DHS is reviewing security and emergency plans as the country enters into a period of heightened alert lasting until next summer because of the Olympics and the U.S. presidential election, The Associated Press’ Eileen Sullivan reports. Absent specific indicators of attack, the terror alert level will stay at yellow because “U.S. officials do not want to be accused of trying to inject themselves into the presidential campaign,” ABC News’ Pierre Thomas adds — which concern The Daily Kos finds not particularly credible.

Feds: In a report aimed at the next president — obtained by AP’s Barry Schweid — security specialists propose a vast overhaul of a “problem-plagued” U.S. security system.“I’m not so sure this is a new organization. I am sure it has nothing to do with homeland security,” Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette columnist Steve Buttry writes skeptically of the ostensibly remade post-Katrina FEMA. Having slammed the Coast Guard for its mismanagement of high technology, Danger Room’s David Axe graciously praises the Coasties for “preventing a potential international incident with Mexico.”

McBama: On Iraq, Barack Obama is “choosing his positions in order to win a political campaign rather than do what is needed to win the war,” The Washington Times’ Stephen Dinan paraphrases John McCain — as John Dickerson complains on Slate how even after Obama’s trip “we have no better sense” of how he thinks about Iraq. “If he’s wrong on Iraq, McCain’s contagion theory goes, he can’t ever be right on Afghanistan,” The York (N.H.) Weekly analyzes — while Salon’s Joe Conason critiques McCain’s claim that “ tactics used to quell the Sunni insurgency long before the surge troops arrived in Iraq should nevertheless be attributed to the surge.” Thanks, ironically, “to the surge he opposed, the policy Obama championed — a relatively swift and steady withdrawal of U.S. combat forces — no longer looks dangerous, irresponsible or like an invitation to defeat,” Walter Russell Mead muses in the Los Angeles Times.

State and local: DHS last week released $15 million to be used by — mostly Jewish — nonprofit organizations for security measures, the Jewish Telegraph Agency relates.In the age of terrorism concerns, Minneapolis is reviewing its policy banning photography in its skyways, KAAL News 6 notes. To align the county courthouse with DHS guidance, “the north and south entrances now are electronically locked to all who do not have a special key fob,” The Duncan (Okla.) Banner reports. Securicrats will begin offering a 20-hour Community Emergency Response Team training course starting tonight, The Shreveport (La.) Times tells. Arizona border communities are getting more homeland security aid — but the rest of the state will be getting less, The Yuma Sun says.

Bid-ness: “Even if — and this is a big if — the company pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, here is the cold, hard fact: Business has never been better for Blackwater and its future looks bright,” The Huffington Post huffs — and see Homeland Security Today: “‘Private armies’ on trial.” A directive “that federal contractors verify employees’ identity documents has some businesses sweating over the potential impact — especially California’s huge food industry,” The Sacramento Bee buzzes. Despite a recent ruling, the legal battle between travel agents and Florida lawmakers over the cost of doing business in officially terror-listed Cuba is far from over, The New York Times spotlights. The Times of India, meantime, notes “the growing number of entrepreneurs, corporate and commercial establishments who have now taken insurance coverage for terrorism.”

Oil patches: “I think we’re likely to see hundred-dollar-a-barrel gas for the foreseeable future,” a maven says in The Knoxville News Sentinel, citing, among other factors, the omnipresent “risk of terrorism or the problem in Nigeria, the talk out of Venezuela” — and see RIA Novosti: “Russian S-300 air-defense missile systems would enable Venezuela to fully ensure the security of its hydrocarbon resources.” “The U.S. and international military forces are taking more aggressive action off the African coast as bolder and more violent pirates imperil oil shipments and other trade,” USA Today tells. Nigeria’s main militant group, meantime, threatens a new wave of attacks on the volatile West African nation’s oil pipelines, AP relates.

Bugs ‘n bombs: “The deliberate contamination of the nation’s food supply is a serious threat, [but the FDA] has not received additional funding to support food-related anti-terrorism activities,” The Abilene Reporter-News notes. In assessing Butner, N.C., as one of five candidates for its massive new bio-lab, DHS failed to consider the proximity of 6,500 unevacuable patients and prison inmates, The Durham News notes — while The Raleigh News & Observer sees mounting opposition likely nixing any chances of landing the facility. “Destroying some Iranian facilities but not others would only slow down Tehran’s nuclear program. Even a solid military success might delay it by no more than a few years,” The American Prospect suggests.

