DHS recently asked a veteran of Operation Stormfury — a vain 1960s effort to disrupt hurricanes by seeding them with silver iodide crystals — to gather experts to look anew at taming hurricanes, New Scientist notes. (“The history of science is no less filled with idiocy and insanity than any other field of endeavor,” Joshua Hill derides, relatedly, for The Canadian Free Press.) “Imagine a bioweapon small enough to fit in a suitcase and deadly enough to destroy the human race,” FOX News’ Allison Barrie instructs in yet another take on DHS’s unlikely — or perhaps not — advisory board of science fiction writers.

Feds: A nonprofit digital library has fended off an FBI attempt to seize info about one of its users, DGI News Service’s Grant Gross relates — and see The Hartford Courant’s Jesse A. Hamilton on a Senate report’s advocacy for an “outreach program” to counter “the Web strategies of groups such as al Qaeda.” Addressing a Hill stalemate over CIA interrogations, a top Senate Republican suggests banning waterboarding and similar abusive methods but allowing the spy agency some leeway, The Associated Press’ Pamela Hess relates — while Reuters’ has a federal judge yesterday ordering the CIA to give the court a 2002 “torture memo.” ICE chief Julie Myers, meanwhile, “is in Argentina to discuss money laundering, human trafficking — and dinosaur eggs,” AP’s Bill Cormier also teases.

Poly-ticks: The hoax e-mails painting Barack Obama as a clandestine Muslim and Manchurian candidate are still having an impact on voters’ perception, Threat Level’s Sarah Lai Stirland blogs — while Reuters’ Jim Wolf has Obama accusing John McCain of “losing his bearings” with his assertions that Hamas has endorsed the Dem frontrunner. As a nuclear power, Israel doesn’t need the United States to “obliterate” Iran, “and there isn’t a strategic thinker in the Middle East who doesn’t know that, as should Sen. Clinton,” NBC News’ Robert Windrem reproves. If some “shudder at the prospect of combining John McCain’s temper with his power to launch war as president, what must they think about Hillary Clinton’s jarring threat that sounds very much like launching nuclear war?” Pat Murphy asks in The Idaho Mountain Express. “My guess is that if [Louisiana Governor Bobby] Jindal were elected vice president, he would not need to get any CIA briefings about . . . the nature of the terrorist threat,” James Lucier comments hopefully in The Yorktown Patriot.

State and local: Aurora (Colo.) police officers will help Denver in providing security for the Democratic National Convention, The Rocky Mountain News notes. A Rochester 911 dispatcher has been arrested for accessing secure government Web sites holding data about suspected terrorists, WHAM 13 News notes. The Long Beach Press-Telegram heralds the retirement of longtime southern California port security official Aileen Colon, the first woman to oversee a major sea- and airport for what is now CBP. DHS’s border fence will slice a golf course in Brownsville off from the rest of the United States, isolating it on the Mexican side, the Los Angeles Timesrelates. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s new “BusinessSafe” Webpage gives merchants a new tool to access info during crises and to report suspicious activity, Tampa’s WTSP-TV 10 tells — and see The Miami Herald.

Chasing the dime: At a time when globalization is supposed to be bringing countries together, border security has Canadian business leaders “bemoaning what they describe as a thickening of the 49th parallel,” The Surrey (B.C.) Leadersurveys. (Americans are shooting themselves and Canadians in the foot with security measures at the border, The Financial Post quotes the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.) “A comprehensive review . . . is needed to chronicle the current threats and weaknesses of terrorist financing and develop an improved and credible strategy for combating them,” a Counterterrorism Blog contributor urges. In a Euro-biz poll, 87 percent of respondents viewed climate change as their single biggest risk, “ahead of terrorism, pandemic flu, flooding, the credit crunch, government red-tape and outsourcing and offshoring,” Engineer Live! informs.

Bugs ‘n bombs: Illinois’ Scott Air Force Base is a player in this week’s national exercise simulating terror attacks in Washington state and a hurricane menacing the nation’s capital, Champaign’s WAND-TV 17 says. A hijacker Tuesday made off with a tanker truck brimming with diesel fuel, The Houston Chroniclerecounts. “Suicide bombing has always exploited common disbelief about what people will do: You don’t expect somebody to walk into a market and blow himself up,” a Slate columnist offers. Al Qaeda has used 6,000 suicide bombers in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, AKI quotes, relatedly, from seized documents. The world still faces a substantial flu pandemic threat and countries need to speed up preparations for a global outbreak, AP has U.N. officials warning. According to a new timeline being propagated by Israel, Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the middle of next year, The Jerusalem Post reports.

