Amtrak forms new department to be headed by former FEMA official, signals tighter integration

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

As I have previously reported, Amtrak is working with closely with the child agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) which has been steadily expanding outside of the confines of airports.

Of course one of the other most well-known child agencies of the behemoth DHS is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is where the head of Amtrak’s new emergency management and corporate security department comes from.

The leader of this new department will be Susan Reinertson, the former regional director of FEMA Region X in Seattle.

She was appointed in 2006 and was responsible for coordinating FEMA’s mitigation, preparedness, disaster response and recovery efforts for Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

Why is this at all important or newsworthy, you ask? Well, it shows that Amtrak – like many other companies – is becoming increasingly tight with federal agencies working under DHS.

Amtrak is already fully compliant with – or some might say they regularly capitulate to – the DHS and child agencies, as evidenced not only by the TSA teams which swoop in on their trains but also by the case I reported on recently in which a college student was detained for quite a while, interrogated and harassed simply for being in Islamic Studies.

Of course, since the train crossed a border they are essentially forced to comply with whatever the Customs and Border Protection (CBP, another DHS agency) officers want to do, but regardless they seem to have no problem with subjecting their passengers to the thuggish behavior of federal goons.

I suspect that this will only increase with a former FEMA regional director heading up one of their departments, since now the DHS will have a high-level former official to leverage.

Amtrak states that their new department will integrate their company-wide efforts into a solitary and cohesive unit.

They claim that this will allow them to more effectively prepare for emergencies and disasters, as well as to mitigate the effects of emergencies and disasters while allowing for faster and more efficient response and recovery.

“The new team will identify opportunities to strategically coordinate, train and put into practice consistent and efficient response and recovery efforts to better ensure the safety and security of our customers and employees,” said Amtrak president and chief executive officer Joe Boardman, according to Government Security News.

While currently Amtrak has their eight emergency management-related functions spread across various departments, these functions will now be all under the control of the new department.

Combining emergency preparedness, continuity of operations and corporate security risk strategy will, according to Amtrak, help them establish and maintain a uniform corporate security strategy and better respond to and recover from emergencies and disasters.

What they leave out is that it will also allow for even closer relations between DHS child agencies and Amtrak, thus allowing for even more unconstitutional checkpoints and Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) team activities.

Some who buy into the complete fraud that is the war on terror might see this as a positive development.

Those of us who see past the propaganda and lies will likely see this as yet another example of the connections between government and the private sector as recently highlighted by the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) moving to Google as well as these 18 Venn diagrams.

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This article first appeared at End the Lie.