Posted on 06/21/2007 2:05:14 PM PDT by Daralundy
I'll venture a guess: Chertoff is an incompetent moron?
“Technical issues”
“Some lawmakers are questioning why Boeing Co., the lead contractor, and staff at the Department of Homeland Security waited until a day after a hearing earlier this month to update Congress on the status of the “virtual fence’s” initial phase.”
Because it’s a patent military industrial complex boondoggle.
The money saw the public move for a “fence”. Building a fence is relatively cheap, management and guarding done by civil service employees.
“Virtual fence” will need all sorts of expensive machines, 20 year service contracts, billions and billions to Boeing and contractors, part of which will be kicked back to Lott, Bush, etc. as donations of some sort.
Best thing about the virtual fence, it can be turned off!
Virtual fence is a real joke.
The whole department needs disbanded. What a fiasco it has been. Just more government bureacracy sucking on the taxpayers money.
I didn’t like the idea when they came up with it and I like it even less now.
They should all have ‘virtual’ jobs.
A multi-trillion government that can build and maintain a space station, and collect income tax from more than 100 million Americans and they can’t build a damn fence, virtual or otherwise? What is wrong with this picture.
CORRUPTION ON PARADE
Chertoff needs to be impeached and removed from office.
Exactly.
All of this over a one week delay in building and a 1 day delay on notification? In the big scheme of things, one week on a construction project, especially a FedGov one, is a drop in the bucket. And more than likely, the person that needed to inform the committee was in the committee meeting and wasn’t aware of the issue until the next day. I know my boss turns off his cell phone during long meetings and doesn’t check them until the end of the day. Looks to me like they are just looking for something to complain about to make the Administration look bad.
“Building a fence is relatively cheap, management and guarding done by civil service employees.”
It is? How much does a fence cost to run down the middle of the Rio Grande — a river that regularly changes course, and which runs though some of the most wild regions in North America — which does not cut off MY access to water, and which meets the requirements of the International Boundary Waters Treaty? And, it would be nice if it didn’t destroy the tourism industry we depend on down in my neck of the woods,
Low tech works better anyway.
Build the friggin wall.
Tony Snow needs to read this.
According to him, between the time he was on Laura Ingraham’s radio program last week and Sean Hannity’s this week, Snow was touting that another 10 miles or so of fence had been built.
Tony must have missed this report.
[Snow and the White House are counting the mileage built last year and the vehicle barriers.]
I don’t get the idea of the virtual fence. From what I can tell, someone will simply be watching the illegals come over the border. By the time anyone is notified, they’ll be halfway to Denver.
“How much does a fence cost to run down the middle of the Rio Grande?”
A hell of a lot less than it costs to feed, house, school and incarcerate the damned illegals!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
” a river that regularly changes course, and which runs though some of the most wild regions in North America “
So build the friggin wall 1/4 mile away from the trickle of the polluted cesspool you call the Rio Grande.
“which does not cut off MY access to water”
We’ll even build you a few sewer pipes to ensure you get all polluted water you can handle on your property.
“and which meets the requirements of the International Boundary Waters Treaty?”
Screw the treaty....hahahahahah there’s a WOT goin’ on there son!!!!!!
“And, it would be nice if it didnt destroy the tourism industry we depend on down in my neck of the woods”
Tourism?
Ya got a lot of people watching the drug runners and coyotes down there?
LOL
Ya want a little cheese to go along with that whine?
“It is? How much does a fence cost to run down the middle of the Rio Grande”
There are concerns, and I think no serious people are advocating wall along the whole border.
The easiest spots for transit, near urban, small towns, etc. should be walled. California Border, much of ARiz. and New Mexico.
“I dont get the idea of the virtual fence”
Boeing can hand out more money than fence builders.
This is what most of our southern border looks like: there is no government-built fence at all. There is often just whatever is left over from some forgotten cattle fence, built privately to keep U.S. cattle from wandering freely into Mexico. For hundreds of miles there is not even a broken cattle fence, there is nothing at all.
For comparison, below the broken cattle fence photo is a sample of an inexpensive but highly effective double border fence system, with a plowed strip to reveal footprints. This type of system is very cheap and can be built with great speed.
Here is what some of San Diego County has: a wall made of rusty Viet Nam-era runway mats. The corrugations are even horizontal, (to make climbing easier?)
Here is what the border looks like where the runway mat wall exists. Mexico begins on the other side of the ineffective rusty wall, which actually helps the smugglers, by hiding their movements until the occasional USBP vehicle has driven out of sight.
This is how "the game" is played. Smugglers hide on the other side of the wall with their dope and/or their illegals, out of sight of the USBP. They wait for the highly visible white BP vehicle to drive over the distant hills. Lookouts with cell phones and walkie-talkies report on the current locations of the BP units. They know with certainty that "the coast is clear" for an hour or two, and the smugglers and illegals hop the fence and run into the scrub only 50 yards away. From there, they are out of sight, and they walk 1-2 miles to holding houses. Then they wait for nightfall, and are picked up and driven in vans to LA or San Diego.
Next, we see the Duncan Hunter 15' fence, which is already being built along a few "showplace" miles of San Diego, mainly near the ports of entry, where panderng politicians can conveniently show it off to gullible reporters. As you can see, the rusty runway wall is seen at the left side, Mexico begins on the other side. In areas with the 15 foot fence, dope smugglers and illegals will have to cross the open sand ("the government road" as it is called) before starting to try to get over the 15 foot fence.
This new fence is extremely tough, and resists cutting. Attacking the fence would have to be done right out in the open, in full view of cameras. This type of fence, on the U.S. side of the government road, will give the USBP a barrier to patrol, instead of forcing them to chase illegals around 100,000 square miles of wide-open frontier land, which is a fool's errand. Everywhere this modern multiple fence system has been built, crossings by illegals drop to almost nil.
This ain't rocket science, folks. We're not talking about something like the Hoover Dam project, (which we managed to build 70 years ago). The world's last superpower, which put a man on the moon 35 years ago, can build a couple thousand miles of simple and effective fencing.
This is how it's being built in San Diego county, along the last 14 miles out to the ocean. The total cost of the entire fence from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific would be about 5 billion dollars, or what we spend medicating, hospitalizing, educating, and incarcerating illegal aliens just about every month. In other words, the fence would pay for itself immediately.
Or, we can continue our current policy.
Chertoff needs to be impeached and removed from office.
I thought they put people somewhere else for treason. I think it has something to do with a blindfold.
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