Starting Points

Apr 1, 2010

No Shortcuts When Military Moves a War - NYTimes.com

Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr

By STEPHEN FARRELL and ELISABETH BUMILLER

JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq — Early this year a “fob in a box” — military slang for 80 shipping containers with all the tents, showers and construction material needed to set up a remote forward operating base — was put on trucks here for the trip from one war to another.

Left over and never used in Iraq, the fob rumbled north to Turkey, east through Georgia and Azerbaijan, by ship across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, then south on the old Soviet rail lines of Uzbekistan into northern Afghanistan. There — the end of a seven-nation, 2,300-mile, two-and-a-half-month odyssey — it was assembled just weeks ago as home for several hundred of the thousands of American forces entering the country.

In trying to speed 30,000 reinforcements into Afghanistan while reducing American forces in Iraq by 50,000, American commanders are orchestrating one of the largest movements of troops and matériel since World War II. Military officials say that transporting so many people and billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, weapons, housing, fuel and food in and out of both countries between now and an August deadline is as critical and difficult as what is occurring on the battlefield.

Military officials, who called the start of the five-month logistics operation “March Madness,” say it is like trying to squeeze a basketball through a narrow pipe, particularly the supply route through the Khyber Pass linking Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Image by theqspeaks via Flickr

So many convoys loaded with American supplies came under insurgent attack in Pakistan last year that the United States military now tags each truck with a GPS device and keeps 24-hour watch by video feed at a military base in the United States. Last year the Taliban blew up a bridge near the pass, temporarily suspending the convoys.

“Hannibal trying to move over the Alps had a tremendous logistics burden, but it was nothing like the complexity we are dealing with now,” said Lt. Gen. William G. Webster, the commander of the United States Third Army, using one of the extravagant historical parallels that commanders have deployed for the occasion. He spoke at a military base in the Kuwaiti desert before a vast sandscape upon which were armored trucks that had been driven out of Iraq and were waiting to be junked, sent home or taken on to Kabul, Afghanistan.

The general is not moving elephants, but the scale and intricacy of the operation are staggering. The military says there are 3.1 million pieces of equipment in Iraq, from tanks to coffee makers, two-thirds of which are to leave the country. Of that, about half will go on to Afghanistan, where there are already severe strains on the system.

Overcrowding at Bagram Air Base, the military’s main flight hub in Afghanistan, is so severe that beds are at a premium and troops are jammed into tents alongside runways. Cargo planes, bombers, jet fighters, helicopters and drones are stacked up in the skies, waiting to land.

All lethal supplies — weapons, armored trucks, eight-wheeled Stryker troop carriers — come in by air to avoid attacks, but everything else goes by sea and land. The standard route from Iraq to Afghanistan is south from Baghdad and down through Kuwait, by ship through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to Karachi, Pakistan, then overland once again. The “fob in a box” went on an experimental and potentially less expensive journey through Turkey to link up with a new northern route through Central Asia, which was opened last year for supplies going to Afghanistan from Europe and the United States as an alternative to the risky trip through Pakistan.

Both routes circle Iran, by far the most direct way to get from Baghdad to Kabul, but off limits because of the country’s hostile relationship with the United States. “These are the cards that we’re dealt,” said Gen. Duncan J. McNabb, who oversees all military logistics as the leader of the United States Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

Nonlethal supplies flowing into Afghanistan include cement, lumber, blast barriers, septic tanks and rubberized matting, all to expand space at airfields and double, to 40, the number of forward operating bases in a country that has an infrastructure closer to the 14th century than the 21st.

Gen. David H. Petraeus of the United States Central Command, in another grand historical parallel, recently called the construction under way “the largest building boom in Afghanistan since Alexander built Kandahar,” a reference to the conqueror of Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C.

Food shipments alone are enough to feed an army. The Defense Logistics Agency, which provides meals for 415,000 troops, contractors and American civilians each day in both wars, shipped 1.1 million frozen hamburger patties to Afghanistan in March alone, compared with 663,000 burgers in March 2009. The agency also supplied 27 million gallons of fuel to forces in Afghanistan this month, compared with 15 million gallons a year ago.

