By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals seeks permission from CBP to post pro-vegan advertisements on the U.S.-Mexico border fence, The Houston Chronicle’s James Pinkerton reports. Hundreds of aging FEMA-managed underground fuel tanks are potentially leaking hazardous substances that could be making local water undrinkable, The Associated Press’ Eileen Sullivan learns.

Feds: TSA has collected records on thousands of passengers who went through airport checkpoints without ID, adding them to a database of people who violated security laws or were questioned for suspicious behavior, USA Today’s Thomas Frank reports.DHS has issued the first U visas for immigrant crime and domestic violence victims, eight years after Congress authorized them, The San Mateo County Times’ Jessie Mangaliman mentions.“Where possible, homeland security should be self-sustaining and less dependent on the political vagaries of the annual budgeting process,” The Homeland Security Daily Wire has a think-tank report urging. The U.S. military was so eager to get the Guantanamo war crimes trials moving that its legal adviser adopted a “spray and pray” approach to leveling charges, Reuters’ Jane Sutton quotes from a general’s testimony.

McBama: “How the candidates — and the electorate — respond to [the Islamist extremist] challenge will determine whether or not the United States can escape the scapegoat trap into which we have fallen,” Daniel Yankelovich suggests in Daily News Egypt. John McCain’s stump around Pennsylvania with ex-Gov. Tom Ridge this week offered “conflicting signs [of] how serious a vice-presidential candidate the former DHS secretary might be,” The Washington Post’s Robert Barnes blogs. “Tom Ridge is a perfect fit... He complements John McCain’s strong national security platform,” an Associated Content poster endorses. “The fact that one in 10 Americans still think he is Muslim is a sign that Obama has to go to Denver on a heightened mission to define the Democrats and himself,” The Boston Globe’s Derrick Z. Jackson opines.

Message center:“If the issue is terrorism . . . . Senator McCain is advantaged. If the issue is how did we get into this war, then Senator Obama is advantaged,” a political ad analyst tells Salon. “Voters trust [McCain] on terrorism and Iraq and they see him as a patriot who puts country first. But they want to know for what purpose?” Karl Rove handicaps in The Wall Street Journal. “What about the huge 15-point advantage on Iraq and 27-point lead on terrorism Time gives McCain? Recent polling suggests this may be overstated,” TPM mulls. “This is not ancient Rome, and McCain is not Julius Caesar; but yet this is the standard that he unfurls as a serious reason to elect him president, [that] he knows ‘how to win wars,’” a Catoosa County (Ga.) News contributor critiques.

State and local: Justice wants state criminal intelligence data systems to include more poop on terrorism, Federal Computer Week leads. California “faces a $15 billion budget deficit, layoffs and across-the-board cuts in services, but at least one agency appears to be doing just fine, thank you — the state Office of Homeland Security,” Sacramento’s Capitol Weekly recounts.“A new school security system, a bomb detection dog and an ion scanning device” are on the wish list for local responders eying $430,000 in DHS monies, the Dothan (Ala.) Eagle informs. An Ohio National Guard exercise this week tests a unit’s ability to provide homeland security support to local authorities, The Fremont News-Messenger notes.

Ivory (Watch) Towers: Recent firebomb attacks on animal researchers disturb academics who insist “they will not be intimidated by bombers who crossed the line by targeting families,” the Los Angeles Timesspotlights. University officials met in Mississippi on Monday “to brainstorm ways to sneak weapons and bombs into a huge sporting event,” The Hattiesburg American mentions. Preceding the Olympics, some 40 Chinese police officers studied anti-terrorism and large crowd-control tactics at Maryland’s Kaplan College, The Hagerstown Herald-Mail mentions. A University of Louisville prof has been tapped for the CDC’s Biosurveillance Advisory Committee, Business First of Louisville announces — while El Paso’s KVIA News heralds the formal opening of the DHS-sponsored National Center for Border Security and Immigration at the University of Texas-El Paso.

Coming and going: A Senate bill would press TSA to created a “’one-stop-shop’ to protect American travelers from experiencing unnecessary delays caused by watch list misidentifications,” The Minneapolis Star Tribunementions. The new JetBlue terminal at JFK features a 20-lane security checkpoint, the largest screening area in North America, ABC News notes — as WISC-TV News has Wisconsin’s La Crosse airport welcoming a TSA Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response team. “The enigmatic Project SeaHawk, a federally funded security task force with eyes all over the Port of Charleston,” is slated to shift from Justice to DHS next year, the Post and Courier spotlights. CBP agents at Port Huron, Mich., meantime, intercepted a Free And Secure Trade program enrollee smuggling 275,000 ecstasy tablets into the United States, The Sarnia (Ont.) Observer informs.

