Congress, and not judges, should decide on giving Guantanamo Bay detainees their day in court, The Associated Press’ Lara Jakes Jordan has A.G. Michael Mukasey saying in a call for new laws governing foreign terror suspects’ rights. A military judge ruled yesterday that prosecutors cannot use statements against Osama bin Laden’s driver obtained under “highly coercive” conditions, the Washington Post’s Jerry Markon reports — while Agence France-Presse has Salim Hamdan pleading not guilty.

Feds: As liquid natural gas traffic mounts, the Coast Guard is “unable to balance the demand of LNG security requirements against other critical and growing homeland security responsibilities,” ex-Adm. James A. Lyons Jr. comments in the Washington Times— while the WashTimes’ Katie Falkenberg profiles at length CBP’s Air and Marine Branch, charged with “stopping terrorists and their weapons of mass destruction.” Some passengers’ no-fly list problems are a result of airlines doing “a poor job of matching the lists to the manifests,” a TSA spokesman tells The Chicago Tribune’s Dahleen Glanton. The Marine Corps is charging two of its own in a theft ring involving the stealing of secret files on potential terrorists for a counterterror task force, The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Rick Rogers writes.

War and pieces: After meeting with Barack Obama yesterday, Iraqi officials said they would like U.S. troops out by the end of 2010 — eight months later than the candidate’s proposal, the Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan and Dan Eggen report. Obama fails “to explain why killing more Afghans rather than killing Iraqis will make Americans safer, or how adopting the Bush-McCain rhetoric on the ‘war on terror’ will win him the presidency,” al Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara maintains — as The Edmonton Sun’s Eric Margolis is distressed “to see Obama succumb to the blitz of war propaganda over Afghanistan and adopt George W. Bush’s faux terminology of terrorism.” A McCain surrogate last week defended his candidate’s Iraq War stance by saying, “The Muslims have said either we kneel or they’re going to kill us,” The Miami Herald’s Beth Reinhard blogs — and see The American Muslim.

Poly-ticks: The Democratic Party “has chosen to win a political war at home, at the expense of winning wars in which the country was engaged overseas,” FrontPage Magazine maintains — while The New York Times charts Obama’s “huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini-State Department.” Homeland security matters have received “surprisingly little attention on the presidential campaign trail,” NPR observes. Noting that they both “touch on similar themes of war, terrorism and human character,” the Los Angeles Times heralds the publication of “dueling paperback” editions of Obama and McCain’s recent books. The level of emergency readiness is “like night and day” compared with 20 years ago, a Twin Cities medico tells The Minneapolis Star Tribune in re: GOP convention crisis preparedness.

State and local: Alabama’s homeland director will testify today before a House field hearing on rural security, The Montgomery Advertiser advises. Colorado’s homeland czar, meantime, meets tomorrow with county and city officials to settle the dispute over the security-related closure of a road along Dillon Reservoir, The Summit Daily News relays. Mississippi’s Analysis and Information Center “operates as a sort of statewide and nationwide neighborhood watch system [to] report suspicious activity,” The Columbus Commercial Dispatch recounts. The Nashville P.D.’s detention of a nine-months-pregnant Mexican woman “shows how local police can exceed their authority when they seek to act on immigration laws they are not fully trained to enforce,” The New York Times tells.

Bid-ness: “Playing a dual role as shipping lobbyist and member of a DHS advisory panel, John McCain’s campaign policy coordinator helped shape a controversial homeland security initiative,” AP leads. The feds are investigating whether millions of dollars are being steered improperly toward a contractor to run DHS’s annual Topoff exercise, AP also relates. A purported bomb detector military testers said worked no better than a Ouija board has been exposed as a stock market sham, ProPublica reports. Blackwater Worldwide plans a shift away from the contracting business that made it a poster boy for the use of armed security contractors, its CEO tells AP. “Profit-driven corporations with little or no concern for homeland security [are] eager to legalize millions of peasants who will work for below-minimum wage,” Borderfire Report rages. A U.S.-Canadian “shipping bottleneck” steals money and stifles jobs, an expert tells the Cleveland Plain Dealer, warning that “new border security measures could slow commerce even more.”