Commanders say that their chief worry is that the equipment and supplies will not arrive in sync with the troops. Their biggest enemy, they say, is the short time between now and August, the deadline set in separate plans for each war.

Early last year, President Obama and military commanders agreed on a withdrawal plan to reduce United States forces in Iraq to 50,000 by Aug. 31 ( 97,000 United States troops are there now), with all American forces out by 2011. Late last year, he pushed commanders to speed up the infusion of new troops into Afghanistan — military planners had originally said it would take 18 months — so that 30,000 new troops would get there by August. So far, about 6,000 of those reinforcements have arrived. Once they all get there, there will be close to 100,000 United States troops in Afghanistan.

“There is a great sense of urgency in getting in and getting effective,” said Vice Adm. Alan S. Thompson, the director of the Defense Logistics Agency. “The administration is concerned about being able to show results quickly.” There are obvious strains, he said, but “I think it’s doable.”

In the meantime, General McNabb, in yet another reference to Alexander the Great, said that when he took over the transportation command in 2008, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reminded him of the well-known words attributed to the famous conqueror: “My logisticians are a humorless lot; they know if my campaign fails they are the first ones I will slay.”

Mr. Gates had his own words of advice. “He just said, ‘Hey, it’s a tough job, better figure it out,’ ” General McNabb said.

Afghan parliament's lower house rejects Karzai election proposals - washingtonpost.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post staff writer
Thursday, April 1, 2010; A09

KABUL -- The lower house of the Afghan parliament on Wednesday resoundingly rejected President Hamid Karzai's bid to change the nation's elections law and to exert more control over the commission that investigates voting fraud.

The vote represented a sharp rebuke of Karzai's effort this year to change the law by presidential decree while parliament was on recess, and a show of force by a legislature that has become increasingly willing to resist rubber-stamping presidential proposals.

The decision comes after the parliament rejected many of Karzai's proposed cabinet nominees, creating an ongoing state of political limbo, and amid pressure on him by the United States to do more to fight pervasive corruption.

"This is a very important day for Afghanistan's democratic institutions," said Peter D. Lepsch, a senior legal adviser for Democracy International in Kabul. "The legislative branch has used its constitutional authority to stem presidential power. That's a big deal."

The vote by the lower house, known as the Wolesi Jirga, does not appear to mean the end of Karzai's proposal to change the elections law. Afghan and Western officials said that the upper house must also vote on the decree. With parliamentary elections scheduled for September, some officials suggested that delaying long enough might allow the new law to survive.

"I would consider what you have now is a half rejection," one Western official in Kabul said on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak publicly. "It is a significant move that the Wolesi Jirga overwhelmingly rejected the decree, but it doesn't give any finality."

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The most contentious proposed change in the elections law would allow Karzai to appoint three of five members of the Electoral Complaints Commission, the U.N.-led body that documented widespread fraud in last year's presidential election, much of it on Karzai's behalf, and became a target for his supporters. When Karzai initially signed the decree in February, it allowed him to appoint all five members of the commission, but under international pressure he compromised to allow the United Nations to appoint two foreign members.

This appointment proposal was a driving force for many lawmakers to vote against it by waving red cards in the air, according to Mirwais Yasini, the deputy speaker of the lower house.

"We had a very bad experience in the presidential election; it cannot be considered legal. The credibility of the current president is under question. Looking ahead, we have to have good transparency. We had to reject this law," he said.

The members present in the lower house -- about half the total -- overwhelmingly voted against the proposal.

Karzai's attempt to seize control of the complaints commission had political implications beyond Afghan elections. The move reportedly angered the White House enough to postpone a trip by Karzai to Washington, even though U.S. officials in Afghanistan initially seemed ambivalent about his proposed decree. Some U.S. officials viewed the parliamentary rejection Wednesday as a positive step, but confusion remained about which law would stand for the September elections.

