Homies: “New Department of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff seems to be saying all the right things after only a few weeks on the job  . . .  but of equal concern is whether Congress will follow Chertoff’s lead and bring more focus to how it spends the taxpayers’ money,” The Colorado Springs Gazette comments. (See, relatedly, James Jay Carafano’s Heritage Foundation Backgrounder proffering a “Congressional guide” to the fiscal 2006 DHS budget.) “By asking for only 200 new border patrol agents next year instead of the 2,000 minimum that Congress authorized, President George Bush perverts the meaning of national security,” The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reviles. “Aptly named” ex-DHS inspector general Clark Kent Ervin was “the polecat at the Bush administration re-election picnic, one featuring a sunny theme of keeping America safe,” The Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot remarks.

Feds: A new national defense strategy issued by the Pentagon calls for greater U.S. military efforts to keep foreign nations from becoming havens for terrorism, The Washington Post’s Bradley Graham recounts. The CIA said Friday that all interrogation techniques approved for use by agency personnel in questioning terrorism suspects were legal, The New York Times’ Douglas Jehl reports. A new government report criticizes federal financing of research on computer network security as inadequate and mistakenly focusing on classified research, the Times’ John Markoff also reports.

Uncle Sugar: “After the terrorism attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, politics couldn’t help itself. Much of the distribution of first-responder grants, conceived with good intentions, has been driven by political motives,” The Baltimore Sun says. The mayors of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are asking to use federal antiterrorism money to pay salaries for police officers and other security-related personnel, the Times tells. Budget cuts may be the only thing that the Alabama Department of Homeland Security can’t defend against, The Huntsville Times tells. Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy has blasted Gov. M. Jodi Rell for distributing to cities and towns $24 million in DHS funding based on population rather than on the relative risk, The Stamford Advocate says. “The lack of risk-based funding coupled with the lack of strategic spending has resulted in questionable uses of terrorism preparedness grants,” a Washington Times contributor comments.

Know nukes: Disruptions caused by last year’s security flap at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab may have cost as much as $367 million due to diversions from the lab’s normal work, The Associated Press says. In its diplomatic communications, the U.S. has glossed over the role played by Pakistan is transferring North Korean nuclear materials to Libya, “to cover up the part played by Washington’s partner in the hunt for al Qaeda leaders,” the Post reports. Investigators believe that that the black market network run by Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan may have been selling secrets needed to fabricate nuclear warheads, The New York Times adds.

Bugs ‘n bombs: Concern about agro-terrorism is old hat, “but the placing of agriculture on an equal footing with the power grid, financial and telecommunications sectors as ‘critical infrastructure’ is a relatively new development,” MSNBC notes. In the wake of last week’s anthrax false alarm, Virginia’s state’s top doctor tells The Richmond Times Dispatch, his department wants to improve the response to such scares. A blow-up sex doll sparked a face-reddening bomb alert in a German post office last week after it started to vibrate inside a package awaiting delivery, Reuters reports.

Hazmatters: “Public interest groups say spent radioactive fuel stored at Peach Bottom and 31 other U.S. nuclear plants continues to be particularly vulnerable to attacks by terrorists,” The Lancaster (Pa.) New Era explains. “It remains, even in a post-9/11 world, crucial that [safety officials] have as much knowledge as possible about the nature and amount of dangerous substances that are stored in, and pass through, their communities,” The Salt Lake Tribune opines.

Air wars: Despite expert warnings that long lines at Los Angeles International Airport are vulnerable to a terrorist attack, airport officials conclude that staff cannot be added to significantly shorten queues, The Los Angeles Times tells. Prosecutors are investigating the death of a man who was subdued by several fellow airline passengers after he became disruptive on a New York-bound flight late Friday, AP says.

