Chertoff’s Fence
All this talk about Michael Chertoff’s role in refusing CIA an advance declination for torture had gotten me wondering about the status of Chertoff’s biggest policy initiative at the Department of Homeland Security: the fence along the Mexican border. Last I remembered, the Bush Administration was using the fence as an excuse to shred environmental and property laws–except in the case of key Bush supporters.
As it happens, C&L links to a story and a GAO study updating us on Chertoff’s fence. And it’s going about as badly as I expected.
The Department of Homeland Security’s plan to build a virtual fence across the U.S.-Mexico border has come to a crashing halt just days before the release of a report expected to slam the system.
Homeland chief Janet Napolitano beat the Government Accountability Office report to the punch when she announced Tuesday that she’s freezing funding for the Secure Border Initiative Network.
Homeland Security hired The Boeing Co. 3 1/2 years ago to build a string of towers along the 2,000-mile border. The towers were to integrate off-the-shelf products — cameras, radar, connections to ground sensors — so that Border Patrol agents could see who and what was coming across in real time.
Boeing made big promises about SBInet’s capabilities.
“Ninety to 100 percent of all illegal crossers, this camera system was going to identify and characterize this threat,” said Rich Stana, who wrote a report on the project last year for the GAO.
Boeing built a 28-mile test section in the Southern Arizona desert. It didn’t work. The company regrouped, redesigned and redeployed one set of towers near the first set. It is building another section right now. The entire border was supposed to be covered a year ago, but after three years — and $1.4 billion — the system is still full of bugs.
“Well, it sort of works,” Stana said.
$1.4 billion to roll back on environmental protections with a buggy computer mess–and little improved security–as a result?!?!? No one could have anticipated!
Meanwhile, the numbers of undocumented workers are beginning to drop since Bush made such a hash of our economy there’s no real reason to come here in the first place.
No one could have anticipated that they were only coming for the money they could make here. /s
Obviously there is some kind of systemic inefficiency in the government bidding process for this project. I would happily have provided same for $1.2 billion.
Not to mention the sinfully ugly construction…makes the U.S. border look like it is hiding a auto junk yard! What would Ladybird say?
Boeing was also one of the contractors used in the DHS TIDE database, a total waste of money.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/29788
I admit to sharing the sense that the supposed justifications for the whole virtual wall project always seemed too surreal for the price tag. It hardly smells like just another boring, garden variety defense contractor welfare program, does it. The deep reasons were likely something out of a bad Ollie North fantasy, like using front companies to sell secret virtual-wall-defeater remote controls to the drug cartels for billions that are then secretly funneled into illegal Drones For Contras programs.