"There is a lot of lack of clarity still," said the Western official in Kabul. "We have to prepare for all scenarios."

Amid the political wrangling, Afghans dealt with a fresh outburst of violence on Wednesday, when a bomb exploded in a marketplace in Helmand province, killing at least 13 people and wounding 45, Afghan officials said. The blast occurred in a crowded bazaar in the Nahr-e Saraj district, according to a provincial spokesman. Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak blamed the Taliban and said that such attacks continue to turn Afghans against the insurgents.

"This is the most cowardly act, to kill innocent people," he said. "When we're able to hold areas, a lot of people will be anti-Taliban."

Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.

Chechen rebel leader asserts role in Moscow subway bombings - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post staff writer
Thursday, April 1, 2010; A08

MOSCOW -- An Islamist rebel leader asserted responsibility Wednesday for the suicide bombings in the Moscow subway stations that killed 39 people two days earlier and threatened more attacks to avenge what he called atrocities ordered by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Russia's volatile southwest.

The video statement by the Chechen militant, Doku Umarov, was posted on the Internet hours after another double bombing killed at least 12 people in Dagestan, located east of Chechnya in the North Caucasus region, where the Kremlin has been battling a separatist insurgency.

"You Russians only see the war on television and hear about it on the radio, and this is why you are quiet and do not react to the atrocities that your bandit groups under Putin's command carry out in the Caucasus," Umarov said in the 4.5-minute video. "I promise you that the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your lives and under your skin."

Umarov, dressed in fatigues and sitting in what appeared to be a forest clearing, said he ordered the two subway bombings in retaliation for an anti-terrorism raid by security forces in February in which at least 20 people were killed, asserting that officers used knives to execute innocent, impoverished villagers.

Umarov said he could only grin when accused of terrorism because he has not heard people condemn Putin for such crimes, and he pledged new attacks on Russians "who send their gangs to the Caucasus and support their security services that carry out massacres."

There was no government response, but Chechnya's representative in the Kremlin-controlled parliament dismissed the threat. "It doesn't matter that he has claimed responsibility for those bestial murders," Ziyad Sabsabi told the Interfax news agency. "In any case, his days are numbered."

Russian forces have tried for years to capture or kill Umarov, who declared jihad in 2007 to establish what the rebels call a Caucasus Emirate.

But it is unclear how much power he wields over the insurgency, which analysts say is a loose network of groups that operate independently.

The militants have stepped up attacks over the past year in the North Caucasus, where bombings and shootouts with the authorities occur almost daily. But the timing of Wednesday's double bombing in Dagestan, occurring so soon after two female bombers struck the Moscow subway system, raised fears of a fresh wave of terrorism across the country.

Officials said the first blast Wednesday occurred as traffic police officers approached the bomber's car in the town of Kizlyar, near the Chechen border. As investigators and onlookers gathered, an assailant in a police uniform pushed through the crowd and set off another explosion. Nine police officers were among the dead, including the town's police chief.

In televised remarks, Putin said the attack may have been committed by "the same gang" responsible for the Moscow blasts. "It does not matter for us in what part of the country these crimes have been committed or who -- people of what ethnicity or religion -- have fallen victim to these crimes," he said, ordering police reinforcements in the North Caucasus. "We see this as a crime against Russia."

The subway bombings were the first suicide attacks in Moscow in nearly six years and raised questions about Putin's record of maintaining peace in the capital, as well as his brute-force approach to suppressing militants.

President Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's protégé, has pushed for a more balanced strategy in the North Caucasus, appointing officials there who have sought to improve economic conditions, open talks with critics and draw public support away from the rebels.

"The terrorists want to destabilize the situation in the country, to destroy civil society, and are driven by the desire to sow fear and panic among people. We will not let this happen," Medvedev said at a session of the Russian Security Council.

Gulnara Rustamova, head of Mothers of Dagestan for Human Rights, said conditions in the province seemed to have been improving since Medvedev appointed a new governor last month. Wednesday's attack, she said, may have been intended to undermine the governor's efforts.