Borders and papers: Rock throwing by a group of illegal border crossers escalated to Border Patrollers opening fire on a pair of suspects in Mexico, striking one in the buttocks, The San Diego Union-Tribune tells. Rep. Duncan Hunter says Mexican troops’ gunpoint encounter with a Border Patrol agent “raises serious questions” about their presence and activities, The Washington Times tells. Texas’ southernmost county “still doesn’t know exactly what its version of the border barrier will look like, when it will be built or where it will go,” The Brownsville Herald relays. “Is it possible to build a border wall without the help of the very people it is intended to keep out? That’s an open question,” The Austin American-Statesmanspotlights.

Courts and rights: The attorney for a Pakistani woman facing terror charges in New York said her client had been tortured soon after being apprehended in Afghanistan, Newsday notes. Those who knew her in Boston can’t understand how the MIT grad could pose “a clear and present danger to America,” The Boston Globe also surveys — while FrontPage Magazine casts her as an “infiltrator,” and Pakistan’s Dawnhas a bail hearing deferred until Sept. 3. The military jurors who gave Osama bin Laden’s driver a light sentence were frustrated to learn the military can hold him indefinitely, one tells AP. A Guantanamo hunger striker claims U.S. guards recently threatened to kill him and took his legal papers, AP, again, quotes his lawyers. An Australian judge has warned a jury that the Muslim religion is not on trial as they hear the case against a Sydney man accused of producing a jihad guide, The Australian Associated Press reports.

Over there: In the wake of a coup, Mauritania’s new military government announced yesterday the arrest of five alleged terrorists, USA Today relays. Egypt is boosting security at the Great Pyramids near Cairo, with a 12-mile chain-link fence featuring cameras, alarms and motion detectors, APreports. British special forces played an “immense” role in taking out terrorist bomb-making cells and insurgent leaders over the last five years, The Daily Telegraph quotes the U.S. commander in Iraq. Unconfirmed reports indicate that al Qaeda’s Afghan commander was killed in fighting along Pakistan’s tribal region, The Long War Journal relates. The close ties al Qaeda has forged with Pakistani militant groups gives it an increasingly secure haven in parts of Pakistan, The New York Times cites an intel analyst.

Over here: “Muslim. Come on; say it out loud: Mus-lim. When you hear that word, what comes to mind? Arab? Terrorist? Shrouded women? Saddam Hussein? Barack Obama? How about American?” a Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist leads. “This is yet another disappointment for the basic Bush administration narrative in which the terrorist is always some Islamo-fascist guy,” AlterNet suggests in re: Justice’s fingering “a clean-shaven, white, God-fearing Catholic guy” for the anthrax mailings. The Oklahoma lawmaker who declared homosexuality a bigger threat than terrorism last week affirmed her perceived mission as a “cultural warrior for Judeo-Christian values,” The Oklahoman reports. There is “no excuse” for animal rights advocates to wage terrorist bomb campaigns, The Woodland (Calif.) Daily Democrat denounces, urging that “the perpetrators, once they are caught, be charged with attempted murder.”

Holy Wars: “There can be no adult discussion of the Mideast without an honest debate on Islam,” a Bloomberg review of Kenneth Pollack’s allegedly soft-peddling “A Path Out of the Desert” (Random House) complains. “The ‘liberation’ that suicide bombers seek has as much to do with liberation from dysfunctional family dynamics as it does with liberation from foreign occupations,” a Times reader writes. “While we in the West sleep, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood is whispering in Arabic to hundreds of millions of Muslims how to establish Islamic states,” Family Security Matters warns. “The global war on terrorism has become a smokescreen for establishing America’s hegemony in the Muslim world. That is an untenable goal by any measure,” Habib Siddiqui argues on The Media Monitors Network. “The battle of ideas in the war on terror is a complex mixture” of an external ideological struggle between “the West” — particularly the United States — and al Qaeda and an internal “battle over religious dogma within Islam,” a Beirut Daily Star op-ed quotes an expert.

Outsourcing the election: “The CIA proprietary company which controls all of the voting machines in the United States has accidentally leaked the 2008 presidential election results,” Unconfirmed Sources confirms. “A malfunction in one of DieSold’s computers caused the election results to be published ahead of scheduled and four months before the election. Barack Obama will take first place with 485 Electoral College votes. Second place will go to Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr with 35 votes. John McCain finishes in last place with 18 votes. Many Americans have expressed outrage over having their illusion of democratic power shattered. ‘So what if elections are fake. At least the results should be kept a surprise until after we get to cast our worthless votes. This error spoils the excitement,’ said Republican Party activist Faye Kerr. Only Unconfirmed Sources will be covering the 2008 presidential election results.” See also, in The Onion: “‘Time’ Publishes Definitive Obama Puff Piece.”