find one person. Because at the end of the day, what was the war on terror? It was really about finding bin Laden , in a lot of ways. Because if the Taliban had handed over bin Laden after 9/11, then you wouldn't be in this room because there wouldn't have been a war in Afghanistan. The whole story would have been over.presenter: One of the things that you deftly insert into this book, along with a lot of other things that you might not think are relevant to bin Laden , is the story of 9/11,
about the failures that brought us 9/11. Then, you spent a lot of this book talking about the CIA, and the CIA's role in taking the wrong direction in trying to find bin Laden and taking so long to find bin Laden . I'm just wondering on both these things how, after all these years of thinking about the United States and its relationship to binLaden and its relationship to al Qaeda, how do you assess the CIA? Are there periods of time in which they're doing a better job than a worse job? Just what your overall report
Laden and taking so long to find bin Laden . I'm just wondering on both these things how, after all these years of thinking about the United States and its relationship to binLaden and its relationship to al Qaeda, how do you assess the CIA? Are there periods of time in which they're doing a better job than a worse job? Just what your overall reportcard on them is, in the name of the war on terror?
presenter: Let's talk a little bit about Tora Bora. This is something you've been talking about for 10 years, or however long. It's always bothered you that we didn't get bin Laden at Tora Bora. When you wrote this book, did you learn anything new about--?Bergen: I did. Wikileaks is an incredibly useful resource for this kind of reporting because we have the-- There's a lot of material on Wikileaks which is not significant, but
fully briefed on what's happening. The universe of people is growing. As it grows, it grows exponentially. What'd happen if somebody started blogging about this, or it leaked out? Bin Laden wouldn't have hung around. The political costs also of not doing something were actually pretty high, because--. If you hadn't done the raid and then two months later it wereto come out that we had all this information, it would have been a disaster. So it was a very tough decision.
Sorry, this one cracks me up. So we value the role of experience generally ladeness of observation. That is, we see certain things, not just sort of for what they are but we interpret them and our sort of background theories are informing
And the film closes with drops of black rain, maybe oil, maybe something altogether more uncanny, falling from the sky. Steroid-laden excrement dumped into Chesapeake Bay from an industrial chicken rearing plant creates a mutated strain of flesh eating parasites in Barry Levinson's genuinely disturbing The Bay from 2012.
Awesome. And I was going to say, if you haven't read the book yet, there's a spoiler alert. Bin Laden does die at the end of it. OK. So as you start SEAL training, one of the major hurdles is BUD/S, right?
And I remember seeing him on PBS and hearing him on NPR and reading about him in "The Washington Post." Al-Aulaqi was a very public figure after 9/11 and was much bin Laden and is this great terrorist.
the next 10 years in part because this has reversed, this pattern has reversed. is laden in inspiring liberty rooted dogma; that to take on is to challenge some of the
the earlier slides what we're seeing is some plots as we look look to the post bin Laden era some plots that will likely emanate from al-qaeda based on a plotting against the United States and the West other plots as we've seen that have gone back to Anwar al-awlaki in
But, so was the portfolio of Arafat, but the difference is, of course, Arafat was focused on one single part of the world, which was, of course, Lebanon and Palestine, while Osama bin Laden was actually looking at the global world. So, in other words, 9/11 was a transnational attack, which was funded in different parts of the world. It was put together; it was planned in one part of the world, Afghanistan, and was carried out in a different country, in the United States. Now, we have never seen anything like that. So, that is the, the product
I happen to disagree with that. But Osama Bin Laden very explicitly said when he was asked, like, "Well, are you just gonna target like U.S. military sites
And the somatosensory areas of the brain go down to normal. But the emotional laden areas of the brain go up. In chronic pain, it's not particularly a physical problem for most people, which is shocking.
And they would watch all of these mujras, and at the end of the entire dance sequence-- the girls dance on-- these songs, they're laden with sexual innuendo, and they do like these suggested moves. And it's very interesting.
This is something that the foremost terrorists the modern times recognized. Osama bin Laden once wrote that the media war is as much as 90% of the whole in the waging of jihad. That's how much importance he ascribed to this particular method of fighting.
9/11 wasn't an intelligence failure as it was often portrayed. It was a policy failure because the intelligence apparatus of the United States, in particular the CIA, in particular the bin Laden unit, in particular people that Karen knows very well, who are in the National Security Council focusing on counter-terrorism, Richard Clark and his deputies, and also, by the way, the FBI field office in New York, which was investigating the first Trade Center attack. They were all saying bin Laden was a big problem, and they were also all saying,
less generous if you were so inclined. But I think this is an important point: that the CIA officially briefed President Bush shortly after the battle to tell him it was their conclusion that bin Laden was at the Battle of Tora Bora, that he had escaped. Now you know-- go ahead.
backwater in Yemen, a place called Ibb. She told a cousin, "I'm going to go down in history" and he was like, "Well, how are you going to do that?" The way to do that was to get married to Osama bin Laden . It's interesting to see how these wives-- they're now, as you probably know, they're all back in Saudi Arabia, she'll go back to Yemen. The Saudis will keep a pretty careful watch over the two older wives, but in Yemen it's an inefficient police state, so she might have some ability to communicate.
is-- People drop a dime on you to pick up a reward. That happened, for instance, in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of 9/11. Somebody picked up $25 million. Well, people in bin Laden 's immediate circle think he's basically the savior of true Islam. They're not going to drop a dime on him. And then, people make mistakes, and that's the other way to find people. But waiting for bin Laden to make a mistake is obviously not a particularly effective strategy.
