.

State officials said Texas taxpayers footed the $80,000 bill for the report by Scales, a former Commandant of the United States Army War College, and retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bill Clinton. Both men are now consultants.

The report states that drug cartels are attempting to "create a 'sanitary zone' inside the Texas border -- one county deep -- that will provide sanctuary from Mexican law enforcement and, at the same time, enable cartels to transform Texas' border counties into narcotics transshipment points for continued transport and distribution into the continental United States."

The authors also say that drug cartels are employing strategies that increasingly rely on organized gangs "to do their dirty work inside of Texas and elsewhere in the country."

U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, said the report, which was commissioned at the request of the Texas Legislature, is sensationalistic, out-of-touch and politically motivated. He said the claim that drug cartels will seek refuge in the United States because of the increased effectiveness of Mexican federal authorities is ludicrous.

"Oh, yeah right, right because we have less capability than the Mexican government," Reyes said sarcastically.

Reyes, a former Border Patrol chief, said Mexican drug cartels know better than to let violence spill over into U.S. border cities because they do not want to draw the ire of the federal government.

An FBI report released last year cited El Paso, San Diego, Phoenix and Austin as the four large cities with the lowest violent crime rates in the country.

El Paso, with a population of more than 624,000 people, had five homicides last year. Austin, which is home to more than 796,000 people, had 38 murders in 2010.

"Since it doesn't suit their political agenda, they are now trying to undermine the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Reyes said. "They ought to stop. They don't live in our border communities. They certainly don't represent us and they ought to stay the hell out if they're going to misrepresent what's going on along the border."

Reyes argues that the report is motivated by Gov. Rick Perry's political agenda.

Perry, who is running for president, has repeatedly said that Texans are living in fear because the federal government is doing a poor job of securing the border. Federal officials argue increased resources along the border have made it safer than ever before.

The authors of the mostly anecdotal report praised the state's border security efforts while criticizing the federal government. They commended Staples, who plans to run for lieutenant governor in 2014, and outlined Perry's involvement in Texas' border security efforts.

Scales said journalists should "focus on state and local, rather than federal sources of information."Ê

"I did this on my own," Scales said. "I went and talked to folks starting in Austin and moving south and I had a completely different view of the border situation than I got from going to a press conference in El Paso."

Scales later said he has only visited El Paso twice to go to Fort Bliss and that he focused most of his efforts on Laredo, Brownsville, Hidalgo County and "a few other places that we visited."

Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas, who was in Austin last weekend to speak at the Texas Tribune Festival, said the FBI crime statistics tell the true story. He said claims that the border is "under siege" are a bunch of "baloney."

Zavala County Sheriff Eusevio Salinas Jr. said he agrees with the anecdotal portions of the report. He said he has landowners who have left their ranches because of fear.

"My community is safe," Salinas said. "My murder rate is very low but yet right (next to me in Mexico) neighbor to me, I'm having killings on a daily basis, so how can I say that my communities are safe?"

In their report, the authors use quotes from both named and unnamed sources that they received from the state's Department of Agriculture.

Many of those quotes, including one from Susan Durham of the South Texans Property Rights Association, come from ProtectYourTexasBorder.com, a website started by Staples that criticizes the federal government on border security.

"The sovereignty of America is under attack and it's happening on Texas soil and Texans are paying the price," Staples, a Republican, said. "Meanwhile, our pleas for help are being met with denial and lame jokes."

McCaffrey said the feedback received for the report leaves little question that "the U.S. border is increasingly insecure, that farmers and ranchers are intimidated. That hundreds of people are murdered on our side of the frontier."

When asked to provide facts to substantiate his statement about hundreds of deaths in Texas, McCaffrey deferred to Michael Vickers, a veterinarian who Perry appointed this month to the Texas Animal Health Commission. Vickers chairs the Texas Border Volunteers, a group that conducts patrols of private property and reports illegal immigration to the border patrol.

Vickers, who lives about 70 miles away from the border in Brooks County, said about 500 people who sought help from coyotes, or human smugglers, to enter the country have been found dead on private property in his county since 2005. He had no official proof to support the claim.

"Officially, up until we had our current sheriff's administration, we did not have an investigator to investigate these people dying on this private property," he said. "Most of the time what we find is a bag of bones or a decomposed carcass."

Vickers and the report's authors said that even if migrants die of dehydration, their deaths should be considered homicides because they were left for dead by human smugglers.

Reyes disputed their logic.

"The poor people that are coming in, that are abandoned by coyotes, they are now conveniently defining that as spillover violence," he said. "That is absurd. That is idiotic and not realistic."

http://www.lcsun-news.com/las_cruces-news/ci_18982951