Robert Fisk Quotes

Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about.

Many people would like Osama bin Laden … to hurt America, but they do not want bin Laden to rule their children.

Bin Laden actually is the most European or westernized of all the Arab leaders. He's the one who is the most polished ironically. He's smart and handsome and rich... you know, he's quite the eligible guy. Well trained by the CIA. He's a very dangerous man indeed and he now has this franchise called Al Qaeda, which rivals Starbucks in its ubiquity.

Bin Laden didn't come from the abstract. He came from somewhere, and if you look where ... you'll see America's hand of villainy.

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.

I will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell.

Osama bin Laden is very shrewd. But he struck me, even in 1997, as being remarkably out of touch. I remember thinking this does not look like the type of guy who walks to the top of a mountain with a mobile phone and says, "Operation B, attack."Now he is America's number one enemy. He's always wanted to be that.

If it is bin Laden, he's a very intelligent guy. He's been planning his war for a long time. I remember the last time I met him in 1997 in Afghanistan. And bin Laden said to me "From this mountain, Mr. Robert, upon which you are sitting, we beat the Russian army and helped break the Soviet Union. And I pray to God that he allows us to turn America into a shadow of itself." When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.

Mr Hitchens's policy has succeeded in making 10,000 new Bin Ladens.

If there is one Osama bin Laden now, there will be 100 bin Ladens afterwards.

Transnational terrorism, in the form of the Salafi Jihadist movement, is fundamentally a function of globalization.

We must be certain that we all realize that our enemy is not an enemy that is located in one single place. There are terrorist cells all around the globe.

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.

Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, as well as Abu Musab Zarqawi, have made it quite clear in their internal propaganda that they cannot win unless they can drive the Americans out. And they know that they can't do that there, so they've brought the battlefield to the halls of Congress.

So we mustn't lower our guard in any sense because of what has happened in terms of the death of Osama Bin Laden and we are certainly not doing that. The terror threat level here in the U.K. remains at severe and we're very conscious of the need to continue that.

We know that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has some very dangerous, very important leaders who are tied directly to the top leadership of al Qaeda central, including a man who was formerly Osama bin Laden's secretary.

I would like to see us find Osama Bin Laden, but let's say we did capture him. Let's say we did kill him. How much good would that do? There's still thousands of people behind him. It's this huge thing.

Sudan expelled bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan.

The most striking thing is that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed largely irrelevant to the Arab Spring.

Osama bin Martin

When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences. Instead of having one Bin Laden, we will have 100 Bin Ladens.

We’d better get Bin Laden. The failure to get Bib Laden fuels Moslem fundamentalism and serves as a recruiting tool for our enemies.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.

The fault lines are shifting from the boundaries of nations into the web of our societies and the streets of our cities. And, terrorism and extremism are a global force that are larger than their changing names, groups, territories and targets.

The special reverence that al Qaeda had for Sheikh Rahman was underlined by a two-hour propaganda videotape that the group's media division released in the spring of 2001, when the 9/11 attacks were in their final planning phase.