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There can be little doubt that Al Qaeda is trying to strike the American homeland before Nov. 2. "We are in the midst of Al Qaeda efforts to attack the U.S. on a scale as big or larger than 9/11," says John Brennan, chief of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the interagency operation that consolidates threat information (and produces the Putter). The decision to raise the threat level to Code Orange ("high") last week was not, as partisans and conspiracists suggested, a Republican political stunt intended to slow John Kerry as he came out of the Democratic convention. But the announcement was clumsily handled, and the confusing press accounts that followed mostly obscured a larger and more important story.
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