Words matter. These are the best Peter Bergen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.
A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Air Force dropped massive 15,000-pound ‘Daisy Cutter’ bombs on the Tora Bora complex where Osama bin Laden was hiding in December 2001.
Using vehicles as weapons is a tactic that has often used by Palestinian terrorists to target Israelis, but in 2014, an ISIS spokesman had encouraged such vehicular attacks in the West, saying of ISIS’ enemies, ‘Run him over with your car.’
The Green Berets of U.S. Special Forces 5th Group – known as ‘the Legion’ – who led the anti-Taliban campaign represent a textbook case of a successful Special Forces campaign.
The Second Amendment is, of course, very much part of the American fabric. But the intent of the founders was that the amendment protected the rights of citizens to bear arms in a militia for their collective self-defense.
Nothing is more powerful than hearing from former members of the group that ISIS is not creating an Islamist utopia in the areas it controls, but a hell on earth.
Candidate Trump had previously opined that ‘Islam hates us’ and had called for ‘the total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,’ an argument he has since modified and moderated.
Seymour Hersh is one of the giants of investigative journalism.
In February I secured permission to enter Osama bin Laden’s compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was killed and where he had lived for the last half-decade of his life; the first, and only, journalist to do so.
An intelligence officer and historian, Rayburn published a 2014 book, ‘Iraq After America,’ which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq descended into chaos in the years after the American troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.
Syria is attracting a lot more Westerners than the Iraq War ever did because it’s the perfect Sunni jihad.
When ISIS and al Qaeda have attacked or plotted attacks in the West in the past decade or so, they have invariably used hydrogen peroxide-based bombs because acquiring military-grade explosives or dynamite is nearly impossible for would-be terrorists in Western countries.
Bin Laden comes out of a business background – he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.
Mattis has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama’s policies on Iran and Obama’s capping of troop numbers and campaign end-dates in theaters of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis also appears to be a skeptic of the Obama-era policy of putting women into combat roles.
Occasionally, Donald Trump says something that is politically incorrect but which also happens to be true.
Trump has long said he favors a ‘safe zone’ in Syria to prevent Basher al Assad’s regime from carrying out indiscriminate airstrikes against Syrian civilians and to halt the refugee flow out of Syria.
Information-sharing between Western governments about the identities of those who have traveled to Syria and have received militant training is the key to preventing more incidents such as the one at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
Trump displays many of the traits of a proto-fascist, and he is also part of a wave of right-wing nationalist movements that is sweeping the West. He can also be positioned in the long, American right-wing tradition of fearing ‘the Other,’ whether they are Catholics or Jews or, now, Muslims.
Common sense would tell you that the idea that Saudi Arabia was paying for bin Laden’s expenses while he was living in Abbottabad is simply risible. Bin Laden’s principal goal was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family as a result of which his Saudi citizenship was revoked as far back as 1994.
Hydrogen peroxide-based bombs were used in the London bombings in 2005; in al Qaeda’s foiled plot to attack subways in New York City in 2009 and also in the ISIS-directed Paris attacks in 2015 and the ISIS-directed attacks in Brussels a year later.
Again and again since 9/11, terror attacks in the West have been carried out by second-generation Muslims who are citizens of the very country they are attacking.
Afghanistan’s winters in the north are legendarily harsh, and southern Afghanistan, by contrast, is bleak desert. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that Afghanistan is one of the world’s most heavily mined countries.
Islam is, to be sure, a big tent, and the one and a half billion Muslims in the world run the gamut from mystical, moderate, pacific Sufis to Salafists.
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad belongs to the small Alawite sect and is therefore considered a heretic by many Sunnis; al-Assad runs a secular regime, and therefore he is considered by Sunni militants to be an apostate, and he is inflicting a total war on his Sunni population.
For Islamist terrorist groups such as ISIS, the holy month of Ramadan – a time of fasting and prayer for the vast majority of Muslims – is seen as a particularly auspicious time to launch terrorist attacks.
We climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Osama bin Laden died early in the morning of May 2, 2011.
Imprisoned by its war on terror framework, the Bush administration supported Israel in a disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
In Syria, a no-fly zone targeted at Assad’s air force and safe zones for refugees fleeing the fighting would help tamp down the death toll that plays into the hands of ISIS and other Sunni militants who can position themselves as the only groups that are really defending the Sunni population.
Americans generally regard themselves as belonging to an exceptional nation. And in terms of living in a religiously tolerant and enormously diverse country, Americans can certainly take some justified pride.
And in the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound surrounded by his wives and children and far from the front lines of his holy war.
The Nazis and the Khmer Rouge went to great lengths to hide their crimes against humanity. Instead, ISIS posts its many crimes on social media for global distribution with seemingly no thoughts for the consequences.
Abedi appears to be one of the many thousands of Western Muslims who have embraced militant Islam, often as a way of trying to resolve the tension between their split identities.
Investigations by special prosecutors can take on a life of their own.
One of the themes of ‘The Longest War,’ my book, which came out before the Arab spring happened, was how al-Qaida and bin Laden was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, not because the United States was winning them, but because al-Qaida was simply losing them.
Donald Trump’s own mother Mary escaped the bone-crushing poverty of Scotland’s remote Outer Hebrides for the promise of New York in 1929.
Security services, from Afghanistan to the United States, should be alert throughout the Ramadan period, but especially on the 27th day of the holy month.
Bin Laden’s role in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s had made him a hero around the Middle East.
Because 9/11 was carried out by 19 foreign-born Arab hijackers, many assume that all terrorists who attack the West are foreigners.
The 9/11 attack itself played out around the world, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, and money transfers from Dubai – activities overseen by al-Qaeda’s senior command from secure bases in Afghanistan.
It is hard to imagine two more final endings to the ‘war on terror’ than the popular revolts against the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and the death of bin Laden.
The less the ISIS ‘caliphate’ exists as a physical entity, the less the group can claim it is the ‘Islamic State’ that it purports to be.
American jihadists are generally motivated by a mix of factors, including dislike of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world.
On November 28, 2016, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an 18-year-old legal resident of the United States whose family was originally from Somalia, used a car to mow down a group of people at the Ohio State University.
I stepped into the bedroom where he was killed and looked up at the ceiling, where you could still see the patterns of blood that had spurted from bin Laden’s head when the bullet fired by a U.S. Navy SEAL tore through the terrorist leader’s face.
Bannon should never have had a permanent seat on the NSC, as he is a political operative, and the NSC has traditionally been a place where American interests are considered rather than narrow Republican or Democratic interests.
If a parent knows that their kid is suddenly becoming infatuated with ISIS, they face a very difficult choice, which is, you know, do I – what do I do?
Pakistan’s key leaders have succumbed to the assassin’s bullet or bomb or the hangman’s noose, and the country has seen four military coups since its birth in 1947. Yet the Pakistani polity has limped on.
Trump has long been a fan of Vladimir Putin but seems to be unaware that Russia’s goal in Syria is simply the maintenance of its longtime ally President Bashar al-Assad in power. Indeed, Moscow has hitherto shown little appetite to focus on ISIS.
How can you prevent an attack by returning foreign fighters if you are not cognizant of their names and links to ISIS?
