"After 9/11, our store associates were instructed that if they see something suspicious or out of the ordinary, they're to contact their managers and local authorities," Frankel said. "It's all about keeping our associates and customers safe and this was out of the ordinary and kind of raised a red flag and they did what they thought was right."

Buying a flight simulator is suspicious? Haven't flight simulators been best selling software for, I don't know, a decade?

This is exactly the problem with our current Orwellian state of perpetual war. Everyone is "enlisted" to do their part. Of course no one knows what they are doing, so we all descend into informing on one another. The issue isn't whether or not this Staples clerk thought it was right to inform on an American citizen; the question is why was this clerk able to be an informant at all? I thought this country stopped burning witches in the eighteenth century.

With it's anxiety-producing and incomprehensible color-coded threat level, the homeland security is moving in the wrong direction. So we're at threat level red -- what can I do about it? Perhaps I should just report every "suspicious" person I see?

What kind of Pyrrhic victory would the Bush administration claim if the "homeland" was secured at the price of turning it into a Stalinesque police state, where there are no laws, but dare to break one and you end up disappeared?

Sorry about the rant.