Sometimes, you come across a piece of news that seems so surreal and outlandish yet so disturbing and unsettling that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The following article by AP writer Ben Feller would appear to fall under this category. Read on at your own peril:

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.

The program demands strong oversight, said John Rollins, a former senior Homeland Security intelligence official now with Congressional Research Service. Otherwise, he said, some bus drivers could think of themselves as undercover agents.

“Today it’s bus drivers, tomorrow it could be postal officials, and the next day, it could be, ‘Why don’t we have this program in place for the people who deliver the newspaper to the door?'” Rollins said. “We could quickly get into a society where we’re all spying on each other. It may be well intentioned, but there is a concern of going a bit too far.” more…