Tust Us: Now Present Your Papers! More Leading By Faith

If you ask me, perhaps the W, Rove and Co aught get its ducks in a row before they trot a plan to militarize the Mexican Border otherwise it looks a lot like smoke and mirrors to deflect any attention on real problems (like leaks of top secret information by top-level administrators, or violations of our Constitutional rights by the NSA):

Q Mr. Secretary, if I've understood everything I've heard, you don't yet know what missions the 6,000 National Guardsmen will do, you don't know who is going to pay for them, you don't know what the rules of engagement will be for them, you don't know what size units there will be or how long -- whether they'll be two-week or six-month deployments, and you don't really know exactly which equipment they're going to have. So my question is, how long have you been working on this?

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: I guess that's what they call a loaded question. And I guess you haven't understood what we've said, so I'm going to try to make it really clear. We know the general set of mission assignments they will be required to preform. As we talked about, there's very specific granular things, what unit is going to go where. We're in the process this week, as we have been previously -- we have a whole set of mission assignments we know we want to get performed, let's say, through the course of the year. We are now looking at those mission sets and saying, what do we want to start with, we're identifying those mission sets.

Once we have those mission sets -- it might be construct some tactical infrastructure; it might be run aerial surveillance missions; it might be run ground surveillance missions -- we will go to the National Guard. They will take the mission sets. They will look at their menu of capabilities and they will match the capabilities to the mission sets, and then they will deploy the units.

Now, it is true that, sitting here right now, I do not have in my head every single mission set. The Chief might have it, but for reasons that are self-evident, I'm not going to tell him to announce to the world exactly what they're going to be. But there is a total compilation of missions we need. We know the different types of missions. There are capabilities to match those missions. The National Guard Bureau has a list of the units, and this is simply the mechanical process of matching up the mission sets and the units, and then beginning to deploy them, starting in June.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY McHALE: We're building upon past success, and we are reinforcing that success with a much greater number of personnel and a more robust commitment of resources. The gentleman back there -- I think he said he was from Watertown -- talked about the Northern border. We engaged in precisely this kind of activity last year during Operation Winter Freeze along the Northern border.

We don't know how many helicopters we're going to put up, but we know to a near certainty that we'll have helicopters deployed with aviation-based reconnaissance capabilities so we can watch illegal movement across the border and report that movement to our partners in Customs and Border Protection.

We don't know where we will place censors to detect illegal movement, but it's almost a certainty that we will have censors in place to detect such movement. We have capabilities that are related to the remote detection of certain kinds of weapons and we deployed those along the Northern border last year.

We don't know how many barriers or roads we're going to build, but clearly, we will be putting new barriers in place, and clearly, we will be building new roads to ease the movement of Customs and Border Protection along some of the more remote areas.

So your question, sir, is a fair one. We don't have the details of the mission sets. But based on past experience like Operation Winter Freeze and 20 years of experience in the counter-drug program, we've got a pretty clear picture in a general sense of the kinds of missions we'll be executing.

Q What I'm really trying to understand, is this a well-thought-out plan, or is it something that's just been --

ASSISTANT SECRETARY McHALE: Yes, sir, it is.

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: -- in quite exquisite detail, what we know, for example, what we want to build in terms of infrastructure, where we want to run surveillance missions. All -- and this is not something that was necessarily developed just for this, we know it in general. The Chief can speak about this, as well. So -- and all that remains to be done is to prioritize them and match them up to the particular capability.

GENERAL BLUM: This is clearly a well-thought-out plan in that it builds on a time-proven successful model that has demonstrated results for two-and-a-half decades. So all we're taking now is taking that prototype and giving it the resources and the attention that it has never gotten before.

Q The President mentioned in his speech last the need to create a national identity card. Why is that necessary, and is that something that DHS would do?

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: I don't think he said exactly that. What the President did say is, in order to have a temporary worker program, you will need to have to a tamper-proof, biometrically based identity card. And the reason for that is this. You need to give -- a couple reasons. You need to give employers a convenient and easy way to verify the legal status of people that they're going to employ.

We also will need, obviously, to be able to track the comings and goings of people in and out of the border if they're going to become part of this temporary worker program, so that this -- part of the, frankly, enforcement benefit to us of having a temporary worker program is it brings people who would otherwise be operating out of the light, in the shadows, into a situation where we know who they are, we've verified their identity, we've checked their background. And we can now assure the employers that if you have a card, the employer can rely on the card. The whole name of the game here is create an easy and convenient path to legal work, and that makes it easier for us then to enforce against those who don't want to be legal.

I'm sorry, but the same administration that said there were WMD in Iraq and that they were ready to respond to Katrina are again asking us to trust them on this as well? I don't know about you, but I am a little short on faith in this administration, and I certainly don't beleive that the federal identification card is simply to help ameleorate the immigration issue: Halt, swineherd, show us your papars!