"I hope he has the wisdom and enough strength to take the right steps and to continue building the dialogue in society," she said. "We are all so sick and tired of all these terrorist acts and unlawful murders. We want to live in peace and to be safe."

Memo From Bangkok - Thai Protesters Shed Culture of Restraint - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By THOMAS FULLER

BANGKOK — Thailand is a country of 145,000 Mercedes Benz sedans and about 75,000 villages, many of them hamlets afflicted by poverty.

During nearly three weeks of mass anti-government demonstrations here, luxury cars have had to share the streets of Bangkok with the blaring megaphones of rural discontent.

Standing in the back of a pickup truck and shaded by a wide-brimmed hat was Thanida Paveen, a 43-year-old mother of two who explained the epiphany that brought her to the demonstration.

“I used to think we were born poor and that was that,” said Ms. Thanida, who grew up in the provinces but now lives in Bangkok and rents out rooms to factory workers in the city’s industrial outskirts. “I have opened my mind to a new way of thinking: We need to change from the rule of the aristocracy to a real democracy.”

The Thailand of today is not quite the France of 1789 — there is no history of major tensions between rich and poor here, and most of the country is peaceful despite the noisy protests. But more than ever Thailand’s underprivileged are less inclined to quietly accept their station in life as past generations did and are voicing anger about wide disparities in wealth, about shakedowns by the police and what they see as the longstanding condescension in Bangkok toward people who speak provincial dialects, especially from the northeast.

The deference, gentility and graciousness that have helped anchor the social hierarchy in Thailand for centuries are fraying, analysts say, as poorer Thais become more assertive, discarding long-held taboos that discouraged confrontation.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The haves in Thailand have a lot — the country has one of the most inequitable income distributions in Asia, a wider gap between rich and poor than in China, Malaysia, the Philippines or Vietnam, according to a World Bank report.

Four years of political turmoil have brought clearer divisions between wealthy families and their domestic staff, between the patrons of expensive restaurants and the waiters who serve them, between golfing businessmen and the legions of caddies who carry their bags.

“This is a newfound consciousness of a previously neglected part of Thai society,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, one of the country’s leading political scientists and a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s FSI-Humanities Center. “In the past they were upset, but they weren’t cohesive as a force and coherent in their agenda. New technologies have enabled them to unify their disparate voices of dissatisfaction.”

The role of technology in bringing together the protesters has been crucial. The leaders of the protest movement have used community radio stations, mobile-phone messaging and the Internet to forge an identity for lower-income Thais and connect a vast constellation of people in villages and towns.

At times the protests in Bangkok could be described as flash mobs of the disaffected. Protesters, who wear trademark red shirts, have converged on government buildings, banks and military bases across the city guided by text messages.

“This would not have been possible 10 years ago,” said Ms. Thanida, who was returning from military barracks in Bangkok where protesters had demanded that soldiers leave the area. The military acquiesced. Like many protesters, she subscribes to D Station, a “red shirt” news service that gives updates and instructions to protesters.

The leaders of the red-shirted protesters have advertised the current round of protests as class warfare and describe themselves as defenders of the “prai,” a feudal word meaning commoner or lower-class citizen. “The blood of the prai is worth nothing” is a phrase now affixed on bumper stickers and T-shirts.

That may be overblown rhetoric. There are many stories of upward mobility in Thailand and, despite the presence of tens of thousands of protesters, the anger has not translated into personal attacks on the wealthy.

The main target of the protesters’ ire seems to be the system: the perception that bureaucrats and the military serve the elite at the expense of the poor. The protesters bewail the 2006 military coup that removed Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon turned prime minister who focused his policies on rural areas. And they question the fairness of a judicial system that removed two subsequent prime ministers who were allied with Mr. Thaksin.

To many outsiders, Mr. Thaksin’s role is puzzling: The notion that a billionaire is leading Thailand’s disaffected to rebellion verges on the absurd. It also infuriates the Bangkok elite, who see Mr. Thaksin’s role as largely self-serving. Mr. Thaksin, most analysts agree, was hardly a paragon of democratic values during his five years in power. He intimidated the media, stripped institutions like the anti-corruption commission of their independence and mixed his business interests with those of the government.