Coming and going: “Thousands of foreigners are being allowed to work in high security parts of Britain’s airports without passing proper criminal record checks,” The Daily Telegraph alerts. Clear, the airport security pre-clearance company, says members have now made one million trips through checkpoints since July 2005, San Francisco’s KCBS 740 AM says. E.U. ports and shippers anxiously await Washington’s next move toward a surge in anti-terror scanning of shipping containers, European Voice says. “Though families here predate the signing of the Declaration of Independence . . . they still find themselves having to prove their right to exist,” The San Antonio Current relates on the fence flap in the Rio Grande Valley.

Courts and rights: A California man described by prosecutors as an “eco-terrorist” was handed nearly 20 years in prison yesterday, Agence France-Presse reports. A Guantanamo judge threatens to suspend prosecution of a Canadian detainee if the military fails to turn over daily records of his detention, Reuters reports. The first of the Lackawanna Six to plead to terror-training charges has been moved from prison to a halfway house, NPR notes — while The Toledo Blade finds testimony in that city’s terror trial still focused on the informer who fingered the three suspects. A judge has temporarily blocked the transfer of one of Jose Padilla’s co-defendants to a restrictive Indiana unit that houses many terror inmates, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel says. Abu Qatada, the radical cleric once described as Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe, was granted bail by a U.K. immigration tribunal yesterday, The Guardian relates.

Over there: The Pentagon has canceled the assignment of a top general to Pakistan after the Pakistani media excoriated him for his previous job as commander of Guantanamo Bay, The New York Times tells — while Reutershas Defense saying that 5-10 percent of inmates freed from Gitmo have returned to terrorism. A Baghdad official said yesterday that al-Qaeda-in-Iraq’s leader has been arrested in the northern city of Mosul, AP reports. Iran’s Foreign Ministry yesterday dismissed as “unfounded” a State Department report’s claim that Iran is a sponsor of terrorism, Iran’s Mehr News notes — while Reuters has a U.S. securicrat sweating the security dimensions of Iran’s diplomatic forays into Latin America. The United States spent $10 million on Filipino informants who fingered top Abu Sayyaf Group terrorists, ABS-CBN News cites also from State’s release.

Kulture Kanyon: A PR campaign designed by Hunter College students and sponsored by Coach is being rapped for promoting a fake persona who blogged “about fake designer bags and linking them to child labor and terrorism,” PRWeek observes. From the moment the winning entry for the United Flight 93 memorial was chosen in 2005 “it has been beset by controversy, most of it coming from critics who see Islamic symbolism in the design,” The Times spotlights — while The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has relatives of victims dismissing such claims. “A new Air Force commercial about the perils of an attack in space does more than stretch the truth a bit. It snaps the truth into tiny little pieces,” Danger Room ridicules. U.K. officials, archived documents show, worried greatly in the 1950s about the survival of the great British cup of tea in the event of nuclear attack, The Press Association reports.

The Silver Scream: Inspired by the FBI IDing animal rights activists as the top domestic terror threat, the filmer of “Your Mommy Kills Animals” (Indie Genius) set out “to determine the actual danger posed by the movement,” Elites TV relates. Barbet Schroeder’s “Terror’s Advocate” (Magnolia), “a tricky, perceptive documentary portrait of the French lawyer Jacques Verges, also plays out as a history of modern terrorism,” The Times of London’s Wendy Ide writes. Biological terror had considerable thematic “prevalence in (usually direct-to-video) movies around the turn of the last century, and one of the better films of the bunch is Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Mimic’ [Dimension],” Flux Capacitator’s Owain J. Brimfield broods. In his day job of “pitching new gadgets to fight the War on Terror,” the hero of “Iron Man” (Paramount) operates in a manner suggesting he “might be the new face of military contractors,” Jeremy Hsu assesses in USA Today — while a Sci-Fi Fodderposter is “really stoked” by news that a film based on another Marvel hero, Captain America, will hit the screen in 2011, confidently forecasting: “He will probably be fighting terrorism of some kind.”

Paranoia strikes deep: An Onion “Statshot” prioritizes America’s “most popular suspicious behaviors,” to whit: 27 percent: Counting exact number of steps between every two points; 13 percent: Handling labeled sandwiches in work refrigerator; 11 percent: Googling “How to build a bomb, hypothetically”; 12 percent: referring to car as “terrestrial transport”; 17 percent: Suddenly being fluent in German; and 20 percent: Triple eyebrow raise. Tune in, also, to Onion Network News: “American Schools Trail Behind World In Aptitude Of Child Soldiers: A shocking new study finds U.S. children lag far behind their international peers in subjects like rifle assembly and mine defusing,” or another ONN item: “Live From Congress: Representative Wants To Rid Congress Of Gang Members.”