Border Insecurity As America Faces WMD Terror
March 31, 2007, 7:47 pm |
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By Bill West*
A few days ago, a rickety wooden sailboat overloaded with some 100 illegal Haitians penetrated our nation’s coastal defenses in south Florida. The Haitians made landfall just north of Miami near a fire station along the beach and, thanks to observant citizens, authorities did manage to capture what were by then compliant but dehydrated and voyage weary wannabe refugees, one of whom unfortunately died in the effort to reach American shores. This is yet another sad chapter in the ongoing sad saga of the poor and porous border security we have in the United States. If 100+ hapless Haitian refugees on a decrepit wooden sailboat can evade detection by the best efforts of the US military and law enforcement to secure our borders from such intrusion, can we truly expect that a sophisticated and well funded terrorist organization, or hostile foreign intelligence service, will have any trouble penetrating those border defenses?
And it is notably ironic, and substantially disturbing, that just today a report surfaced in the Jerusalem Post about the increasing vulnerability of the United States to terrorist attack by weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. The end of last month, there was a study released by researchers at the University of Georgia considering the post-attack effects of nuclear bomb explosions in four US cities, demonstrating the extreme devastation such attacks would cause and how the US is still not prepared to cope with such an attack.
These are not comforting events and reports. America has been fortunate to have gone unscathed within its homeland since the 9-11 attacks. With events such as the recent Haitian maritime landing in south Florida reminding us how vulnerable we really are at our borders, maybe that should be taken as a wake up call to quickly fix those border security problems that remain.
*Counterterrorism Blog
March 30, 2007
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/03/
border_insecurity_as_america_f.php
Cross-posted with permission
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Categories, Tags: United States, Terrorist Groups, Immigration
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