Lamar College: Port Arthur, TX

03/17/2014 – Journalist Peter Bergen to headline LSC-PA Distinguished Lecture Series

PORT ARTHUR – Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaeda, existed as one of the most wanted men in the world after he orchestrated the attack on the World Trade Center buildings in New York.

Years before those horrific attacks, journalist Peter Bergen arranged for the first television interview with bin Laden, one in which he declared war against the United States for the first time to a Western audience.

Now, Bergen brings his first-hand accounts of those who call for war against the United States, national security practices in the U.S., and the war on terror as the Distinguished Lecture Series keynote speaker at Lamar State College-Port Arthur on Tuesday, March 25.

The event begins at 7 p.m. at the Carl Parker Multipurpose Center, located on the campus of Lamar State College-Port Arthur, 1800 Lakeshore Drive. Admission to the event is free of charge.

Bergen is a print and television journalist, documentary producer, and the author of four books, three of which were New York Times bestsellers and three of which were named books of the year by the Washington Post.

He is the director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C.; a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security and CNN’s national security analyst. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

His most recent book, a New York Times bestseller, is “Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad”.

His 2011 New York Times bestseller was “The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda”. His previous book was “The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader”. Bergen is also the author of “Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Bin Laden”.

Bergen has reported on al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, counterterrorism, homeland security and countries around the Middle East for a range of American newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, TIME, The Nation, The National Interest, Mother Jones, Newsweek, Washington Times and Vanity Fair. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic and writes a weekly column for CNN.com. He has also written for newspapers and magazines around the world such as The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, International Herald Tribune, Prospect, El Mundo, La Repubblica, The National, Der Spiegel and Die Welt. He has worked as a correspondent or producer for multiple documentaries that have aired on National Geographic, Discovery and CNN.

Previously he worked for CNN as a producer on a wide variety of international and U.S. national stories. From 1985 to 1990 he worked for ABC News in New York. In 1983 he traveled to Pakistan for the first time with two friends to make a documentary about the Afghan refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion of their country.

Bergen has a M.A. in Modern History from New College, Oxford University. He won an Open Scholarship when he went up to New College in 1981. Before that he attended Ampleforth. He was born in Minneapolis in 1962 and was raised in London. He is married to the documentary director/producer Tresha Mabile.