The U.S. and British embassies in Baku assumed lower profiles yesterday after Azerbaijani security announced having thwarted a “horrifying terror attack” against them, The Daily Telegraph’s Megan Levy reports. Two “Wahabite suspects” who “had beard” were subsequently detained by Baku police outside the U.S. embassy — but “released after giving explanation,” The Azeri-Press Agency adds. See, also, The Counterterrorism Blog to recall a somewhat similar Oct. 1 incident involving the U.S. mission in Vienna.

Feds: House homelanders are expected today to unveil a blue-ribbon panel to craft a new national cybersecurity strategy in time for the next prez, The Christian Science Monitor’s Mark Clayton recounts. Rather than foster a $22 million home-grown terror commission, House members should have sponsored “a field trip to the local Barnes and Noble, whose shelves are groaning with tomes,” CQ Homeland Security SpyTalker Jeff Stein jabs. “There is more than one way for a democracy to address the issue of electronic surveillance and civil liberties,” Gary Schmitt mulls in The Weekly Standard after quizzing Euro-spooks.

Poly-ticks: Among the “rooms” in “Hillary’s House of Horrors,” The New York Daily News’ Michael Saul has GOPer Mitt Romney seasonably stumping, is one where “she's weakened homeland security by voting against the authority of our government to listen in to al Qaeda's calls.” John McCain says rival Rudy Giuliani is deservedly popular because of his efforts on 9/11, but that it will take more than that to defeat Dem Hillary Clinton, The Associated Press reports. The criminal investigation of ex-NYPD commissioner and failed DHS nominee Bernard Kerik “is on track to crash headlong into the GOP presidential race — and Giuliani's final push for the nomination,” AP’s Liz Sidoti also spotlights.

Meta-issues: “While Democrats tend to talk about terrorism in general, Republicans increasingly pin the threat directly on Islam.” The Wall Street Journal notes of a semantic divide along the campaign trail. “Many of the men who hope to be the next president have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns,” a New York Times columnist relatedly raps. Terming President Bush's strategy to rein in Iran “mindless,” Dem contender Joe Biden tells The Boston Globe that Pakistani radicals and international terrorists pose graver nuclear threats. Generally, the Iran powder keg is stirring “foreign policy rows among saber-rattling Republicans and war-wary Democrats,” Agence France-Presse analyzes.

The fire this time: In mounting that embarrassing fake presser last week, FEMA simply “responded as it had trained to respond,” Time Magazine maintains — while the Times has a responsible official being denied a prestigious transfer to another agency, and The Washington Post invokes “the ghost of Brownie.” The San Diego wildfires charted the gulf between the tech-savvy affluent and poor urbanites in a forced evacuation, Wired surveys. Two City Council members introed a timely bill to bring reverse 9-1-1 to L.A. — before learning the megalopolis, in fact, already has it, the Los Angeles Times tells — while The Toronto Star weighs the factors enabling “a recent American rarity — a co-coordinated, largely problem-free response to human tragedy.”

State and local: The Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune enjoys a chopper fly-along to scope out CBP’s newish air branch based at the town’s airport. “Concern about billionaires buying the Legislature has taken a back seat to the Department of Public Safety's concern that a terrorist group may blow it up,” The Houston Chronicle comments of a Texas battle royale over access to a security tape. A South Carolina sheriff's office has won in the DHS grant lottery a Side Scan Sonar for underwater searches, The Myrtle Beach Sun News notes. A Springfield (Mo.) church last weekend welcomed words from “a former terrorist, converted to Christianity,” KOLR 10 tells.

Bid-ness: An ad from the “marketing masterminds” at Pittsburgh Paints associates their paint chips with DHS’s threat advisory rainbow, Bob McCarty Writes blogs. The reputation Blackwater and other contractors have “for getting the job done without much caring about Iraqis who get in the way . . . reflects the priorities of the United States military itself,” a Times op-ed offers. When Minnesota’s governor weighed against a steel project, he did so absent any investigation into the sponsoring company’s actual involvement in Iran, aides tell The Duluth News Tribune. DHS’s Ready Business Campaign is urging St. Louis biz folk “to prepare for the unexpected,” a Post-Dispatch commentary spotlights.

Know nukes: More than a year after Congress told Energy to harden nuclear bomb factories and labs against terror, at least 5 of 11 sites are certain to miss their deadlines, some by many years, The New York Times tells. Officials at Kansas’ Wolf Creek nuke plant tell The Topeka Capital Journal they’ve invested at least $9 million in security systems since 9/11. Regional cop shops gathered in New Jersey for a nuclear radiation detection demo under DHS’s Securing the Cities Initiative, The Westchester (NY) Journal News notes. The recent unauthorized flight of six armed nuclear missiles “was not the result of procedural negligence . . . but rather the consequence of a deliberate tampering of these procedures,” says a Global Research essay charging “treason.”

