With the U.S.-Canada border under sudden intense scrutiny in the United States, a handful of American senators placed it under an ever-harsher spotlight Thursday by asking for the military's help in patrolling the boundary.

Democratic senators from states located near or along the 6,400-kilometre border are asking the U.S. Department of Defence to provide military radar in an effort to nab drug traffickers who use low-flying aircraft to move their product from Canada into the United States.

"The term 'operational control' is a very narrow term of art, and it does not reflect the infrastructure and technology and all the other things that happen at the border," she told a House of Representatives border security hearing on Wednesday. "And so it should not be used as a substitute for an overall border strategy."

Last week's report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, found that less than one per cent of the border is secure, and added that Islamic terrorists are far more likely to enter the U.S. from Canada than from Mexico.

Efforts to patrol it are marred by petty bickering among an array of different federal and state departments, the report also found.

The findings have resulted in the type of American attention that hasn't been focused on the Canada-U.S. border since the weeks and months following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Many Americans — politicians and everyday citizens alike — continue to mistakenly believe that the perpetrators of those attacks entered the United States via Canada.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2011/02/10/us-canada-border-security....