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No event in recent times has produced as many explanations as the 11th September attacks five years ago. Within the space of an hour, al Qaeda inflicted more direct damage on the US than the Soviet Union had done throughout the cold war, a cataclysm seen by more people than any other event in history. Yet it took only 19 men armed with small knives to destroy the World Trade Centre, demolish a wing of the Pentagon and kill 3,000 people. This mismatch has led some—especially in the Muslim world—to seek a deus ex machina to explain what otherwise appears inexplicable. The usual suspects have been assembled on 9/11’s grassy knoll: the Jews were behind the attacks; the US government engineered them; the “Cheney-Bush energy junta” planned them so that they could grab the oil fields of central Asia, and so on.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — U.S. intelligence officials say Osama bin Laden is likely hiding in Pakistan, and the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit says the United States will have to be “extraordinarily lucky” to get the al Qaeda leader. “Sometimes you get lucky,” Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996-1999, told CNN. “But looking for Osama bin Laden in the Hindu Kush is not like looking for Eric Rudolph in North Carolina.”

CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen says the notion that Osama bin Laden once worked for the CIA is “simply a folk myth” and that there’s no shred of evidence to support such theories.

CNN.com asked users to send questions to Bergen as part of an upcoming documentary, “In the Footsteps of bin Laden,” which premieres on August 23 at 9 p.m. ET. Here are his answers:

The announcement in London yesterday of the dismantling of a major terror plot against American passenger flights between Britain and the U.S. provided fresh evidence that the threat of terrorism — whether inflicted by the militant jihadist movement al Qaeda or inspired by it — is still very much with us.

We asked Peter Bergen, one of the few Western journalists ever to meet Osama bin Laden, and Warren Bass, a former 9/11 Commission staffer who is now Book World’s nonfiction editor, to pick the best of the recent flood of books on terrorism.

The worst book of the year, is surely Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof. Boof, a Washington DC-raised Sudanese-American “womanist” poet, has garnered publicity with her claim that she was Osama bin Laden’s mistress in the mid-90s. In lurid prose she details her life as bin Laden’s moll. However, the book […]

The al Qaeda leader says that Sunnis in Iraq are experiencing annihilation. Bin Laden also says that the only way for them to win freedom is by “holding on to their jihad” and ousting the occupying power from Iraq.

Over the past four years, key members of the Bush administration have claimed that al-Qaeda is “on the run” (Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice), “disrupted” (George Tenet) or “decimated” (President Bush). At the same time, however, significant terrorist attacks around the world have dramatically increased since Sept. 11, 2001, most of them conducted by militant Islamists. How does one reconcile this apparent contradiction?

COOPER: Good evening again. We begin with breaking news, the kind that raises a chill whenever it happens, a new message tonight, an audiotape purported to be from Osama bin Laden. It came out just moments ago.

CNN’s Octavia Nasr has been translating it and joins us now from the newsroom in Atlanta.

Not since the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser has an Arab political figure shaken the world as Osama bin Laden has. Journalist Peter Bergen’s biography of the man who has fascinated admirers and horrified adversaries elicits scores of interviews of those who actually met and knew him personally. One theme of this revealing book is the ideological and military struggles bin Laden waged against the Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Masood. A second refrain is that bin Laden certainly thinks strategically, but often acts on impulse and commits blunders.