Here’s a bit of information on border security you may not be aware of.

By now you know that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s intransigence on the issue of border security and her outward hatred of President Trump stand in the way of a compromise that would again reopen the government.

She has stated that what was needed to improve border security was drones, technology, levees, personnel and “mowing the grass.” I’m not kidding.

There’s a little not-so-secret story most of the American people aren’t aware of, and you won’t hear Pelosi talk about it.

Pelosi was the Speaker in 2011 when DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano cancelled the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) contract, a project initiated in 2006 to provide an integrated system of personnel, infrastructure, technology and a rapid response system on the border.

“SBInet cannot meet the original objective of providing a single, integrated border security technology solution,” Napolitano stated.

For those of you not familiar with the project, it was to include a series of mobile towers with varying surveillance and communications equipment that could be moved along the border. They were slated to include radar, long-range cameras, broadband wireless, thermal imaging capabilities motion detectors, and some ground sensors for seismic detection.

SBInet would also include construction of fences, vehicle barriers and border roads.

Airborne sensors (drones) were meant to fill the gaps in the virtual fence in remote areas where building and maintaining towers was impractical.

To facilitate rapid response, Border Patrol agents were to carry PDAs and GPS capabilities.

The contractor, Boeing and its 10 subcontractors, promised that they would be able to detect and apprehend 95 percent, plus or minus five percent of all incursions. The U.S. Government spent $1 billion on SBInet over the four-year contract period during Pelosi’s watch as Speaker.

Pelosi isn’t the only House member with a short memory.

Mississippi Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at the time, expressed “grave and expensive disappointment” over the failure.

Appearing on NPR yesterday, Thompson, now chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, failed to mention the expensive border security failure under his watch. Rather, he referred to the Democrat talking points – no pathway to citizenship for DACA, the 800,000 government employees out of work, and the obligatory shot at President Trump throwing a temper tantrum and walking out of discussions.

Over on the Senate side, Independent Joe Lieberman, who voted Democrat, was the Chairman of Homeland Security and Government Affairs during the failure of SBInet. He is no longer in the Senate.

Although Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins was ranking member at the time, and no longer has a Homeland Security Committee assignment, she has been silent on border security, pressing to reopen the government instead.

New York’s Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, stood with Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid at the time of the failure and was certainly aware of it.

Schumer visited the border as a member of the “Gang of Eight” in 2013 and came away with the need for more drones, saying they should “increase the effectiveness rate dramatically, at least in my opinion.”

Asking Napolitano if she disagreed, she referred to the “denominator” as a part of a mathematical formula DHS uses to measure effectiveness of border efforts.

“Well, I won’t disagree, and the technology, I think, as it’s implemented will give us more confidence in the denominator, which has always been one of the major problems in calculating effectiveness.”

You understand that, don’t you? OMG

Think about it. There have been three national elections since the flawed SBInet project was initiated, adding several hundred new members of Congress, including the near 100 who were just elected. They are most likely unaware of its failure. Yet, I imagine a number of them resorted to giving the ‘combination of surveillance, sensors and more personnel’ solution during their campaigns.

Kramerontheright wants to know why Republicans have generally been silent on President Trump’s plan to beef-up border security, a key pledge on his agenda.

Yesterday’s weak statement by Sen. Ron Johnson, current chairman of Homeland Security and Government Affairs, on Fox lacked the enthusiasm needed to sell it to the American people:

“We have to secure the border, that’s what the president ran on and I’m personally glad to see he is starting to work on it right away. We have never committed in a bi-partisan fashion to secure the border. We finally have a president committed, so we are starting to move on it.”

Pathetic!

Certainly, we must have gained a wealth of knowledge – $1 billion worth – from the SBInet project regarding what works, and what doesn’t work, over the varied terrain of our border.

The president agrees that in addition to barrier protection, primarily at ports of entry, the border’s rugged terrain will require a variety of surveillance tools that may have been part of the SBInet plan. Vast improvements in surveillance methods and equipment have emerged since the SBInet project got the axe.

The opposition keeps saying that they don’t know what improvements the president wants. Why hasn’t someone mapped it out for them – high barrier here, fence there, vehicle barrier here, Border Patrol tower and outpost here, etc.

Just saying.

“As a people, we are not very good students of history; we keep repeating the same mistakes at dreadful costs.” –Col. Don Wilson

                      May God bless the United States of America.