At least someone in Washington is willing to say it.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA Director George Tenet said on Thursday al Qaeda has reorganized and become as serious a threat to the United States as it was in the months before last year's Sept. 11 attacks.

Tenet, in a joint hearing before the congressional intelligence committees, also said the CIA and the FBI could not be flawless all the time in fighting the terror threat.

"The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer, the summer before 9/11," Tenet told the committees. "It is serious, they've reconstituted, they are coming after us, they want to execute attacks."

"You see it in Bali, you see it in Kuwait," he said, referring to attacks this month on American troops in Kuwait and the bombing in Bali that killed more than 180 people. [JAW--although we have not been shown evidence of Al Qaeda involvement in these crimes], "They plan in multiple theaters of operation, they intend to strike ... again."

The United States launched a war on terrorism last year with a military campaign in Afghanistan to destroy Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which it blamed for the hijacked plane strikes that killed 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite routing al Qaeda forces and making some key arrests around the world, the United States does not know the whereabouts of bin Laden and other network leaders.

Oh, but we really have done a lot. Aside from killing unknown thousands of Afghans, and abrogating most of the U.S. Constitution, our de facto government has managed to alienate that part of the world which didn't already regard us as evil.