Many protesters, as well as associates of Mr. Thaksin, say the protest movement has taken on much larger dimensions than just a battle between Mr. Thaksin and his political rivals.

“This goes well beyond Thaksin,” said Pansak Vinyaratn, one of the main architects of policies during the Thaksin administration. “The question is, will the Thai state be able to harness this negative energy to something positive.”

It is significant that Mr. Thaksin made his fortunes in the telecommunications business. Even his critics concede that he was able to communicate with the rural poor and deliver results in ways that none of his predecessors had achieved. As prime minister, he gave lower-income Thais a taste of a better life, including cheap loans that allowed people to buy pickups and mobile phones, which inadvertently or not laid the groundwork for the current political movement.

In 2005, after four years of Mr. Thaksin as prime minister, the number of people using mobile phones in the vast, rice-growing northeast had more than doubled to 5.3 million.

Incomes in the northeast rose nearly 50 percent during the Thaksin government and even more in the provinces east and south of Bangkok.

The protesters today are not the country’s desperately poor, says Ammar Siamwalla, a prominent economist in Thailand who specializes in development issues. They are more likely to be people whose expectations were raised and then dashed: they started small businesses like hair salons in the Thaksin years when more money started circulating in rural areas, Mr. Ammar said. “It jump-started a lot of things.”

After the coup in 2006, these small-time entrepreneurs were stuck. “They were suddenly caught short by the lack of access to credit,” said Mr. Ammar, who is otherwise critical of Mr. Thaksin’s rule.

Debt levels in the northeast doubled to an average of about 100,000 baht, or just over $3,000, per family. Today rural families still carry this debt, but their incomes are relatively stagnant, in part because crop prices were deflated by last year’s economic crisis.

Beyond the economics, there is an intangible side to Thailand’s political crisis that may be even more significant for the country in the long run.

The once deeply ingrained cultural mores that discouraged displays of anger, that prized politeness and justified the entitlements of the royalty and the elite have been eroded by technology and mobility. The prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, rarely visits the northeastern part of the country because his aides fear a hostile reception. (Mr. Abhisit has been ensconced in a military barracks in Bangkok for much of the past two weeks.) Another group of protesters, the “yellow shirts,” who helped precipitate Mr. Thaksin’s ouster with their own demonstrations, held the country hostage by shutting down the airport for a week in late 2008, a protest that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers.

The traditional restraints on aggressive and argumentative behavior — the Buddhist clergy and a once deeply held fear of bad karma, among other factors — have been weakened, says William J. Klausner, an expert on Thai culture and Buddhism who has studied village life since he moved to Thailand in the 1950s.

“Villagers today feel far less inclined to accord deference and respect to those in authority simply because of their privileged position and perceived sense of entitlement,” Mr. Klausner wrote in an essay.

Many Thais say they are shocked by the coarse language used by political activists of all stripes today. Insults that were once rarely heard in public have become common.

Thailand appears to be losing a small part of what has long attracted millions of tourists to its shores: a culture of unflappable, bend-over-backwards politeness.

Pakawan Malayavech, a 55-year-old native of a northeastern province, reflected on these changes as she walked through a crowd of tens of thousands of red-shirted protesters recently. She left Thailand as a young woman for the United States, where she drove a Good Humor ice cream truck in Fairfax, Virginia, and did other odd jobs. Then, in 1999, she returned to retire, and now she sees the country like frames in time-lapse photography.

“People used to forgive and forget easily,” she said. “Now the new generation are more like Americans — they talk back.”

Afghan President Harshly Rebukes West and U.N. - NYTimes.com

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By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, delivered an extraordinarily harsh criticism Thursday of the Western governments fighting in his country, the United Nations and the Anglo-American press, accusing them them of perpetrating the fraud that denied him an outright victory in last summer’s presidential elections.

He said they risked being seen as invaders rather than saviors of the country after eight years of war against the Taliban.