20 years is the rise of women in the agency. The bin Laden unit was full of women because initially, at that time before 9/11, it was seen as a backwater and no one really cared about bin Laden . But some of the people who did the work that found him, in particular, were women. It was a particular female analyst who essentially said, in 2005 when it was clear there was going to be no magic bullet, "There are going to be four ways we can find him. We can either find him through his immediate family and their communications with him."
of redundancy is fine, but there's--. Clearly everybody's going to have to give blood at the blood bank in terms of this budget crisis. The national security industrial complex shouldn't The pretext on bin Laden . I think if the Taliban had handed over bin Laden , why would we have gone to war with them? It's not like Afghanistan's such a valuable piece of territory for the
and south through yemen key individuals in the group right now with the death of Osama bin Laden I'm annaelsa wha hurry who has probably been the most important ideological individual pushing out messages has generally taken over as the most
the bomb that senior you many bomb maker put together for him was hidden in his intelligence and in bin Laden 's hideout they said that some of it indicated they
traveled the world for National Geographic going to far away places and I could never forget Afghanistan Osama Bin Laden came on our radar in 1996 reading in the newspaper and Osama bin ladden returned from Sudan and he
They're always teenagers and twenty-something's, right?" I mean, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin is 26 years old. Almost all of the September 11th hijackers; in their twenties, right? Osama bin Laden recruited into extremism when he's14 years old, right? The person who bombs the Atlanta Olympics, part of the Christian Identity movement, is just 30 years old. Religious extremism is a movement of young people taking action.
in reality, was not caused by the crash of '29. It was actually caused by the protectionism, which was applied after the crash of '29. Now, we if go down that road, the truth is that Osama bin Laden will have won this war because the reason why 9/11 took place is to destroy the power of the United States, not only in economic terms but also in political terms to destroy that role, that symbol, that the United States always had of democracy
Mengele laughed, a hacking half note followed by a cough. "The rapture is nothing but a terrorist plot run by Christ instead of Bin Laden . And who is Jesus Christ? The illegitimate son of a Jewish bitch." Beholding Mengele, I was struck less by the banality of evil than its
Standing behind a table laden with hundreds of great clay pots, each containing one fighting male, and in some cases, its female sex
Certainly Osama Bin Laden 's favorite philosopher.
Turn over Bin Laden and his compatriots and shut down the training camps, or we're gonna
in the oil-laden fish like salmon, you know, mackerel, sardines.
We know the assassination of Osama bin Laden , and so it's it is the way how you deal with terrorists who do not want to
I was getting called "Osama bin Laden ," "Taliban," "you're not from here," "go back home" all the time.
Weren't they housing Osama bin Laden -- Well yes.
Now they did host bin Laden and al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization.
But take some of that pestilence-laden river water, add a little of our bubbly grain juice, suddenly all those nasty pathogens die off.
And then life, by the way, is what's happening around you as you're planning. A prime example was the bin Laden raid. We had some of the best military minds in the country coming up with a plan because we knew what it looked like.
We had an issue when we brought-- how I mentioned that you think you can be prepared for everything, but you're not. When we brought Osama bin Laden 's body back, we were on the phone with the White House. We're trying to make sure it's him.
It starts off with, like I said, the human intelligence on the ground that led to-- there's a movie called "Zero Dark Thirty" about a woman that found bin Laden , and it was pretty much true.
It starts off with, like I said, the human intelligence on the ground that led to-- there's a movie called "Zero Dark Thirty" And I was in bin Laden 's house, and I'm in a room and I'm watching my guys work.
So I was in the Bin Laden one, so I was like this up against the stage.
And we hear the word that bin Laden 's been killed.
And fuzzing is like an amphetamine-laden monkey, right, that you just kind of sat off in front of a keyboard and hoped for the best and see what happens.
presenter: One of the things that you deftly insert into this book, along with a lot of other things that you might not think are relevant to bin Laden , is the story of 9/11, which is relevant to bin Laden . You are pretty harsh on the national security establishment, at least some of those people at the top level. You don't name names, but you are concerned about the failures that brought us 9/11. Then, you spent a lot of this book talking about the CIA, and the CIA's role in taking the wrong direction in trying to find bin
when they started zeroing in on the Abbottabad compound, when it became clear that there was not one, not two, but three families there, and that the third family seemed pretty sizable, to anybody who'd been following bin Laden , that was actually more of an indication that this is looking pretty good. As a father, he's a doting father. I have a picture in the book with his son Hamza, in which he was reading poetry to his kids.
I would say yes, but with an interesting qualifier, which is that he basically-- His first wife went into the marriage with bin Laden . He was 17, she was 15. Obviously, she had no idea that he was going to become an international jihadi militant. Every other wife along the way who married him understood what he was getting into because he started being involved in these fights with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan against the Soviets when he was 22, 23. He
pacing back and forth in the compound. They're not sure who it is, so they name him the Pacer. It turns out to be bin Laden . There are certain things that happen that surprise us about bin Laden . One of them is the Arab Spring, and the fact that he can't, for all of the complaining that he'd done and pointing to mistreatment of Muslims and this war between the religions and this war on Islam. When it actually comes right down to what happens
complaining that he'd done and pointing to mistreatment of Muslims and this war between the religions and this war on Islam. When it actually comes right down to what happens in those final years of bin Laden 's life, is that the headline is not about al Qaeda. Talk a little bit about what you think this meant to bin Laden and what it means for the future of al Qaeda, in general
of redundancy is fine, but there's--. Clearly everybody's going to have to give blood at the blood bank in terms of this budget crisis. The national security industrial complex shouldn't went in to get bin Laden . We decimated al Qaeda. Bin Laden 's gone. Now it's all about the Taliban. We're going to be there for 10 years. From your perspective of having written