A Modest Proposal

WASHINGTON, May 17 — 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.

With friends like those, you can start a War on Terra anywhere- even your own back yard.

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.

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...

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...

The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico...

"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)

Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.

Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.

Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.

These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.

Each of these giant contractors — Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government — is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.

The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.

If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed...

The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border — devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million — is dismal.

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.

A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month...

What's uneven about that? Nothing worked. I'd call those results consistent.

Here's another consistency: Dear Leader's trying to please two pillars of his base, the isolationist racists by building an Iron Curtain between the Corporate States of America and Mexico, and the Company regulars, by requiring all workers (citizen or not) to register everything about themselves with two government databases in order to get a job in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Now if he could only figure a way to rebuild his TheoCon coalition. The Robertson-Falwell-Graham Axis of Medieval is staying close to the One True Faith (in Dear Leader, of course) but it seems the Catholics in America have more sympathy with the workers than with the Scalia-Scalito Opus Dei party line. Most of the Church in the world is composed of Hispanics, alas, the very people the Don Negroponte used to order thrown out of Blackhawk helicopters in Central America. The Hitler Youth faction has always been a tiny abherrant minority in the Church, possibly because the humane truths the Church teaches are far larger than the small people who seek to take advantage of the Faithful, but alas such psychopaths are compulsive power seekers and election riggers.

That Dear Leader's figured out an angle to enrich his Carlyle Group affiliates and bring his War on Terra home speaks for the genius of the man. Blimps on the border. A testing ground for new DARPA toys to use against people who tend not to shoot back or carry shoulder-mounted missile launchers. That's a war game even Chancellor Rumsfeld's kind of Generals can win.

Speaking of consistency, it's really tough being a Reptilican or even a Wrethuglican when your senior statesmen types get chatty:

When reporters ask the White House about the NSA program that secretly collects “phone call records of tens of millions of Americans,” administration officials insist that they “cannot confirm or deny the claims in the USA Today story.”

Apparently, someone forgot to send the talking points to Senate Intelligence Committee member Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Here’s how Hatch responded to a question “about recent reports of the government compiling lists of Americans’ phone calls”:

Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said that at least two of the chief judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had been informed since 2001 of White House-approved National Security Agency monitoring operations.

“None raised any objections, as far as I know,” said Hatch, a member of a special Intelligence Committee panel appointed to oversee the NSA’s work.

By answering the reporter’s question directly, Hatch confirmed the program’s existence. This isn’t the first time Hatch has let classified information slip. From a September 2001 Chicago Tribune report:

A senior senator’s disclosure of highly classified information about the U.S. terrorism investigation has infuriated Bush administration officials and led to a clampdown on how much the White House will share with lawmakers.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters hours after terrorists crashed hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that U.S. intelligence had intercepted a telephone call from a suspect reporting to his handler that the targets in New York City and near Washington had been hit...

Hmm... funny how that never came out in the offical made for TV version...

It's tough establishing total world hegemony.

But given how many are already patting themselves on the back for the Democratic landslide victory this fall and in 2008, and triangulating against the potential conservative backlash, I have no doubts Dear Leader's Company will have their endless war and blank check for some time to come.