About 7,000 facilities, roughly half of the nation’s chemical plants, are at high risk of catastrophe from either an accident or terrorist attack, The Associated Press’ Beverley Lumpkin has DHS stating yesterday as it released new security rules. The Supremes declined again yesterday to hear urgent appeals from two groups of Guantanamo detainees challenging the constitutionality of a new law stripping federal judges of habeas corpus review authority, The New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse reports. “The rejection is important because it more or less puts an end to five years of legal challenges to the structure of how the Bush Administration has sought to handle enemy combatants in the war on terror,” The Wall Street Journal cheer leads.

Feds: DHS chief Michael Chertoff will meet this month with the Southwestern Border Sheriff’s Coalition, which urges the feds to include state and local law-enforcers in efforts to secure the border, The Washington Times’ Jerry Seper says. The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization is “spending only 25 percent of the approximately $4 billion appropriated for its efforts (though this is not stopping the agency for asking for 30 percent more for 2008),” The Homeland Security Daily Wire’s Avi Klein quotes a GAO Report. “Just ’cause something’s secret, doesn’t mean it’s interesting, that should be the lesson” learned via Alec Klein’s Washington Post article on a super-secret trade group called the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, Danger Room’s Sharon Weinberger cracks wise.

Plots and counterplots: The Miami New Times’ Calvin Godfrey fills in the blanks on the comparatively little-noted three-hour St. Pat’s Day security lockdown at the White House after a 66-year-old Miami Cuban ex-con hurled a black cylinder onto its northeast lawn. The FBI is investigating information that al Qaedaites have been dispatch to the US with orders to find work in schools to engineer a Beslan massacre on this side of the water, Insight’s Jeffrey T. Kuner darkly, if unconvincingly, rumormongers (and see The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer’s Sarah A. Reid on local participation in the School Bus Watch anti-terror training program for drivers). The state investigation into allegations that Verizon and AT&T illegally released customer phone records to the NSA will remain open, The Rutland Herald’s Daniel Barlow cites Vermont regulators.

State and local: “ The need for an emergency command center was evident as early as 1989, but funding sources were not available until DHS provided $100,000,” The Cadillac (Mich.) News summarizes, concluding that “Osceola County citizens are safer today.” Staten Island Ferry agents are using vacuum-like trace detectors to sniff amongst their 65,000 daily passengers for a dozen different kinds of explosives, Newsday notes. “As the LAPD cracks down on the city’s most violent street gangs, federal and county officials have launched their own campaigns to apprehend and deport gangsters who are in the county illegally,” The Los Angeles Daily News spotlights.

Bid-ness: Oil prices had jumped on news that the US was asking Iran to provide information about an ex-FBI agent believed to have gone missing while on private business there, Reutersreports. Canadian privacy laws were upheld during a post-9/11 terrorism probe by Washington even though personal banking details were likely handed over to the US Treasury Department, The Canadian Press has that nation’s privacy sentinel reporting. More than 18 months after Katrina scourged the Gulf Coast there remains to be litigated a mountain of fraud cases that, by some estimates, involve thousands of people who bilked the feds and charities out of hundreds of millions of dollars intended to aid storm victims, AP surveys.

Know nukes: Preparing for the possibility of a mass-casualty nuclear terror event, Energy’s Oak Ridge facility has reopen a lab that evaluates human radiation exposures based on chromosome damage, The Knoxville News Sentinelsays. In a new initiative to secure Gotham from a large-scale atomic terror attack, the NYPD will employ a new technology in the subway system designed to detect possible weapons’ radiation, the police commissioner tells The New York Sun. The office in charge of protecting American technical secrets about nuclear weapons from foreign spies is missing 20 desktop computers, at least 14 of which have been used for classified information, the Timesquotes Energy’s IG.

Air turbulence: “Many Orlando airport screeners don’t like their jobs,” which “should probably concern you, as these are the people charged with making sure someone doesn’t sneak knives, guns or other contraband aboard planes,” The Orlando Weekly spotlights. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., can’t print out airline boarding passes online because his name is the same as one on the terrorist watch list, The Nashville Scene notes. Snoop Dogg, meantime, is “shocked at being denied a British visa, although he remains hopeful authorities will allow him to share a ‘message of love and harmony,’” AP reports.