In a 50-minute speech given at the Independent High Election Commission, which oversaw the presidential election, and later broadcast on national television, Mr. Karzai used nationalist rhetoric and accusations of conspiracy against him and his country just two days after President Barack Obama had come for his first visit as president.

The speech seemed more a measure of Mr. Karzai’s mood in the wake of Mr. Obama’s visit, in which Mr. Obama rebuked the Afghan’s president for his failure to reform election rules and crack down on corruption. At points in the speech, Mr. Karzai used inflammatory language about the West.

“There is no doubt that the fraud was very widespread, but this fraud was not committed by Afghans, it was committed by foreigners. This fraud was committed by Galbraith, this fraud was committed by Morillon and this fraud was committed by embassies,” said Mr. Karzai. He was referring to Peter Galbraith, the deputy United Nations special representative to Afghanistan at the time of the election and the person who helped reveal the fraud, and Philippe Morillon, the chief election observer for the European Union.

Later in the speech he accused the Western coalition fighting here to shore up his government of being on the verge of becoming invaders—a term usually used by insurgents when they refer the American, British and other NATO troops. And, if they came to be seen as that they would be encouraging the insurgency, he said.

“In this situation there is a thin curtain between invasion and cooperation-assistance,” said Mr. Karzai, adding that if the perception spread of the west being invaders and the Afghan government being their mercenaries, the insurgency “could become a national resistance.”

Compounding his anger was a political defeat in the lower house of Parliament on Wednesday when his revision of the election law was rejected. Under the revised version the United Nations would have little input over the Election Complaints Commission, the agency that investigates election irregularities.

The American Embassy and the United Nations Mission in Kabul had no comment on Mr. Karzai’s speech. Both are involved in trying to persuade Mr. Karzai to make election reforms that better safeguard against a repeat of the fraud since without them western countries are unlikely to want to help pay for the parliamentary elections scheduled for September. While negotiations are ongoing, diplomats have said privately that they would rather not discuss the latest developments.

Contacted afterward, Mr. Galbraith ridiculed Mr. Karzai, calling his speech “so absurd that I considered it an April Fools day joke.” He also said Mr. Karzai’s speech “underscores how totally unreliable this guy is as an ally.”

Mr. Morillon of the European Union could not immediately be reached.

CQ - Behind the Lines for Thursday, April 1, 2010

Image by Bill on Capitol Hill via Flickr

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Snap!: "Many security people are now billing themselves as counterterrorism specialists [b]ut they have no idea how terrorists think or operate," ex-CIAer slams . . . Gilding the lily: "The U.S. already has an effective means of stopping terrorism without the need to child proof the transit system," maven maintains . . . And that's that: "Anyone who says America's federal courts can't bring terrorists to justice is overlooking the facts," Sen. Feinstein says. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

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“Many security people are now billing themselves as counterterrorism specialists, whatever that means. But they have no idea how terrorists think or operate,” ex-CIA operative Charles Faddis tells U.S. News’ Alex Kingsbury. “It is currently very difficult to prevent a suicide bomber from attacking a public transport system,” BBC News’ Chris Yates surveys — as Reuters’ William Maclean reports that “pressure on national budgets and growing problems identifying would-be bombers will make a tough task even harder,” and Jena McNeill chides in The Foundry, “The United States already has an effective means of stopping terrorism without the need to child proof the transit system.”

Homies: A TSA without a confirmed leader hurts in two ways: it’s bad for front-line morale, and it means there will be no bold policy proposals coming from the agency, counterterrorist Brian Jenkins warns Time magazine’s Mark Thompson — while Government Executive’s Alex M. Parker finds federal employee unions claiming, indeed, that the TSA leadership void is a buzz harshener. In light of anti-IRS terrorist Joe Stack and recent militia arrests, “perhaps conservative critics of DHS will reconsider” the scorn they heaped on its right-wing extremism report last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker suggests — but see Monica Crowley’s op-ed in The Washington Times.

