Peter Bergen Quotes

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Killed not by a massive troop deployment but by a commando raid carried out by a few dozen highly trained men and helicopters.

The guy who finally pulled the trigger on Osama bin Laden is not patting himself on the back. He's giving as much credit to his teammates who got him to that position.

Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault....The direction is to go in and get Bin Ladin and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McCraven at approximately 10:45 AM.

When the president went around the table to the country's national security leadership, Hillary was clear: We have to go get bin Laden. And our Special Operations Forces did just that.

As tragic as Benghazi was, its importance pales next to killing Osama bin Laden.

Next time you go get bin Laden, don't call it Operation Geronimo, and if anyone wants to stand toe-to-toe with me and talk about it, I'm open, brother.

Obama killed Osama. Yes, President Barack Obama gets to crow about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

I don't think there's any question that America is safer as a result of the bin Laden operation.

We climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Osama bin Laden died early in the morning of May 2, 2011.

We barely missed killing Bin Laden. There were numerous findings issued by the President to kill him. We rolled up terrorist cells. We stopped the millennium bombings.

After the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the Obama administration steadfastly refused to say which element of the U.S. military had participated in the assault. Until Vice President Joe Biden decided to talk about it on national television, that is.

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it.

The US military has achieved a decisive blow against al-Qaeda with its commando action against Osama Bin Laden and his killing.

If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then, I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.

There was a striking example of this in Pakistan when the US sent in Special Forces, to be honest, to kill Osama Bin Laden. He could easily have been apprehended and caught but their orders were to kill him.

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.

As president of the United States, my top priority will be to keep America safe. We're going to go after the terrorist networks. We're going to go after Osama bin Laden. We are not going to live in fear in this country.

I mean, it's not just one day you get up, bang, and you got Osama bin Laden. It's the kind of thing where an awful lot of people over a long period of time - thousands have worked this case and these issues and followed on the leads and captured bad guys and interrogated them and so-forth.

In October 2008, American commandos launched a cross-border raid into Syria to capture an Islamic militant known as Abu Ghadiya. He was accused of being one of al Qaeda in Iraq's main smugglers of fighters and money between Iraq and Syria.

The U.S., often in secret, carries out counterterrorism missions all the time, with drones in places like Yemen and Somalia.

On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, it is some consolation that the man most responsible for that terrible morning will not be smiling smugly to himself as satellite TV brings to the leafy boulevards of Abbottabad the somber images of New Yorkers commemorating those who perished in the Twin Towers.

The more we captured, the more we learned and eventually it destroyed the organization that attacked us on 9/11 and allowed us to get bin Laden.

We’ll bring bin Laden’s head on a platter with flies on his eyeballs.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act.