Coming and going: Two years after Gotham’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it would spend $591 million to terror-fy its transit network, officials say they had begun spending only about half of that sum, The New York Times tells. “If Maryland law is not changed, and illegals are permitted to continue to obtain driver’s licenses in the state, the next group of terrorists looking to get bogus IDs will likely be coming to Baltimore or Gaithersburg,” The Washington Times tsk-tsks. “After Sept. 11, it was shocking to learn how easily the hijackers entered the country. What is shocking today is how little progress has been made in securing our borders.” The New York Times, again, comments.

Ports in a storm: To improve security on the nation’s commuter ferries, the Coast Guard has been trying to answer some critical logistical questions, the Times also tells. Lawmakers, ports and DHS are all debating “how best to determine the danger to each individual port . . .  [when] no foolproof formula exists for evaluating which would be the most likely target for terrorist activity,” The Biloxi Sun-Herald reports.

Order in the court: “There is no clear, nationwide picture of what measures have been taken to secure courthouses. Security in federal courts is handled by a single agency, the U.S. Marshals Service, but at the state and local level security measures vary widely,” AP says, too. “Tying judicial security to the war on terror risks destroying one of the institutions we seek to defend,” a Times contributor comments. (“The best way to prevent violence in courthouses is to make them gun-free zones,” another Times op-ed advises.)

Talking terror: “Although there are differences between gangs and insurgents regarding motives and modes of operations, it is possible to infer that gang phenomena are mutated forms of urban insurgency,” Max G. Manwaring concludes in a U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute monograph. “Some of the recent expansion of government is the unavoidable result of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 [and Bush] initially resisted creation of a Department of Homeland Security, which was a Democratic idea,” Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reminds in an essay delineating the Prez’s big government conservatism. “Torture is never worth it. Some things we don’t do, not because they never work, not because they aren’t ‘’deserved,’ but because our very right to call ourselves decent human beings depends in part on our not doing them,” Jeff Jacoby inveighs in his Boston Globe column. “In three and a half years after Pearl Harbor, we had virtually won World War II,” an impatient Times reader writes: “In three and a half years after 9/11, the Bush administration has a priority list.”

Emigres: Mohammed Daki’s “odyssey is one of the strangest among the scores of terrorism suspects’ tales across Europe and the United States,” the Post teases. The Post Sunday Magazine’s lead article, meanwhile, tells “how a Chechen terror suspect wound up living on taxpayers’ dollars near the National Zoo.” “How did a political refugee who became a cafe owner in a Michigan town suddenly become a terrorist in the eyes of the government?” the Times Sunday Magazine asks in a “post-9/11” profile of Ibrahim Parlak.

Over there: Nine terror suspects freed under a new British anti-terrorism law are living under such harsh and confusing control orders that one has been readmitted to a mental hospital, AP says. A suspect wanted in Spain for alleged involvement in last year’s Madrid train bombings was arrested Saturday near London, AP says, too. Investigators are hunting clues that al Qaeda was behind the suicide bombing by an Egyptian on a Qatar theater that killed a Briton, Reuters reports. Iraq and Jordan engaged in a tit-for-tat withdrawal of ambassadors Sunday in a growing dispute over Shiite Muslim claims that Jordan is failing to block terrorists from entering Iraq, AP, again, reports. The families of the victims of 9/11 are now reaching out to other international victims in an effort to discredit global terrorism, the Times tells.

Lager louts: “Prime Minister Tony Blair emerged as the toughest on terror following an emergency after-hours session behind the bike shed at Westminster,” Britain’s DeadBrain reports. “Mr. Blair and Michael Howard, the current interim leader of the Conservative Party, had agreed to settle their differences outside the House after being unable to do so during the day’s often raucous debate on the government’s anti-terror bill,” Malcolm Drury writes. The extramural fisticuffs apparently “followed a heated exchange that was finally ended by the Speaker, who threatened both leaders with detention if they did not sit down and shut up.” See DeadBrain, too, for a “dumbed down” explanation of the U.K.’s new terror bill: “All terrorists to be put under house arrest, all houses to be put under terrorist occupation,” and so on.