Feds: An undercover agent gathered evidence for the FBI’s probe of the Christian militia group rounded up last weekend for allegedly planning to spark an anti-government uprising by killing cops, The Detroit Free Press’ David Ashenfelter and Ben Schmitt relate — while a USA Today editorial says the charges “should come as a surprise to no one,” and The Associated Press’ Corey Williams and Jeff Karoub report eight suspects pleading innocent yesterday. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “is not the only prominent Republican who has advocated closing Guantanamo,” argues a Charleston Post and Courier editorial defending him against The Wall Street Journal’s charge that he is soft on terrorism. “Anyone who says America’s federal courts can’t bring terrorists to justice is overlooking the facts,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., opines in, again, the Journal.

State and local: Arizona state senators have approved a bill forcing schools to ask parents whether their children are in this country legally, The Arizona Daily Star relates. Georgia is seeing a spike in swine flu hospitalizations, having registered the most in the country for three weeks running, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has federal health officials saying. Police radio communications were down across D.C. for several hours earlier this week, FOX 5 News notes — while The Jackson Clarion-Ledger hears Mississippi officials hoping a $100 million DHS grant will heal first-responder communication woes exposed by Hurricane Katrina.

Ivory (Watch) Towers: The 528 students enrolled in homeland security studies at U-Mass can select from 21 courses in areas such as domestic terrorism, WMDs and forensic psychology, The Boston Globe profiles — while The Huffington Post polls readers: “Would you major in counterterrorism?” A Purdue University innovation using Bluetooth signals from wireless devices to track checkpoint wait times could help make more accurate airport staffing decisions, Homeland Security Newswire updates. John Yoo, who gave legal cover to Bush-era enhanced interrogation methods, tells the Los Angeles Times he’s happy teaching at Berkeley, “despite calls for his ouster and protests by liberal groups.” A Muslim scholar previously denied a visa and barred from speaking engagements in the United States is scheduled to speak at Harvard Law School, The Boston Herald briefs (and see below).

Bugs ‘n bombs: A dangerous ammonia gas leak in Indiana prompted evacuation of hundreds from their homes and sent at least three people to hospitals Tuesday, The Indianapolis Star relays. “Bizarre incidents among drug abusers in Europe force us to question whether experiments with biological weapons might be under way already,” a Washington Times op-ed leads. A recent CIA report warns that Iran has maintained its pursuit of nuclear capabilities that could help the Middle Eastern state build a nuclear bomb, Global Security Newswire notes. Iran’s nuclear ambitions, meanwhile, took center stage Tuesday at a Group of Eight foreign ministers summit on global security and terrorism, Agence France-Presse reports. A naval assessment group “is the latest government agency to tackle the threat from an EMP, a devastating electromagnetic burst that fries computers, sensors, weapons and all other electronics in its path,” Navy Times notes.

Close air support: Among the masses patiently queued up at an Orlando checkpoint early Monday a.m. was ex-DHS chief Tom Ridge, who quipped, “Some say it’s justifiable punishment,” The Washington Post reports — while WALB 10 News has suspicious luggage being “detonated, causing tension and flight delays at the Southwest Georgia Regional airport.” Colorado Springs Airport, meanwhile, is moving checked luggage screening back into the lobby while its baggage area is refitted for new automated explosives detection equipment, the Gazette relates — as The Baltimore Sun sees AirTran unveiling a $39 million baggage security system at BWI. A U.K. parliamentary report recommends that “passengers, and terrorists, should not know what [security] regime they will face when they arrive at airports,” The Times of London tells.

Ports in a storm: A new public-private security agreement covering the Port of Houston can serve as a model for other ports around the country, The Houston Chronicle hears the House homeland honcho praising. By requiring those doing business at Florida’s ports to pay for two background checks, the state has put Florida’s maritime industry at an economic disadvantage to the other 49 states, a Tampa Tribune op-ed objects. One of the biggest concerns for U.S. port authorities is that a mandate for 100 percent screening of incoming maritime cargo “would result in reciprocity — requiring U.S. ports to screen all outgoing cargo as well,” Security Director News notes. “Don’t make deals with pirates,” ABC News hears Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama advising in a just-published book about last year’s hostage ordeal in Somali waters.

