Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.
Peter Bergen
A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Air Force dropped massive 15,000-pound 'Daisy Cutter' bombs on the Tora Bora complex where Osama bin Laden was hiding in December 2001.
The Japanese scored an important victory at Pearl Harbor, but the attack pulled the United States into World War II, and four years later, Japan was in ruins, utterly defeated.
In the public's mind, Special Forces are often confused with the 'door kickers' of Special Operations Forces - such as SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force - who are the United States' elite counterterrorism operators.
What made al-Awlaki so influential is that, unlike a number of leaders of al Qaeda such as Osama bin Laden, he was a cleric, so he could present himself as a leading religious figure. Second, because al-Awlaki had spent much of his adult life in the States, he communicated with his followers in colloquial, accessible American English.
The dangers of TATP bombs can be seen in the case of Matthew Rugo and Curtis Jetton, 21-year-old roommates in Texas City, Texas. They didn't have any bomb-making training and were manufacturing explosives in 2006 from concentrated bleach when their concoction blew up, killing Rugo and injuring Jetton.
If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.
Abu Musab al-Suri is someone I got to know pretty well because he's a Syrian. Very bright guy, lived in London. He actually was the person who took myself and correspondent Peter Arnett and the cameraman, Peter Juvenal, to interview bin Laden for his first TV interview.
The Russians have been waging wars with these separatists since the 19th century, but for obvious reasons, Chechen separatist terrorism tends to be carried out by Chechens.
When it comes to the greater Middle East, McMaster brings to the table his own deep knowledge of Iraq and Afghanistan, countries where he served for many years.
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.
What is tricky for those hoping to utilize such weapons is that TATP bombs are quite difficult to make because their ingredients, when combined, are highly unstable and can explode easily if mishandled.
The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.
An intelligence officer and historian, Rayburn published a 2014 book, 'Iraq After America,' which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq descended into chaos in the years after the American troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.
We climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Osama bin Laden died early in the morning of May 2, 2011.
Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders, he was able to indulge in his hobbies... and he was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes to the wider world.
And in the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound surrounded by his wives and children and far from the front lines of his holy war.
The sitting prime minister, Jose Aznar, who had strongly backed the U.S.-led Iraq War, was unseated by a challenger who then pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. The Madrid terrorist attacks are generally regarded as being the key to why Aznar, who had been leading in the polls, was defeated.
The money that bin Laden inherited was about 20 million dollars over the course of many years, not the much larger sums some have suggested. In 1994, his family cut him off.
ISIS is even at war with its most natural ally, al Qaeda in Syria.
My quest to meet Osama bin Laden began in North London early in 1997. In the Dollis Hill section, I contacted Khaled al-Fauwaz, the spokesman for a Saudi opposition group, the Advice and Reformation Committee, which bin Laden had founded.
Trump has claimed he knows more about ISIS than America's leading generals. Clearly, this is also total nonsense; he doesn't seem to have done the slightest thing to educate himself about ISIS.
McMaster, 54, is the smartest and most capable military officer of his generation, one who has not only led American victories on the battlefields of the 1991 Gulf War and of the Iraq War, but also holds a Ph.D. in history.
Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS during his attack, the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11.
What did U.S. officials have to lose by saying that bin Laden was being protected by the Pakistanis, if it were true?
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.
Islam is, to be sure, a big tent, and the one and a half billion Muslims in the world run the gamut from mystical, moderate, pacific Sufis to Salafists.
The United States didn't ban Italian immigration in the 1920s because a small minority of Italians became members of the Mafia, and the country is a richer place for it.
In picking Gen. Jim Mattis for Defense secretary, President-elect Donald Trump has said that he found his 'Gen. George Patton.' Yet that label may not really capture what makes Mattis a distinctive choice.
As Michael Scheuer, who ran the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit until 1999, has pointed out, if bin Laden believed in Christmas, the Iraq war would be his perfect present from Santa Claus. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan severely damaged bin Laden's organization.
In quiet ways far too complex to hold Trump's interest, Muslims in the United States and around the world are helping every day to prevent massacres such as Orlando from happening.
In the past, Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, of which SEAL Team 6 is a key component, has only launched ground raids in Yemen when the lives of hostages held by al Qaeda seemed at risk.
The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.
Keeping a relatively small, predominantly U.S. Special Forces presence in Afghanistan to continue to train the Afghan army past December 2016 is a wise policy that would benefit both Afghans and Americans.
Bush administration officials, of course, deny that they didn't take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating that in their public utterances, private meetings, and actions, the al Qaeda threat barely registered.
Sheikh Rahman's fatwa was the first time that anyone associated with al Qaeda had given religious sanction to attacks on American aviation, shipping and economic targets.
So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.
Bin Laden studied economics and public administration before he turned to a life of jihad.
When Abu Zubaydah was shown a series of photos of al Qaeda members by Soufan, he identified one of them as the operational commander of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The only lethal terrorist to immigrate to the United States as an adult and conduct an attack shortly after arriving is Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan.
ISIS may be a perversion of Islam, but Islamic it is, just as Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the unborn child explain why some Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics and doctors.
The senior director at the NSC for the Middle East is retired Col. Derek Harvey, an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer with a Ph.D. who served as the head of the U.S. military cell examining the insurgency in Iraq in 2003.
President-elect Donald Trump has a host of national security challenges to deal with as he assumes office, from the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the grinding Syrian civil war to the flexing of Russian muscles under President Vladimir Putin to how to deal with ISIS as the terrorist army retreats in Iraq.
On November 28, 2016, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an 18-year-old legal resident of the United States whose family was originally from Somalia, used a car to mow down a group of people at the Ohio State University.
It is in Pakistan's own interest that the Afghan army is able to fight effectively against the Taliban, which is more likely if they continue to have American advisers at their side.
Anwar al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen by virtue of his birth in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 while his Yemeni father was studying at New Mexico State University.
Without U.S. forces in the country, there is a strong possibility Afghanistan could host a reinvigorated Taliban allied to a reinvigorated al Qaeda.
The thing that's very puzzling to somebody who's been in Pakistan repeatedly since 1983 is lots of people live in compounds with high walls in Pakistan. I mean, that's so completely routine. In fact, you know, it would be un-routine to have the reverse.
It is very much in America's national security interests to ensure that the Taliban do not dominate Afghanistan and that neither ISIS nor al Qaeda continues their growth in the country.
Adding to your list of enemies is never a sound strategy, yet ISIS' ferocious campaign against the Shia, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Muslims who don't precisely share its views has united every ethnic and religious group in Syria and Iraq against them.
