Pork busted new House intelligence chairman

Mickey Kaus:

Virtual Fence = Virtual Corruption? Speaker Pelosi's post-Hastings fallback choice to head the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, voted against building the 700 mile border fence. He prefers a system of video surveillance cameras, apparently. And gee, it seems that his daughter works for a firm that won a government contract to provide such surveillance services! What's more, according to WaPo's John Mintz (who broke the story) the firm did a really bad job. TPM Muckraker summarizes:

In 1999, IMC [the firm in question] won the contract, worth over $200 million. And at the advice of the Immigration and Naturalization Service official who was managing the operation, the company hired Reyes' daughter, Rebecca Reyes, to be his liaison at the company, the Post reported.

IMC's performance on the program was so bad it verged on criminal, according to later investigations. Millions of dollars in overcharges were alleged, installation was so bad that some cameras never worked properly, and the entire exercise wasted money and "placed. . . national security at risk," according to a GSA inspector general report. [E.A.]

Those who feel that a CW-endorsed "virtual fence" will be as effective a Bush-era bureaucratic initiative as, say, training a new Iraqi police force or providing Karina relief will not be encouraged by the history of Reyes' project. ... Doesn't an actual, non-virtual fence offer sufficient opportunities for sleazy contracting? Or is it too cheap and effective?...
Kaus notes that there will be no hearings to probe Reyes on his questionable background for his new job. On top of that I have real questions about his commitment for victory in Iraq since he opposed the liberation of Iraq. The blogs will have to keep close scrutiny on his performance since it is pretty clear that the Democrats and the media will not.

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