School Bus Drivers Join the Terror Watch
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — The war on terror has a new front line – the school bus line. Financed by the Homeland Security Department, school bus drivers are being trained to watch for potential terrorists, people who may be casing their routes or plotting to blow up their buses.
Designers of the School Bus Watch program want to turn 600,000 bus drivers into an army of observers, like a counterterrorism watch on wheels. Already mindful of motorists with road rage and kids with weapons, bus drivers are now being warned of far more grisly scenarios.
Like this one: terrorists monitor a punctual driver for weeks, then hijack a bus and load the friendly yellow vehicle with enough explosives to take down a building.
An alert school bus driver could foil that plan, security expert Jeffrey Beatty recently told a class of 250 of drivers in Norfolk, Va. After all, bus drivers cover millions of miles of roads. They know the towns, the kids, the parents.
“The terrorist is not going to be able to do some of their casing and rehearsal activity without being detected by one of you,” said Beatty, an anti-terrorism veteran of the CIA, FBI and the Army’s Delta Force. The more people watching, he told the drivers, the safer the community will be.
With bus drivers becoming informal intelligence gatherers, the reach of homeland security is growing – not exactly what parents think of when their kids head to the bus stop.
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This is the kind of nonsense I’m talking about that needs attention right now. I want to know how the Democrat Party approaches this issue. If anyone can find some candidates to ask, please do and get back to me on this.
This is a new part of a $50,000,000.00 program that has been in effect since 2003. If it’s needed, I want to know why and the ‘why’ should come with credible evidence. If the Democratic Party doesn’t endorse this program I would like to know what they are doing to change it.