Bugs ‘n bombs: Officialdom wonders why a Des Moines-based industrial chemical distributor has suffered two dramatic fires in three months — including one that rocked the city’s outskirts Monday, the Register reports. Watchdogs say the biodefense research spree has resulted in unsupervised labs “putting the country at higher risk for dangerous disease outbreaks than before 2001,” The Dallas Morning News notes. Six first responders were overcome Sunday by a tear gas grenade that washed up on Palm Beach, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel says. As many as 2,000 U.S. guns enter Mexico each day, fueling an expanding drug cartel arms race, the Post surveys.

Air turbulence: Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister “has chalked up his second detention at the hands of the DHS — with exquisite irony, at Dulles Airport on his way back from talks with, er, the DHS on tackling terrorism,” The Register ridicules. Instead of teaming with Disney on a video welcoming foreign arrivals, CBP should have trained “Customs agents to be less abrasive and more welcoming,” Homeland Stupidity harrumphs. Better X-ray gear is coming to O'Hare International to shore up weaknesses in detecting bombmaking materials, The Chicago Tribune tells. An American Airlines flight from Orlando to Dallas-Fort Worth was diverted last weekend after a passenger — later detained — tried to open an emergency door, the Chronicle conveys.

Imprecations: “The U.S., through the so called ‘War on Terrorism’ has been spreading its poisonous hegemonic tentacles of power to choke and threatened the rest of the world,” Evelyn Khoo Lyn Yin inveighs for Just International. The administration has been trying to “prepare the public psyche” to accept a massive attack on Iran “as a course of action that is unavoidable,” the Bircherite New American’s William F. Jasper jousts — The Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff hits at “the eerie parallels between CIA ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and the verscherfte vernehmung methods of persuasion used by the Gestapo.” The threat of another terror attack here is “overblown,” Ohio State’s John Mueller assures the Chicago Tribune’s Mark Silva.

Terror Talk: Maybe “the military is right that ‘winning hearts and minds’ is the key to defeating terrorism in Africa,” Jacob Laksin concludes in The Weekly Standard, noting a slogan at a U.S. base in Djibouti: “If at first you don't succeed, call in an air strike.” Terrorism today “seeks to combine the annihilating power of Hiroshima with the nihilistic gospel of Auschwitz,” Andre Glucksmann aphorizes in City Journal. “Americans had best rethink the ‘war on terror’ while they still have the liberty to do so,” Paul Craig Roberts rumbles in CounterPunch. “Today we continue to fund the Taliban . . . by prohibiting drugs,” Drug War Chronicle’s David Borden blasts as to the lucrative black market opium trade.

Courts and rights: Lawyers will make final arguments today in the ex-terror prosecutor malfeasance trial, The Detroit News reports. “The tension between legal and political imperatives has long bedeviled the offshore trial project,” The Wall Street Journal surveys in re: the Guantanamo military tribunals. The circumstances of detainees’ suicide deaths continue to be contentious, CounterPunch rounds up. A UN human rights expert, meantime, calls on the U.S. to release “enemy combatants” and quickly close the Gitmo terror jail, AP reports. The administration wants al Qaeda to believe that the U.S. does torture while convincing the rest of the world that it does not — “a contradictory catechism is not holding up well,” the Times analyzes.

Over there: U.S. officials confirm that a man convicted in the USS Cole bombing was still in prison in Yemen despite reports of his release, Reuters reports. The growing numbers of foreign fighters in Afghanistan “are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies in the Taliban,” the Times tells. Hours after arriving in London yesterday, King Abdullah accused Britain of having ignored a Saudi tip that could have prevented the 2005 bombings, AFPreports — while the News of Karachi twits ex-PM Benazir Bhutto’s call for FBI/Scotland Yard help in probing the Oct. 18 suicide bombing that greeted her return to Pakistan. Japan's justice minister takes back a claim that he personally knew of an al Qaedaite who regularly entered that country, cited to defend controversial new measures to fingerprint foreigners, AFP, again, recounts.

All the king’s men: “The National Anti- Quartering Association, America's foremost Third Amendment rights group, held its annual gala in Washington Monday to honor 191 consecutive years of advocating the protection of private homes and property against the unlawful boarding of military personnel,” TheOnionreports. “The NAQA was created in 1816 in response to repeated violations of the Third Amendment during the War of 1812. The organization quickly grew in influence and cites its vigilance as the primary reason why the amendment has only been litigated once in a federal court since the Bill of Rights was ratified. The organization is also arguably the country's most powerful political lobby; every politician elected since 1866 has fully supported Third Amendment rights, although its president recalled the ‘dark days’ of 1982, when the federal case of Engblom v. Carey threatened to strip Americans of their fundamental Third Amendment freedoms.”