U.S.-Mexico collective security. (Insider Report).

According to the March 22nd New York Times, the U.S. and Mexico are now "coordinating military missions" for defending our joint border from terrorist attack. Mexico has dispatched 18,000 troops to guard airports, seaports, border posts, and bridges that link its country with the U.S. "It's a new mission, Mexico looking out for the United States," explains Sgt. Benito Hernandez, a Mexican soldier stationed in the city of Juarez.

Special Forces troops, Army Rangers, and Marines--as well as remote sensors and surveillance drones--are deployed to monitor the U.S. side of the border. According to the Times, U.S. troops "are training their sights away from smugglers of drugs and migrants toward the terrorist threat, erasing the 'thin line between counterdrug and counterterror missions,' to quote Gen. John Yingling, one of their commanders. The American military is moving closer to using its soldiers as law enforcers, as Mexico has done for years."

This raises two very troubling questions. First, since drug and migrant smugglers from Mexico are the most significant terrorist threat to our southern border, why are our forces "training their sights away" from them? Second, wouldn't using U.S. soldiers as law enforcers require repealing--or at least radically modifying--the Posse Comitatus law?

General Yingling's Joint Task Force Six (an outgrowth of the so-called "war on drugs") is now under the operational control of "the New Northern Command headquarters in Colorado, which has been given responsibility for overseeing the United States, Mexico and Canada," notes the Times. "The Northern Command includes officers of the CIA and the FBI, which in turn are sharing border security information with their Mexican counterparts. The Federal Protective Police, Mexico's equivalent of the FBI, is heavily involved in the new security mobilization, as is Cisen, Mexico's equivalent of the CIA. These linkages and the coast-to-coast mobilization by both nations represent the birth of an international national-security network, American and Mexican officials said."

It also represents a dramatic acceleration to erase the U.S.-Mexican border and amalgamate the two nations as part of an emerging, EU-style regional bloc.