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THE US has made a muppet of its hi-tech border defences along the Arizonian border with Mexico.

Border patrols in Tucson were meant to be patched into a sci-fi panoply of surveillance tools from their car-mounted laptop computers.

Instead, Mexican bandits, cotton picking job hopefuls, fugitive axe murderers and kiddy fiddlers were left free to fiesta! under the eye of an impotent big brother.

Battleplans are meant to be displayed on car mounted laptops in border patrol cars. The information is meant also to be linked with police and other government computer systems. Flying robot drones are to add to the mix.

But border patrollers didn't even have their laptops secured properly. So when they bounced over the rugged Arizona terrain in pursuit of banditos, the computers flapped about and got broken.

The radars didn't work in the rain. The cameras were meant to pick out an economic refugee at 10km, but could only stretch to half of that. Residents along the border have been reluctant to give up their private land for the sake of the defences.

The US Department of Homeland Security has been forced to rethink its plans for an omniscient border patrol and contractor Boeing, which worked on the now defunct pilot, has been commissioned to draw up another set of blue prints for the Imperial defences.

Boeing managed in two years to implement a series of automated watch towers with cameras, radar, and other unspecified sensor equipment, but the system was useless because none of the components could be connected, the US Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog, reported with a more diplomatic use of language.

The project was rushed, the costs had been under-estimated and the users hadn't been consulted. The command centre system, which was mean to give border patrollers a realtime view of the landscape and anything that moved in it, wasn't any good.

Officials of the Secure Border Initiative, as the programme is ironically known, said that the Boeing pilot, Project-28, was only a test run anyway. The GAO said it would be delayed and cost more than the DHS had specified.