The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Dumb Sensors, Deadly Consequences
by Michelle Malkin 
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Pro-Amnesty Open Border
Agitators Block Macy’s Parade BLM Style
by rickwells.us
{rickwells.us} ~ The radical leftists gain their political advantage by having no respect for their adversaries, and assaulting our culture and our cultural norms... Their operatives are notorious for taunting innocent citizens into moving their cars as they block traffic and threaten them and then jumping in front of them or on the hoods in order to get the person who was simply going about their own day arrested and drawing them into their “political statement.” They block freeway traffic and enter restaurants where they shout at the patrons, defying anyone to strike back against them. We’ve seen the leftist Antifa thugs go much further in their violence, to physical assaults on those they disagree with, with one of their own dying in Charlottesville... https://rickwells.us/pro-amnesty-border-macys-parade/.
Flynn Legal Team No Longer
Communicating With White House Legal Team
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Why Did Trump Expose Israeli
Covert Opreations to the Russians?
{israeltoday.co.il} ~ Remember when US President Donald Trump banned airlines passengers entering America from certain countries from carrying laptop computers into the flight cabin?... It was a major inconvenience that caused a great many people to groan. And, it turns out, Israel was behind that decision. In a meeting with Russian official, the details of which were recently revealed to Vanity Fair, Trump defended his decision by saying he had received a trusted intelligence warning necessitating such a move... http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/32820/Default.aspx
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Iran Completes Its Land Bridge to the Golan
by Jonathan Spyer
{meforum.org} ~ In the east of Syria, the so-called race to Abu Kamal between the US-supported Syrian Democratic Forces and the forces of Iran... the Assad regime and Russia appears to be close to conclusion – in the latter's favor. Regime forces moved into the town last Thursday. They were then expelled by an unexpected Islamic State counterattack this week, and have now retreated to positions about two kilometers outside of Abu Kamal. The Islamic State move, however, has the flavor of a last roll of the dice. Clearly, the Sunni jihadis will lose the strategic border town in the days ahead. The US-supported SDF fighters are covering ground rapidly to the north. But the forward units of the mainly Kurdish force remain about 25 kilometers north of Abu Kamal, in the area of the Kishma oil field... http://www.meforum.org/7026/iran-completes-land-bridge-to-the-golan?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=2db0201fbd-spyer_mef_2017_11_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-2db0201fbd-33703665&goal=0_086cfd423c-2db0201fbd-33703665.
Unsealed records show
liar-Clinton law firm paid Fusion GPS
by Gage Skidmore
{conservativeinstitute.org} ~ Fusion GPS bank records that were unsealed Tuesday pursuant to a federal district court order... confirmed that the company was paid for its services by a liar-Clinton linked law firm. Fusion GPS is the opposition research firm hired by the liar-Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and is responsible for the infamous and discredited Trump dossier... https://www.conservativeinstitute.org/political-corruption/hillary-caught-red-handed.htm.
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Dumb Sensors, Deadly Consequences
by Michelle Malkin
{truthrevolt.org} ~ The circumstances of U.S. Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez's death this week remain murkier than the Rio Grande River.
Agent Martinez succumbed to critical head injuries early Sunday morning. An unnamed partner, who came to Martinez's aid after he radioed for help from a remote area of the Big Bend sector in Texas, also suffered serious wounds. Whether by deliberate ambush or accident, one of our border enforcers is dead and the other hospitalized.
This much is clear: Dumb sensors + depleted forces = deadly border disorder.
Agent Martinez had ventured out alone to check on a ground sensor to determine who or what had set it off. He confirmed to his colleagues that human activity had activated the alarm before he died.
Here's the scandal: Our federal government has been squandering billions of dollars on inferior border technology for years. It's a monumental waste of taxpayer funds and a dangerous redistribution of wealth to crony contractors, whose ineffective pet projects are putting our men and women on the front lines at risk.
Nearly 14,000 ground sensors have been littered along the southern border over the past several decades -- some dating back to the Vietnam War era. Untold numbers have simply been buried and lost by federal workers who failed to record where they put them. Twelve years ago, a Department of Homeland Security inspector general's report found that agents couldn't determine the cause of 62 percent of the sensor alerts because they were "unable to respond to the dispatch, or it took the agent too long to get to the sensor location."
Compounding staff shortages are outdated sensors unable to distinguish between humans, vehicles and animals. They can't tell cows from criminals or wild boars from dirty bombers. Thirty-four percent of alerts were confirmed false alarms in the 2005 review. Only 2 percent resulted in apprehensions of immigrants in this country illegally, the feds admitted.
The Arizona Republic reported that "a possible false alarm from a ground sensor, and faulty radio communications, may have contributed to the death of Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Ivie in a friendly-fire incident" in 2012. "Agents didn't detect anyone but each other when they arrived. Ivie, responding separately, apparently mistook the other agents for smugglers and opened fire. One of the agents shot and killed him."
A $1 billion integrated fixed tower project, fronted by Boeing, was supposed to remedy the flaws of the ground sensor system. A surveillance program along the southwest border in Arizona, the IFT systems "are fixed surveillance assets that provide long-range persistent surveillance" using radars that send pictures back to a central hub to monitor illegal crossings and criminal activity.
But the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general reported this summer that the towers had never been properly tested for suitability and operational effectiveness. Its successors haven't fared much better.
On a trip to the Sierra Vista, Arizona, region earlier this summer for my CRTV.com show, "Michelle Malkin Investigates," I talked to ranchers who pointed out fancy new towers with fatal blind spots, out of reach of deep washes and heavy forests where illegal immigrants and drug smugglers travel.
"We have $50 million of infrastructure on this ranch now," fourth-generation Arizona rancher John Ladd told me during a tour of his property, "and none of it has worked. Camera towers, radar, fence, roads, street lights." All the technology in the world is useless, he has long pointed out to politicians and bureaucrats, without boots on the ground. And Border Patrol agents parked in air-conditioned cubicles hours from the border don't count.
"You got 600 agents in Tucson" who "take 6 hours to get to the border. Move them down! You got Nogales ... and Naco and Douglas that are within a mile of the border," Ladd points out. "All the rest of them are more than 50 miles north. Why do we have that? What good is that?"
Longtime illegal immigration activist and systems engineer Glenn Spencer, who I first met in California in the 1990s, has lived and worked on the Arizona border for more than decade. He patented and tested a pilot system of seismic detection and ranging on 1.5 miles of his friend John Ladd's property called Seidarm and paired it with a drone, dubbed Hermes, which automatically launches when border activity is detected within 500 feet of the smart sensors. It can be manufactured and built at a fraction of the cost of the big defense contractors' systems. Unlike much of the government's gold-plated technology, Ladd said: "It worked."
"If they had SEIDARM/HERMES installed, they could have checked out the ground sensor without putting the agent in jeopardy," Spencer told me after Agent Martinez's death hit the news this week.
But politicians in both parties have spurned Ladd's pleas and Spencer's proposals. Special interests have raided public coffers to fund border security Kabuki theater and stave off meaningful assessments. Spencer doesn't mince words:
"They don't want to measure it; they don't want to secure the border; they want to make it LOOK like they are."
Beltway business as usual. Another agent's life sacrificed. President Trump, the clock is ticking.
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