By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — It was more than a reminder of how modern life heavily relies on high tech when a fiber-optic cable from Phoenix to northern Arizona intentionally was cut, widely disabling the Internet, cell phones, and landlines.
Among reported problems, merchants couldn’t process transactions, students couldn’t do homework, ATMs didn’t function, weather forecasts weren’t complete, and law enforcement couldn’t use databases for at least a few hours, depending on where they were, on February 25.
Repair crews had to search for where attackers had dug into the rocky soil in the desert and cut open a buried metal pipe, then continued to slice through the powerful yet vulnerable fiber-optics.
Investigators reportedly thought power tools were used because wire cutters or a house saw wouldn’t have been sufficient.
In the Southwest, where violent criminals often cross a porous international border as they please, and Mexican drug cartels operate within the United States, this was a reminder of how terrorists could try their hand at some serious disruption.
Americans generally agree that the border cries out for protection, but they’re mocked and ignored by the insensate Democrat and Republican elite, as well as the heedless U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the local Arizona Catholic Conference, who sing out for ever more illegal aliens to sneak into the U.S. and sign up for financial rewards extracted from taxpaying citizens.
A story at the Washington Free Beacon website on February 27 reported: “‘This doesn’t look like “vandalism” but rather like sabotage,’ said Rachel Ehrenfeld, the founder and CEO of the American Center for Democracy (ACD) and its Economic Warfare Institute (EWI). ‘Next time it could be both the fiber-optic cables and a cell tower or two’.”
The story also quoted Nicholas Hanlon, an official with the Center for Security Policy, as saying:
“The Phoenix outage tells us that terrorists and otherwise hostile groups don’t have to probe our defenses to find soft targets in our electrical infrastructure when vandals can do it for them. NERC [The North American Electric Reliability Corp.] and the electrical industry tell us they are doing good work on their security practices one day. The next day they tell you national security is not their job.”
The Wanderer interviewed a retired federal law enforcer, Kirk Fowler, before he spoke to a meeting here the evening of March 2.
Fowler had served a total of more than 27 years with the Border Patrol, the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, and was in charge of intelligence for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico and Central America.
Asked about some speculation that the fiber-optic line was attacked by vandals looking to steal copper wire, Fowler said, “I did not believe it at all. That didn’t make any sense to me.”
An attempt at sabotage is “what I thought. That’s the only thing that makes any sense to me….If you’re going to start a new program, you try it small, see what happens….It can only be connected to some kind of terrorism.”
He told The Wanderer that the U.S. government doesn’t want the border secure. “They think they’re going to get these people [from other countries] to vote for them, that’s all that matters. . . . I think it’s the Democratic establishment, but the Republicans are worried about it. That’s why they cave in.”
Speaking to the evening’s meeting of the Arizona Project Tea Party, Fowler said there are “well over 20 million illegals in this nation,” half of them being visa over-stayers.
As to the taunt of how will anyone deport 20 million people, Fowler said, “You don’t have to do anything. They’ll deport themselves” if they think there’s no benefit in staying here.
If people think their behavior will be rewarded by coming to the U.S., they’ll do it, Fowler said; if they think they’ll be punished, they won’t.
“They come here because they think they’ll get employment. They’ll get welfare,” he said, so it’s the U.S.’s fault for enticing them with these rewards.
The “whole immigration system,” he said, “makes no sense at all — reward people for violating the law,” but penalize people who want to enter legally.
“. . . I think President Obama knows exactly what he’s doing. I don’t think he’s confused at all,” Fowler said.
When an audience member remarked that immigrants bring their old ways of life with them and will transform the U.S. into the same bad thing they’re escaping, Fowler replied, “You’re absolutely right.”
Unlike the U.S.’s porous border, “You want to talk about serious immigration laws? Look at the Republic of Mexico. Read their laws,” Fowler said.
Another speaker at the meeting, Patrick Smith, said the illegal immigration problem won’t be solved until inducements to break the law are ended. “Show them that you’re serious. Throw out the magnets that are drawing them in.”
When illegal aliens saw that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was serious about opposing their presence, “most of them self-deported,” Smith said.
Noting that the U.S. government could give illegal aliens $34,000 just through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), “This thing is not going to get solved” with that kind of reward, he said.
Impossible To Secure
The Wanderer emailed conservative Arizona Republican campaign strategist Constantin Querard to ask his opinion of the security challenge posed by the fiber-optic line cutting. He replied that the problem goes considerably further than that.
“We live in a world that is crisscrossed with simple wires and pipes. These deliver our power, our communications, our gas, and our water,” Querard said. “They are not complex systems, and they are impossible to secure.
“The cost of simply burying the entire system to increase its security would be staggering and that wouldn’t protect it from someone willing to dig before sabotaging. So we ought not be surprised if our rather obvious vulnerabilities become targets for those seeking to do us harm,” Querard said.
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