Peter Bergen Quotes

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.

Members of al Qaeda and other affiliated organizations spent a great deal of time blending into the populations of several nations around the world and exploring all aspects of life there.

ISIS has leadership, just like al Qaeda has leadership. It's important to be able to eliminate the individuals that are leading the organization.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

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

Osama bin Laden is going after us to get us out of the region, so he can deal with the regimes that he sees in the region, or replace them with purists.

The chief al Qaeda recruiting tool is the net.

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.

What could be better in al-Qaeda's mind than to have India and Pakistan going at each other? What more to further their aims?

Al Qaeda still remains a threat.

Staying in a very public fight with the U.S. is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.

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.

We don't want the Taliban to put down roots, or the al Qaeda to put down roots in Afghanistan that can facilitate Afghanistan becoming - once again - a launching pad for international terrorism.

Spontaneous operations performed by individuals and cells here and there over the whole world, without connections between them, have put the local and international intelligence apparatus in a state of confusion, as arresting the members of aborted cells does not influence the operational activities of others who are not connected with them.

Al Qaeda likes to coordinate, have a central command to be able to send out emissaries around that they have highly trained and say, 'This is the moment we're going to do a large-scale attack.'

Al-Qaeda, which means 'the base' in English, lost its base and training camps in Afghanistan, while its leaders were on the run, captured, or dead. One year after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda was still on life support.

Terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They're trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that.

I predict you're going to see more and more of this shifting of al Qaeda fighters going over to ISIS because they are the game in town.

Today, few terrorist organizations still employ the 'al-Qaeda model' in which individuals travel to terrorist training camps overseas and then are deployed to the West to inflict atrocities.

I'm not hard to find unless you're ISIS - then, it's a rough night.

In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott.

Al Qaeda has dominated the battlefield of the soul among the disaffected, disenfranchised, and dissatisfied. It promises action instead of discussion.

Bin Laden was constantly revolving in his mind the fact that he had got rid of the Russians; therefore, the Americans can be got rid of, too. And where better than in the country where he knows how to fight?

Every day we learn more and more about this wacky Osama bin Laden. He lives in a cave and at one time he was a womanizer. But now he has settled down with his five wives and 26 kids, so that's now all over. ... He also had a drinking problem at one time. I believe he went through 'Jihab'

Social media is not only the most important tool for inciting terrorists, it can also be an effective weapon against them.