A bipartisan assessment to make you gulp a little

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-MI) say the terror threat to the US is greater than it was before September 2001.

"The fatalities are way up. The numbers are way up. There are new bombs, very big bombs. Trucks being reinforced for those bombs. There are bombs that go through magnetometers. The bomb maker is still alive. There are more groups than ever. And there is huge malevolence out there," Feinstein said.

"I think there is a real displaced aggression in this very fundamentalist jihadist Islamic community. That is that the West is responsible for everything that goes wrong and that the only thing that's going to solve this is Islamic sharia law and the concept of the caliphate," Feinstein said. 

Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee agreed, and said terrorists are now focusing on smaller events, making it more difficult for the intelligence community to detect plots against American targets.

"The threat level has never been more diverse than it is today and that's one of the bigger concerns that we have, and why we both would agree that the threat is higher today and we are probably less safe. The more efforts they try, the more perfect you have to be to stop something. That's a huge challenge," Rogers told CNN.

Citing the recent disclosures about the interworking of U.S. intelligence operations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, Rogers said it has changed the way al-Qaida operates and communicates, making it even more difficult to detect an attack before it becomes operational.

They sound like they're delivering the unvarnished truth.