It was almost a ho-hum news article: a double-decker tourist bus in midtown Manhattan on Sunday is surrounded by rifle-toting, SWAT-garbed New York cops after the driver suspects five men with “stuffed” pockets of possibly being evil-doing terrorists, according to the Associated Press. Like a scene gleaned from an old news reel of the CIA-sponsored coup against Jacobo Arbenz’s government in Guatemala (or any other generic scene of police action in Latin America), the men are handcuffed and made to line up, on their knees, against a wall (see photo here). As it turns out, the men are of course not terrorists, simply tourists, and they are released, probably relieved they did not suffer the fate of Jean Charles de Menezes who was summarily executed for having a “stuffed” jacket. “People were really scared,” one of the bus passengers told the Daily Telegraph. And that’s the point—to scare the heck out of Americans, to make them believe al-CIA-duh is gonna get ‘em, and thus soften them up for further police state intrusions, now made to appear necessary, as biometric ID cards will soon be (you’ll need one to drive a car, see a doctor, or buy food). “We just want to clear our heads of the whole thing,” one of the made to kneel at gun-point victims declared. “We were humiliated enough,” he added. “We just want to go,” said another. Unfortunately, for our dumbed-down populace, this seems to be a typical reaction to police state tactics.