DHS and a South Texas county are in accord on building a combination of levees and border barriers to address both security and flood control needs, The Associated Press’ Christopher Sherman reports. This “border wall is going to make some people richer — but exactly who, or by how much, is a big question,” The McAllen Monitor’s Jackie Leatherman adds. In El Paso, meantime, county commissioners have voted for abandoning the fence and recognizing that local police shouldn’t be enforcing federal immigration law, The El Paso Times’ Erica Molina Johnson tells.

Feds: A bill introduced yesterday would set mandatory standards for care of ICE detainees and require that all deaths be reported to Justice and Congress, The New York Times’ Nina Bernstein and Julia Preston report. DHS is refusing to identify the “influential Muslim Americans” who met with Michael Chertoff to help shape a softer approach to government talk about terrorists, Steven Emerson rebukes in The Jerusalem Post. A House panel yesterday subpoenaed Veep Dick Cheney’s chief of staff in its probe of possible torture of terror detainees, Reuters’ Thomas Ferraro relates. Eight ships meant to be “the latest, best weapon for stopping terrorists, illegal immigrants and smugglers now float unused in a U.S. Coast Guard shipyard in Baltimore,” Jen Haberkorn leads in a Washington Times explication of a “$100 million taxpayer debacle.” See, too, CQ Weekly’s Tim Starks’ dissection of the “disappointing” post-9/11 intelligence reforms.

Poly-ticks:Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have “declared their determination to escalate U.S. military action in the Middle East, disagreeing mainly over which country should be targeted first,” San Francisco’s Independent Media Centerassails. With “the threat of terrorism always present, I’m resting better at night knowing that we may have a person in the White House with battlefield experience. After all, Hillary Clinton has dodged sniper fire on the runway in Bosnia,” Norman Shaughnessy snipes himself in the Grand Rapids Press. “Obama wants to sit down with an Iranian leader who is dedicated to wiping Israel off the map — his words. I don’t think we should give him that kind of prestige,” the AP’s Libby Quaid quotes from John McCain’s dissection of his Dem opponent’s security experience. A group of Arab-American and Muslim leaders want McCain’s campaign to apologize for cutting ties with an Arab-American businessman serving on his Michigan finance committee, AP also recounts.

State and local: New York State has enacted a Libel Terrorism Protection Act designed to make it harder for “libel tourists” — outed terror funders, e.g. — to threaten authors with foreign lawsuits, Publishers Weekly reports. Hard-fought legislation aimed at curbing illegal immigration lingers near death at the Kansas Capitol, and no one has issued a resuscitation order, The Kansas City Starupdates. Pumped up ICE workplace raids are fueling a growing market in Houston for phony immigration and work documents, the Chronicle recounts. When Michigan’s governor underwent surgery yesterday, the state constitution barred her from temporarily handing over power to the lieutenant governor while incapacitated, The Lansing State Journal explains.

Follow the money: A captured Sri Lankan terror ops manual urges fundraising via charging admission fees for music, drama and sporting events or selling reading materials on the Tamil Tigers’ attacks, The National Post reports. Tiny Nauru says it has received Treasury’s backing for anti-money laundering reforms, The Voice of New Zealand notes. Pakistani bureaucrats and pols are now in receipt of a handbook detailing the risks posed by “organized financial crime, money-laundering for financing terror and absence of closer cooperation with international forces against terror-capital,” The Islamabad News notes. “It is unlikely that anyone around here will change their smoking habits for fear that they are funneling money to Islamic terrorists,” The Buffalo News nags in an editorial rapping Rep. Pete King’s linking of Indian reservation cigarette sales and terror finance.

What’s up, doc? Hospital trauma centers in seven major cities do not have the capacity to handle even a modest terrorist attack, USA Today cites from a House panel’s investigative report — as The Washington Times finds expert witnesses warning lawmakers that hospital ERs will not be ready to treat victims of a major terrorist strike or natural disaster if Medicaid cuts scheduled for this month take effect. AP, meantime, spotlights grimly specific physician-drafted guidelines for patient triage in a bird flu pandemic or other health disaster. (“This bone-chilling new plan is further evidence that the powers that be are preparing [for] a die-off,” Global Research hyperventilates.)

