Peter Bergen

In his state of the union address President Bush returned to one of his favourite themes: Saddam Hussein "aids and protects" al-Qaida. Yet the evidence for this claim is somewhere between tenuous and non-existent.

Every year the US state department releases an authoritative survey of global terrorism. According to its 2000 report: Iraq "has not attempted an anti-western attack since its failed attempt to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait". Even after September 11 the heaviest charge made… more

While the Bush Administration looks to the weapons inspection process in Iraq to turn up a material breach worthy of war, hawks in and out of government have been making a separate case for invasion, claiming that a US military strike against the country is necessary under the amorphous rubric of the "war on terrorism" and because of Saddam Hussein's alleged connections to Al Qaeda. In fact, it is Saudi Arabia rather than Iraq that has supplied much of the… more

In past weeks Al Qaeda has relaunched itself, a rebranding that presages a second phase in its war against the West. The clearest evidence for this shift is in three audiotapes that Al Qaeda has released since the beginning of October from its top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri.

Most analysts both inside and outside the government believe those tapes to be authentic. On them, the two Qaeda leaders call for a wider war against not only… more

Caveat emptor. A tidal wave of tomes related to the Sept. 11 anniversary is washing up at your local bookstore as you read this. Some of these are data dumps from the police blotter, others the sad tales of victims and their families. Still others weave conspiracy theories purporting to show that energy interests in Central Asia shaped American policy toward Osama bin Laden or that "state sponsors" such as Iran or Iraq play important roles in his organization. However,… more

I quit my job at CNN in the autumn of 1999, to start working full time on a book about Osama bin Laden. I had become interested in the mysterious multimillionaire Saudi after I met him in eastern Afghanistan in 1997, and spent most of the next four years trying to understand the man. Finally, at the end of August last year, I gave my manuscript to my publisher. Having worked for more than a decade in the news business… more

Was Sept. 11 the beginning of something or the end of something? Are militant Islamists a significant ongoing threat to the West, or is militant Islam a force that will eventually exhaust itself? Daniel Pipes has been sounding the alarm about the threat posed by militant Islam for more than a decade and posits that it threatens the West "in many and profound ways," while Rohan Gunaratna has written a well-researched investigation of al Qaeda, the group that best embodies… more

Federal officials have captured a U.S. citizen with suspected ties to al Qaeda who allegedly planned to build and explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, the Justice Department said Monday.

U.S. officials said Washington was the probable target of the plot. FBI Director Robert Mueller said the plot was in the "discussion stage" when the suspect, Abdullah Al Muhajir, was arrested. Mueller said the plot had not gone any further, to the knowledge of U.S. authorities.

Attorney General John… more

Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has managed to do what Osama bin Laden could only dream of doing: uniting the umma, the global community of Muslims, behind the Palestinian cause -- and, to a lesser degree, against the United States. Enormous rallies have swept the Muslim world in past weeks, protesting Israel's military operations against the Palestinians, protests that easily dwarfed the pro-Osama demonstrations that followed the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

On April 11,… more

For most Americans, the events of September 11 came like a bolt from the blue on that beautiful, terrible morning. But as Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda observe in their well-written introduction to The Age of Terror, "the unforgivable is not necessarily incomprehensible or inexplicable." In fact, all three of these books make clear that although the attacks on New York and Washington were unexpected for many, the warning signs had long been evident -- at least to some… more