Coming and going: Less than 24 hours after beginning patrols along the border near Nogales, Minuteman volunteers tell The Arizona Republic they encountered as many as 350 undocumented immigrants. “As usual, the ‘civil libertarians’ are mistaken. There’s no ‘national ID card,’ let alone one that will destroy our ‘civil liberties.’” FrontPage frowns in re: Real ID Act privacy concerns. The Atlanta transit system’s proposed 2007-08 budget includes a plan to put more police officers and other uniformed workers on trains, The Journal-Constitution recounts. A joint command center in Singapore will co-locate three maritime groups to coordinate against terror threats at sea, APreports.

Courts and rights: A former Maryland cab driver accused of attending a militant training camp in Pakistan pleaded guilty in New York yesterday to supporting terror, Reutersreports. The stalled case against Momin Khawaja enters its fourth year on a familiar note — a judge disqualifying himself, delaying once again Canada’s effort to launch its first post-9/11 terror trial, The CanWest News Service notes.

Guantanamo Bay Watch: David Hicks’ plea — nine-month in jail and a year-of-silence about abuse at Guantanamo — continues to generate anger both here and Down Under, The Christian Science Monitor’s Arthur Bright surveys. “The controversy over abusive interrogations of prisoners during the war against terrorism spotlights the need for clear ethics norms requiring physicians and other clinicians to prevent mistreatment of prisoners,” Steven Miles essays in The American Journal of Bioethics. “Unfortunately, unfair as it is, the President’s decision to confine terrorism suspects at Gitmo has turned into an international debacle,” Max Boot writes in “Time to Close Gitmo” for Commentary. It’s also time to shift the venue for detainee terror trials to federal civilian courts, Nat Hentoff nags in The Washington Times.

Terror talk: “To be fair, replacing ‘war on terror’ isn’t easy,” Peter Beinart concedes in a Post op-ed predicting that “the ‘war on terror’ — as a phrase — could be nearing its final days. When the Bush administration goes, it may, too.” “When a civilization no longer inculcates an overriding attachment to its own survival, well, it no longer survives as a civilization,” fire-breather Suzanne Fields aphorizes in a Washington Times tirade on the Royal Navy’s surrender to Tehran. “Terrorism breeds terrorism,” The Australian quotes radical Shiite Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr pronouncing in “one of his strongest broadsides against the US.” Most of what the United States knows about al Qaeda and other threats is rooted in conjecture and wishful thinking, The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Amanda Garrett quotes terror maven Bruce Hoffman. “If we allow . . . innocent immigrants to live in a police state for six months at a time, what are we allowing Homeland Security to make of America?” Greg Moses wonders in a CounterPunch slam of ICE’s detention policies. Giving both police and intel services equal access to a national anti-terror database unveiled last Friday “is a sensitive issue in Germany, in light of abuses under both the Nazis and by Communist East Germany,” Deutsche Welle recounts.

Over there: Sunni insurgent groups previously allied with al-Qaeda-in-Iraq “have turned against it, killing its leaders, attacking its supporters and vowing to drive it out of the country,” The Times of London tells. Hamas is reputedly constructing tunnels and bunkers in Gaza and smuggling in ground-to-air missiles and military-grade explosives, the Times tells. Scores of residents or perhaps hundreds were killed over the weekend as the worst fighting in 15 years — between government and Islamist forces — battered the ruined Somali capital, Mogadishu, the London Times, again, reports. Bangladesh on Friday executed six Islamist militants in connection with the bomb-murder of two judges, the Timestells. Christians are fleeing Lebanon to escape political and economic crises and signs that radical Islam is on the rise in the country, The Daily Standard says. “Today, Morocco is 1916 Russia,” a Weekly Standard quotes an official in a piece on the Islamist tsunami lapping at that North African nation.

Drawing the line: “As befuddled travelers struggle through even tighter airport security, and with it, longer lines, they are stunned to find security officers burrowing through their bags for what seemed like endless minutes looking for yet another newly prohibited carry-on item, ‘fun,’” GlossyNews notes. “As if the recent bans on liquids were not enough, travelers now have to contend with even greater lines at the airport,” Michael Doidge writes. “Economists are especially concerned over the impact the bans on toiletries and ‘fun’ will have for travelers. While it is assumed that image-conscientious Americans will not do without toiletries, and will buy them at their destination wherever it may be, purveyors of ‘fun’ are not so secure in their thinking. ‘We are concerned that Americans, when given the opportunity to have fun or to not during their travels, will just choose not to have it,’ said one Disney World spokesperson. ‘Luckily, no one has had fun here since 1987.’”