Bioterrorible: “An attack on Alabama’s agricultural industries could be devastating to the state and the country,” The Eufala (Ala.) Tribune has residents learning at an agro-terrorism seminar — while the Providence Journal finds U.S. Rep. James R. Langevin holding a field hearing in Rhode Island today on biowarfare preparedness. “The agriculture industry is perilously vulnerable to attack by foreign livestock viruses,” The Altus (Okla.) Times reminds. “With the knowledge that al Qaeda is a working to produce weaponized anthrax and other biological weapons, each moment that passes brings [closer] a national biological or chemical nightmare,” Family Security Matters frets. “Though its critics say it’s underfunded, mismanaged and of questionable value,” Las Vegas’ KLAS News 8concludes we’re better off with the BioWatch early alert network than without it.

Air turbulence:Pittsburgh International Airport is now one of three U.S. hubs using an expedited screening system for cockpit personnel, the Post-Gazette reports. “The last of the huge baggage scanning machines that populated the ticketing lobby at Sea-Tac after [9/11] is about to be removed,” The Tacoma News Tribune leads. Kuwaiti screeners foiled a citizen’s bid to smuggle in twelve bottles of whiskey, Arab Times tells — while The Chicago Tribune is the latest paper to sweat the advent of “potentially embarrassing ‘graphic’ full-body scans,” and see Miami’s WPLG-TV 10 on the “gasps and questions from modest passengers” evoked by new digital wave scanners.

Talking terror: “Ask a family member who lost someone in the atrocities of 9/11 how they feel. The fear cannot stop now — or ever. How can an ordinary person in the heart of Ohio know that Osama bin Laden is not plotting right now to attack our country again?” a Canton (Ohio) Repository reader remonstrates. “For all the heat it has generated, for all the moments of good theater it has provided, the debate over the War on Terror has also called into question the role of public intellectuals today,” Jacob Heilbrunn surveys in an insightful World Affairs Journal essay. “The deaths of nine U.S. soldiers at the hands of the Taliban at a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan is a sharp reminder that the central front in Washington’s ‘war on terror’ has moved from Iraq,” Jim Lobe writes in Asia Times. “Recent arguments on the imminent victory or coming defeat of al Qaeda are, to my mind, only relevant to one element of the phenomenon that the name represents,” Jason Burke thumbsucks in The Guardian.

Strategerizing: Investigators searching for international terrorists who plot and carry out attacks in the United States should first look close to home, AP’s Jon Gambrell has a University of Arkansas study showing. “It is conventional wisdom that the United States, or the West in general, can make the global jihad problem go away by doing something that is not being done now,” Robert Spencer disapproves in FrontPage Magazine. “There are a number of cases of terrorist ‘drop-outs,’ and studying their motivations for turning their backs on their former compatriots is highly useful for creating an effective counterterrorism strategy,” Michael Jacobson explores in West Point’s CTC Sentinel — and see “The Way Back from Islam” in The Counterterrorism Blog “From its tongue-tied commander in chief to its ‘information operations’—which even the military admits are regularly outdone by al Qaeda propagandists — the military has so far been incapable of putting its urgent mission into narrative form,” Andrew Klavan comments in City Journal. “By my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won,” Commentary’s Michael J. Totten quotes independent reporter Michael Yon.

Courts and rights: A former college student broke down crying yesterday when he was handed more than 12 years for his part in a domestic terror plot to kill Jewish civilians, The Orange County Register reports. The Nation explores new evidence in a detainee’s case “that the integrity of entire military commissions system has been corrupted” — while Columbia Journalism Review asks whether “justice at Guantanamo is simply unattainable?” Britain should stop extraditing prisoners to America following the CIA’s waterboarding admission, The Times of London has “an influential group of MPs” demanding. “The Supreme Court must reverse a federal appeals court decision last week that grants the president sweeping power to deprive anyone of their freedom,” The New York Times urges.

Fathers know best: “America’s Founding Fathers rose from the dead this week to present President Bush with a ‘hearty bitch-slap,’” CAP News notes. “’Frankly, we could not stand by and watch this anymore,’ said John Adams (1735-1826), odd bits of flesh falling from his rotting yet remarkably well-preserved carcass. ‘It was hard enough to sit by and watch Warren G. Harding, but we’re pretty sure he didn’t just make everything up off the top of his head like this ninny.’ According to Adams, the Founding Fathers plan to take turns bitch-slapping Bush for what they see as his infractions against the Constitution they ‘spent a lot of time working on.’ They cite Bush’s authorization of inhumane treatment of prisoners, his abrogation of treaties and his orders for secret surveillance.” Check out also, The Onion News Network:“Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency.”