Peter Bergen Quotations

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.

Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.

The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.

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.

Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders, he was able to indulge in his hobbies... and he was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes to the wider world.

At one point people in al Qaeda were actually drawing monthly paychecks when they were based in Sudan.

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.

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.

Often it is important to listen to what people aren't saying.

I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

I am very suspicious of the notion that somehow bin Laden was a media creation... Bin Laden's actions made him into a big deal. Not the media.

One meeting does not make a conspiracy. Saddam Hussein does not engage in these types of acts.

Given the impact that Bin Laden has had on the recent history of the world, there is surprisingly a good deal that remains mysterious about him.

He seemed to be a very intelligent guy, a very well-informed guy and a very serious guy.

It indicates to me a certain degree of security, ... Live Today.

That was a direct correlation. Most of the time there is no correlation.

Where else in the world is a government helping the civilians they harm in conflict? Marla was very proud of this fact,

We can talk about the money, but what does the money really mean? We're dealing with someone who has the ability to convince people to be martyrs.

We're paying some kind of 'fear premium' for the price of oil right now.

The purported will states, 'Attack them on the sea. Attack them on the land. Attack them everywhere. Attack their economy,'

At night, temperatures here fall below the freezing point.

Even by the standards of 1970s Saudi Arabia, it was a little unusual.

There's overwhelming evidence bin Laden was behind the attacks of September 11. If the family chooses not to believe that, that's just how families operate.

Saddam Hussein was put on notice that he can't do those type of things.

After all, the chain of custody of these tapes is the one way to find bin Laden. He obviously feels secure enough that he can release a number of these tapes.

The most obvious meaning of the tape is that bin Laden is still alive.

This is not rhetoric. This is for real.

It's extraordinary that the chain of custody of these tapes has not been traced back. After all, they're releasing these tapes very frequently, on average once every six weeks, yet it seems that American intelligence agencies or other intelligence agencies are not capable of tracing back the source of these tapes.

In Islamist jurisprudence you warn enemies before you attack them. It is typical behavior.

In a final e-mail (she said): 'We're helping lots of kids with medical care' -- this is on the day that Marla died -- 'This place continues to break my heart. Need to get out of here, but it's hard.'

He's not living in a cave - he's living somewhere with more amenities. His most recent statements show a Talmudic attention to the news.

Most Muslims don't want to live in some Taliban-style utopia, which is what bin Laden and allied groups are offering.

If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.

Why should Americans care about the Nazi back story in World War II? If you don't have the Nazi back story in World War II, World War II is simply not comprehensible.

There's some pretty good academic research that suggest that what Americans don't like is losing.

The terrorists who have succeeded in carrying out spectacular attacks against Western targets in the past have been college-educated, technically proficient men who are capable of manufacturing and deploying chemical, radiological, and biological weapons. Al Qaeda attracts the kind of highly educated men who one day might be able to pull off such an attack.