I'm not sure many people remember the series of two and three paragraph blurbs buried in the news section of the Washington Post and other papers during the summer of 2001 -- especially in May and June of that year. In fact, I suspect most people didn't even notice that summer that the "buzz" about a significant terrorist attack on U.S. assets. It rose to a subtle crescendo around the July 4th holiday, then faded -- at least publicly.
Newsweek and ABC News report that -- for the first time in six years -- the buzz is back.
Newsweek's Terror Watch has a long piece on concerns that new attacks on U.S. soil or against U.S. assets abroad may be in the works -- concerns significant enough that teams of FBI agents have been given two weeks to track down leads and get a better handle on the potential threat.
Publicly, the White House is downplaying the threat (that in itself is alarming, given the Bush administration's track record of over-hyping terror threats in the past), ABC News reports, even as intelligence officials are increasingly jittery:
The new threat comes as FBI agents were already trying to sort through a mountain of e-mails, jihadist message board postings, telephone intercepts and human source intelligence, in an effort to pluck an intelligence gem from the background of "chatter" louder than has been heard in any recent summer season.
There is so much terrorist "noise" that some agents and officers have already dubbed June and July a "summer of chatter."
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