It seems like just yesterday that Bush was telling us how he was going to make us safe and secure like 2 year olds nestled in their mothers busom, by building us a fence to keep all those terrorists that keep snaking over our southern border, you know, those scary folks that wash our dishes and pick our lettuce and clean our motel rooms and all of the other things they do that don't involve unimagined Saudi Arabians flying jetliners into buildings. [My bolds throughout.]
Why, just last week, DHS Chief Brownie, er Michael Chertoff, said "I have personally witnessed the value of this system, refering to Boeings $20 million boondoggle of a virtual fence.
Boondoggle I say?
Boondoggle indeed. Note the dates on these articles. 2/22/08 and 2/28/08. You go from A high-tech "virtual fence" on part of the U.S. border with Mexico is finally ready for service and the technology can fight illegal crossings all along the frontier, the Homeland Security chief said, to The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from linked, tower-mounted sensors and communications and surveillance gear, [DHS] officials said yesterday.
That's got to be some kind of record for incompetence, just in the time frame. But it gets better. The physical part of the 700 mile fence BushCo wants to hack across our southern border is going to cost $4 million a mile, but, "The total cost is not yet known," said Richard M. Stana, the GAO's director of homeland security and justice issues, told members of the subcommittee, because DHS officials "do not yet know the type of terrain where the fencing is to be constructed, the materials to be used, or the cost to acquire the land."
They don't know the type of terrain? Terrain? What they're going to use to build the fence, and how much the land will cost? I'm simply not astonished, I picture one of Rummy's 20 something running this project too, after their successes in Iraq.
This article leaves me with many questions, and amply demonstrates the need to remove the Republicans from control of the government. This was just another politicized operation run by political hacks, cronies, and "operatives" from the cesspool of Karl Roves world, a photo op PR campaign to justify the $7.6 Billion they planned to give to their corporate sponsors, while showering us and the media with their yet another heckuva job handjob.
This pretty well encapsulates what voting for republicans in general, and Bush in particular, has given us.
He added that the system was developed with "minimal input" from Border Patrol agents, resulting in an unworkable "demonstration project" instead of a operating pilot system. He blamed the DHS for acting too hastily in trying to deliver a working pilot by last June.
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A nongovernment source familiar with the project said that the Bush administration's push to speed the project during last year's immigration debate led Boeing to deploy equipment without enough testing or consultation.
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Those running the project "basically took equipment, [an erector set], put it on towers and put it out there without any testing as such" because of the tight deadline.
Feel safe yet?
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It's probably one of those nifty express lane toll systems. They are mounting it now so that in a few years when ALL of our food and commodities come from the Southern Neighbor the haulers can simply come across without stopping and the system will automatically deduct the entry fees and put it into the outsourced border toll operators bank account to cover the costs of manning the toll collection, er, I mean, security system. It will be touted as yet another way to help pay off the National debt and work towards getting the White House out of foreclosure, alleviating the need for Bill Clinton to continue running it as a B & B from the East Wing for the Malaysian Landlords.
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