Al Qaeda Terrorism Threat a Farce?

     The Washington Times says the US Government intercepted a message between senior al Qaeda operatives that is the most serious terrorism threat in years. The State Department closed 20 US embassies and consulates over the weekend. However in a converse report, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, “This is not an indication of a new threat stream, merely an indication of our commitment to exercise caution and take appropriate steps to protect our employees, including local employees, and visitors to our facilities”.
Who am I to believe? An unspecified government source says there has been an intercepted Al Qaeda message of high terrorism significance, while the State Department implies they know nothing about it and is merely taking normal precautions. The State Department hasn't taken "normal precautions" previously and certainly not with respect to Benghazi. Why now?
Notice that the US government agency for the interception of the terrorist message was not mentioned, nor was the context of the message itself revealed. The Washington times goes on to quote numerous politicians concerning their agreement that the terrorist threat is real and that we need to take appropriate steps. This implies everybody seems to know about the context of the message, except me. The interesting thing is that the politicians go on to say that Al Qaeda is trying to drive us out of the Middle East and that we must resist rigorously. Why now? Al Qaeda has been trying to do that for years. Frankly, I don't think we should be there. Not because Al Qaeda wants us out, but because the general Arab public doesn't want us there. As long as we are there as undesirables, we on nation building, which process has a dismal record.
However, going go back to the matter of the Al Qaeda message interception, notice that the National Security Agency (NSA) could not have been involved. According to NSA, they only look at the telephone numbers and the times of calls from those numbers in all of the information they obtain from the telephone companies. That being the case, they could not possibly have related any telephone number to a suspected terrorist. It is prohibited by their own admission. If that is the case, and the message was interrupted by other than NSA telephone records, then that is the information source we should be pursuing with respect to terrorism, not the collection of telephone records about average citizens by the NSA.