"Today, al-Qaida has not only regrouped, but it is on the march," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. "Al-Qaida is now functioning exactly as its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, envisioned it."

The measurable progress against al-Qaida is frequently touted: Three-quarters of al-Qaida's pre-Sept. 11 leadership have been killed or captured, according to government estimates, and at least $140 million in bank assets frozen. In March, James Phillips, a research fellow with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., said the continued offensive in Afghanistan and elsewhere has hamstrung.

"Al-Qaida's leaders increasingly must focus on their own personal security and have less time for plotting mass murder. It is more difficult for bin Laden and his lieutenants to recruit new members, train them, communicate with them, or carry out new operations. The isolation of al-Qaeda's top leaders, believed to be hidden along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, has reduced their ability to supervise the network's activities in other regions," Phillips said.

The Rand Corp.'s counterterrorism office has been studying captured al-Qaida literature and speeches over the last year -- the so-called Harmony documents seized in Afghanistan and dating back to the mid-1980s -- and has arrived at a very different conclusion.

"Today, al-Qaida is also frequently spoken of as it if is in retreat: a broken and beaten organization incapable of mounting further attacks on its own and instead having devolved operational authority either to its carious affiliates and associated or to entirely organically produced, homegrown, terrorist entities. Nothing could be further from the truth," Hoffman told the committee.

The Afghan attack "pulverized" al-Qaida, Hoffman told United Press International Wednesday.

"I think we did do that, but this is a movement with enormous regenerative capacity -- its message resonates, and it's not wanting for volunteers," Hoffman said. "They've adapted and adjusted to even our most consequential countermeasures."

In the ensuing four years since the attack, the organization has evolved into what bin Laden set out to create: a fractured, worldwide movement inspired by bin Laden and united by a single vision, as well as a central organization that continues to direct the implementation of terrorist attacks.

"To the idea al-Qaida is on the run -- how can that be if al-Qaida was directly responsible for the most consequential terrorist incident of the last year? (The Lond

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