Courts and rights: A federal judge ruled yesterday that warrantless eavesdropping on a now-defunct Islamic charity was illegal, Bloomberg reports. The Army officer accused in the Fort Hood shooting rampage is apparently being moved from a hospital to jail, AP relates. U.S. prison units specially designed to muzzle communications by inmates considered extremist are unconstitutional and discriminate against Muslims, Reuters has a lawsuit filed Tuesday charging. Digital Due Process, whose members also include Intel, eBay, AOL, AT&T and the ACLU, wants to require law enforcers to get a court order or search warrant before accessing any personal e-mail or other Internet data, The San Jose Mercury News notes.

Over there: A Pakistani court yesterday formally opened the trial of five Americans charged with terrorism and plotting attacks, which could see them jailed for life, AFP reports. The Russian-backed leader of Chechnya vows that terrorists who target innocent civilians must be “poisoned like rats,” CNN notes — while NPR has a Chechen rebel chief yesterday claiming the Moscow metro bombings. Russia’s decade-long fight against an Islamic insurgency has not worked, USA Today, relatedly, has analysts asserting. “In Iraq, we’ve seen the number of female suicide bombers swell due in part to a resistance to having men search women at checkpoints,” Salon suggests.

Mapping the thin ice: San Francisco’s police chief has had to apologize for quipping that the Hall of Justice “is susceptible not just to an earthquake, but also to members of the city’s Middle Eastern community parking a van in front of it and blowing it up,” The SFist relates. When six young Southern California Muslim men paused for prayer during a trip through Nevada earlier this month, police were suspicious enough to check their names against a national terrorism watch list, The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin reveals. “Because they live together, guard their privacy and practice an unfamiliar faith, residents of Islamville have been viewed with suspicion,” The Tennessean profiles. A parliamentary committee has concluded that the U.K. government’s anti-terrorism scheme, Prevent, has backfired by stigmatizing and alienating Muslims, The Daily Telegraph discusses. FOX News “baselessly suggested that Muslim scholars Tariq Ramadan and Adam Habib . . . are ‘terrorists,’” Media Matters chides.

Holy Wars: Terrorism experts say recent conservative political unrest has fueled a resurgence of radical militias, even though their popularity had declined after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, The Detroit News surveys. “There is a good reason to worry about right-wing anti-government extremism,” a Post columnist, relatedly, contends — as New York Magazine wrestles with whether a just-busted Michigan Christian militia cell is a terrorist organization. “Pakistani terror camps are teaching children the three R’s: reading, ’riting and rage . . . Graduates don’t go to college — they blow themselves to bits in Afghanistan to find paradise,” The New York Daily News spotlights. “The metro bombings in Moscow make clear that terrorism is far from exorcized from Russia. So where has it been hiding these last few, quiet years? The Web,” Foreign Policy leads. Two women dressed in Muslim clothing were attacked and beaten in Moscow after Monday’s deadly subway suicide bombing, Pravda reports.

My people will call your people: “It was one of the biggest winners at the Sundance Film Festival, and [it] wasn’t even supposed to be shown at Sundance,” CAP News leads. “Instead of an overlong moralistic art piece about a mute cripple and his magical beagle, the audience was subjected to the latest video from al Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. As al-Zawahiri railed against the [Obama administration’s Afghan] surge, many of the gathered Hollywood elite cheered, a few left, and one, Warner Independent Pictures head of development Michelle Olivant, saw greatness. ‘I was just spellbound,’ Olivant recalled. "I mean, here’s this old Muslim guy, hummus in his beard, soiled towel on his head, going off in a way that would rival, say, a Jack Nicholson or a George C. Scott. So powerful ... it still gives me goose bumps,’ she said. Warner immediately got in touch with al-Zawahiri’s people, and a three-picture deal rumored to be in the high seven-digit per picture range was hammered out.”