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" We climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Osama bin Laden died early in the morning of May 2, 2011. "
Peter L. Bergen
Morning
Stairs
Early
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" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
Key
Bullet
Birth
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
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" ISIS is even at war with its most natural ally, al Qaeda in Syria. "
Peter L. Bergen
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" 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. "
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" The reason that Islamist militants can assert that jihad is necessary against the perceived enemies of Islam is that there is sufficient ammunition in the Quran to buttress their beliefs. The same could also, of course, be said for the Old Testament, which is full of scenes of violent death visited on the enemies of God. "
Peter L. Bergen
Old
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" In quiet ways far too complex to hold Trump's interest, Muslims in the United States and around the world are helping every day to prevent massacres such as Orlando from happening. "
Peter L. Bergen
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" The rise of ISIS starts with a Jordanian thug named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who founded ISIS' parent organization, al Qaeda, in Iraq. What gave Zarqawi the opportunity to create al Qaeda in Iraq? It was, of course, George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. "
Peter L. Bergen
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Organization
Who
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
Only
Lived
City
" Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts, and simple common sense. "
Peter L. Bergen
Common Sense
Facts
Nonsense
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
Lines
End
In The End
" Trump has claimed he knows more about ISIS than America's leading generals. Clearly, this is also total nonsense; he doesn't seem to have done the slightest thing to educate himself about ISIS. "
Peter L. Bergen
More
Done
America
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
Old
Watching
Man
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
War
Israel
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" Often it is important to listen to what people aren't saying. "
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Listen
Often
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" The E.U. is the latest of a series of multinational organizations set up after World War II to ensure that there would never again be a pan-European war and to create the conditions for a new European prosperity after the destruction wrought by the war against the Nazis. The E.U. has admirably succeeded at both. "
Peter L. Bergen
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Create
" How can you prevent an attack by returning foreign fighters if you are not cognizant of their names and links to ISIS? "
Peter L. Bergen
Returning
Attack
Fighters
" If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero. "
Peter L. Bergen
Intelligence
Values
Long
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
Powerful
Nothing
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" The Obama administration has framed its defense of the controversial bulk collection of all American phone records as necessary to prevent a future 9/11. "
Peter L. Bergen
Future
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" Syria is attracting a lot more Westerners than the Iraq War ever did because it's the perfect Sunni jihad. "
Peter L. Bergen
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" The dirty little secret of the intelligence world is that much of what you really need to know isn't exactly a secret anyway. "
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Need
" Occasionally, Donald Trump says something that is politically incorrect but which also happens to be true. "
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" The war on terror, sometimes known as the 'Global War on Terror' or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels. "
Peter L. Bergen
War
Sometimes
Lens
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
Numbers
Women
President
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
Creation
Him
I Am
" 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. "
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War
Dictator
He
" Keeping a relatively small, predominantly U.S. Special Forces presence in Afghanistan to continue to train the Afghan army past December 2016 is a wise policy that would benefit both Afghans and Americans. "
Peter L. Bergen
Army
Wise
Small
" 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. "
Peter L. Bergen
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Less
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" 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. "
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Run
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Sure
" Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, another hinge event in American history, 9/11 was a great tactical victory for America's enemies. But in both these cases, the tactical success of the attacks was not matched by strategic victories. Quite the reverse. "
Peter L. Bergen
Great
Victory
Success