Sunday, 14 July 2013 07:40
How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone
'The first thing I did at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix this March was climb the brown "explosion-resistant" tower, 30 feet high and 10 feet wide, directly in the center of the spacious room that holds this annual trade show. From a platform where, assumedly, a border guard would stand, you could take in the constellation of small booths offering the surveillance industry’s finest products, including a staggering multitude of ways to monitor, chase, capture, or even kill people, thanks to modernistic arrays of cameras and sensors, up-armored jeeps, the latest in guns, and even surveillance balloons.
Although at the time, headlines in the Southwest emphasized potential cuts to future border-security budgets thanks to Congress’s "sequester," the vast Phoenix Convention Center hall -- where the defense and security industries strut their stuff for law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) -- told quite a different story.
Clearly, the expanding global industry of border security wasn’t about to go anywhere. It was as if the milling crowds of business people, government officials, and Border Patrol agents sensed that they were about to be truly in the money thanks to "immigration reform," no matter what version of it did or didn’t pass Congress. And it looks like they were absolutely right.'
Posts