Coming and going: A man who left the secure area of Charlotte’s airport last week to change his ticket bypassed security checkpoints to get back in, prompting a 45-minute lockdown, the Observer observes. “I’m giving up on airline travel. The humiliating process of going through airport security . . . is getting even worse,” a Coulee (Wisc.) News commentator complains. “There are limits to what border guards should be authorized to require of citizens as well as visitors. Those limits are laid out in the United States Constitution,” The Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph editorializes. “Louisiana is the latest state to reject a federal identification card program intended as an anti-terror measure that is under criticism,” The Monroe News Star relays — while The Washington Post spotlights a new Virginia law requiring that ICE be notified of illegal immigrants charged with crimes.

Talking terror: “Islamic extremists are gaining strength, while America finds itself increasingly isolated [for want of] a holistic strategy to guide the prosecution of our new war,” Navy Cmdr. Philip Kapusta and Marine Capt. Donovan Campbell essay in The Boston Globe. “As an episode of organized violence, wars simulate the terrorist experience and prepare the surviving mujahedeen for a lifetime of postwar terrorist activity,” Rami G. Khouri quotes an expert in Lebanon’s Daily Star on the perils facing even a “post-victory Iraq.” Al Qaeda’s strategy “is to suck in the U.S. military — this is classic Osama bin Laden ideology, according to which the United States should be dragged to fight in Muslim lands,” Pepe Escobar essays in Asia Times. “For an organization that [prizes being] the symbol of ‘resistance,’ being vilified by western governments . . . is a badge of honor,” Matthias S. Klein writes in a Guardiancritique of Hezbollah’s addition to Britain’s terror list.

Chattering classes: “I tend to grow concerned when right-thinking people all seem to be simultaneously agreeing that the terrorist threat is diminishing,” The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg worries in a Q&A with Daniel Benjamin. Although an “imperfect fit,” the war metaphor for the battle against Islamist terrorism developed initially because “in the short term, no remotely viable alternative to it existed,” Curtis A. Bradley quotes Benjamin Wittes in a Foreign Affairs review essay. “Here’s the official policy on torture from the administration that decries moral relativism: It’s in the eye of the torturer,” the Post’s Dan Froomkin blogs. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. “seems ever ready to lend a terrorist a helping hand. Just ask Susan Rosenberg, the Weather Underground bomber. He helped convince Bill Clinton to commute her 60-year sentence,” National Review’s Andrew McCarthy attacks.

Courts and rights: Prosecutors in the trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver yesterday unveiled a graphic video of the Sept. 11 attacks and other al Qaeda operations, Reuters reports. Behind the “judicial routine” of that trial “lies a parallel universe of law and lawyers,” the Times analyzes. A “well-known U.S.-based Pakistani-American journalist” has been in U.S. custody for the last four months on what are said to be terrorism-related charges, Pakistan’s Daily Times tells. “The next administration will have to be careful it doesn’t simply re-create Guantanamos elsewhere, for instance at prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq,” The Christian Science Monitoradjures — while Al Jazeera says 86 percent of “enemy combatants” interned at Guantanamo are not enemy combatants.

Over there: Despite favorable signs that the “combat phase” in Iraq is finally ending, U.S. commanders are leery of proclaiming victory or promising that the calm will last, AP assesses. Taliban armies finance themselves from the drug trade, but so do many of their Afghan foes, The New York Times tells. The number of extremist training camps has increased as Pakistan’s government has taken a more conciliatory approach to the militants, The Wall Street Journal spotlights — while Reuters has at least six, including three foreign militants, killed Monday in a suspected U.S. missile strike on a Pakistani safe haven, and the Times, again, has President Bush praising the visiting Pakistani P.M.’s dedication to the terror fight. Indian anti-terror squads have carried out raids in the search for leads into the bombings that killed at least 49 in western India last weekend, CNN notes.

Heavy legislative lifting: “Two days after tearing his right hamstring while sponsoring bill S 2597, Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., was placed on the 15-day Congressional Disabled List,” The Onion reports. “‘I was up there lobbying to authorize the extension of nondiscriminatory treatment to the products of Moldova, when all of a sudden I felt this snap,’ said the 76-year-old Lugar, who collapsed on the Senate floor and was unable to walk back to his seat under his own power. ‘I’m too old to be sponsoring this hard.’ As Lugar was being carried out of the Capitol on a stretcher, he gave a thumbs-up sign, drawing a standing ovation from his fellow members of Congress. ‘He’s a fighter,’ said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. This is just the latest in a string of bad luck for the Senate, as during a routine checkup Sunday, bone chips were discovered in Iowa senator Tom Harkin’s proposing elbow, and doctors have said he may never legislate again.”