The much touted "Virtual Fence" has failed. So 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 a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear, federal officials said yesterday.
As the Border Patrol took over that initial stretch Friday from Boeing, authorities confirmed that Project 28, the initial deployment of the Secure Border Initiative network, did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Translation: it failed to work.
So Bush and his gang of neocons are now "shifting away" from a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear to... what? At least three more years of nothing.
In a nation where we have TV cameras on every street corner and in every Mall, a nation where we can watch cop chases from the police car TV systems, a place where we can capture just about anything at anytime on our cell phones and spread it across the Internet, how is it a "network" of TV cameras and remote monitors built by a heavyweight like Boeing failed?
Pardon my cynicism, but I would bet serious money that it was supposed to fail. Bush no more wants an effective border fence than he wants an effective U.S. Constitution, or a law-abiding presidency.
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