Coming and going: TSA “has approved security tamper-evident bags for the transportation of duty-free liquids, purchased post-screening checkpoint, on flights departing the United States, Homeland Security Daily Wire spotlights. TSA likes Continental’s paperless boarding pass because the two-dimensional bar codes — displayed on passengers’ cell phones — are tougher to copy than the older one-dimensional variety, Autopia advises. TSA has launched 90-day employee screening pilot programs at seven airports in obedience to legislation passed by Congress in January, AviationNews.com notes. Two olive-skinned, photo-snapping Puget Sound ferry riders about whom the FBI issued an APB last summer turn out to be a pair of E.U. software consultants fascinated with on-ferry parking design, The Seattle Timescites from an FBI release.

Terror tech:Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have discovered a method for remote sensing of the physiological and emotional state of human beings, which could have significant implications for anti-terror and security technology, Science Dailyrelates. With an official comparing it to the late 1950s response to Sputnik, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is charged with creating a cyberwarfare range where new forms of defending against electronic assault can be tried out, Danger Room reports. “Separating cyberwar, cyberterrorism and cybercrime isn’t easy; these days you need a scorecard to tell the difference [because] military and civilian attacks — and defenses — look the same,” Bruce Schneier muses for Wired. At a symposium last week, DHS pitched a bid to recruit small businesses with good ideas about using nanotechnology to solve homeland security problems, The Arizona Republic reports.

Gizmotronica: Another Wired item checks in on “the first major test of the Army’s $160-billion, 20-year plan to build a high-tech family of networked robots and hybrid-electric armored vehicles.” Harvard researchers have crafted a shoebox-size laser sensor that can detect extremely low concentrations of chemicals, a step toward their goal of a compact, cheap sensor that can be carried discretely and detect parts-per-billion volumes, Technology Review spotlights.Wiredalso offers a gallery of new survival gadgets now being flogged, including the Bedu Emergency Rapid Response, “a keg-sized drum full of durable life-saving gear built to support eight adults for up to five years.” A solar camera developed by an Ohio port authority has passed the one-year mark, during which time it never lost power as it delivered real-time video and digital security images, Today’s Facility Manager mentions.

Guantanamo Bay Watch: In interviews and a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for detainees at Guantanamo said they believed government agents had monitored their conversations, The New York Times tells. An Al-Jazeera cameraman released from the U.S. terror jail last week terms it “the worst prison mankind has ever seen,” AP says. “Most of the [Guantanamo] inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash rewards,” a Times columnist contends. The public campaign to close Guantanamo “involves the claim that it houses many innocent people... Now Reutersis reporting that someone released from Guantanamo has died in a suicide attack in Iraq,” The Counterterrorism Blog counters. “The United States releases a terrorist, and — surprise! — he commits terrorism,” The Wall Street Journal chimes in. British intelligence knew in advance that a former London janitor now awaiting trial at Gitmo would be tortured in an Arab country to extract evidence, Reuters quotes counsel.

Over there: The Counterterrorism Blog highlights a new report which examines the myriad complexities the worldwide prison system must address when managing incarcerated extremists — while Britain’s Sunday Mirror has prisoners “exploding a firebomb inside a top security jail holding killers and convicted terrorists.” Nepal’s Maoists want off the U.S. terror list in light of their victory in historic elections last month, The Washington Timestells. Indonesian police say they have arrested a key Jemaah Islamiyah member who allegedly helped plot the 2005 Bali suicide bombing, Agence France-Presse relates.

Qaeda Qorner: In what he termed a widening trans-Atlantic divide, CIA chief Michael Hayden says the U.S. government regards al Qaeda as part of a global threat while E.U. members perceive a law enforcement issue, The World Tribune tells. For al Qaeda — on the run in Iraq and under attack in Pakistan and Afghanistan — “the Algerian Sahara has proved fertile ground in its quest to open a new front on Europe’s southern doorstep,” The Times of London tells. The United States has urged Pakistan to meet its commitment of securing remote tribal areas allegedly used as safe haven by Qaedaites and other extremists, AFP reports.

This just in, from TheOnion: “HOUSTON — According to an official NASA report released Saturday, nearly 32 percent of all prayers exiting Earth are deflected off satellites orbiting the planet—ultimately preventing the discharged requests for divine intervention from ever making it to the Gates of Heaven. ‘After impact with the satellite, these diverted prayers typically plummet back into the atmosphere, where they either burn up or eventually land, unanswered, in a body of water,’ the report read in part. ‘Of the remaining prayers, research confirms 64 percent fail to make it past the stratosphere because they aren’t prayed hard enough, 94 percent of those with enough momentum are swallowed by a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and 43 percent are eaten by birds.’ The report concluded that, of the 170 billion prayers issued last month, one made it to God, whose reply was intercepted by a hurricane and incorrectly delivered to a Nigerian man who reportedly did not know what to do with his brand-new Bowflex machine.”