So at first glance, Bush's plan to militarize the border struck me as a desperate attempt to appeal to red voters' Neanderthal instincts, a la the condemnation of gay marriage. My second thought was "What stake might Halliburton have in this?" Sure enough, today's news tells of another W-enabled defense industry windfall.
This is how they fleece us:
Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control
by Eric Lipton, The New York Times
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.
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...The equipment Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them — all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job...
full article
