Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer, not a TikTok influencer, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
Let’s be clear: Osama bin Laden was not a deep thinker but the leader of a group responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and other Westerners, along with tens of thousands of people in Muslim-majority countries.

So the fact that people on TikTok are extolling bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” al Qaeda’s rationale for the 9/11 attacks, in videos that have been watched at least 14 million times is simply baffling.

Most of the people praising bin Laden on TikTok appear to be in their 20s, so they were either not born or were young children when 9/11 happened, and they also seem to be entirely ignorant of the actual history of al Qaeda.

Bin Laden’s men not only carried out the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,997 people, but they also bombed two US embassies in Africa in 1998, killing more than 200 Kenyans and Tanzanians and a dozen Americans.

Bin Laden’s al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq helped to trigger the Iraqi civil war in 2006, during which tens of thousands of Iraqis died.

In Indonesia in 2002, an al Qaeda-affiliated group killed more than 200 people in Bali, and in London three years later, bin Laden’s followers carried out the most lethal terrorist attack in British history, killing 52 commuters. And this is only a partial list of the mayhem carried out by bin Laden and his followers.

The “Letter to America,” had been posted on The Guardian’s website in 2002 when it was first issued, and it was removed by the Guardian this week after it started going viral.

This text is a laundry list of rationales that runs to a dozen pages about why al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11. It begins with the issue of Palestine, which the letter says is occupied by Israel with “American support.” Some of the recent videos on TikTok seem to be making connections between bin Laden’s opposition to Israel and their own opposition to the US support for Israel in its war against Hamas.

The “Letter to America” also decries the United States’ role in global warming, American tolerance for homosexuality and the drug culture that exists in the United States.

I’ve read tens of thousands of words by bin Laden, have written several books about al Qaeda, and produced bin Laden’s first television interview, which aired on CNN in 1997, and it’s not clear to me that bin Laden even wrote this “Letter to America” because it differs in many respects from his usual writings. If he did write it, he did so with the help of others.

Bin Laden’s voluminous other statements invariably focused not on cultural or political critiques of the United States but on criticizing American policies in the Middle East, not only US support for Israel but also, for instance, its support of the Saudi royal family.

Certainly, bin Laden himself was very focused on the Palestinian issue. As a teenager, he would gather friends to chant religious songs about Palestine. His father, who ran a major construction company, renovated the three holiest sites in Islam, including the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which is in territory that was taken by the Israeli army during the 1967 War.

So, bin Laden not only had a personal connection to the Palestinian issue, but as a devout Muslim, he had strong religious convictions about it. When, on August 23, 1996, he declared war against the United States, he wrote, “I still feel the pain of (the loss) [of] Al-Quds [Jerusalem] in my internal organs; That loss is like a burning fire in my intestines.”

For bin Laden, the Palestinian issue was a key factor in his hatred of the US. The al Qaeda leader was killed in a US Navy SEAL Team Six raid in 2011 in Pakistan, and so his voice has been absent from the scene. But in recent years, that issue seemed to have waned in importance for other jihadist groups. In countries like Iraq and Syria, ISIS was far more focused on attacking Shias, whom the jihadist group’s members consider to be heretics.

Now, the Palestinian issue is back as a cause célèbre among jihadist groups from al Qaeda to ISIS.

For the podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” I interviewed Nelly Lahoud, a professor of security studies at the US Army War College and the author of “The Bin Laden Papers.” Lahoud examined all the files recovered at bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, nearly 6,000 pages of al Qaeda’s internal communications.

Lahoud learned how much bin Laden miscalculated about how the US would respond to the 9/11 attacks, telling me, “Bin Laden was convinced that the American people would take to the streets and replicate the Vietnam anti-war protests and demand that their government withdraw their military forces from the Middle East.”

In fact, bin Laden’s attacks on 9/11 spectacularly backfired, and instead of withdrawing from the Middle East after the attacks, the United States got more deeply involved in the region than at any other time in its history.

It might behoove those posting on TikTok to understand some of this history before praising bin Laden’s purported brilliance.

Is Israel Prepared for this Ground War?

Nov 14 2023
Experts on urban and underground warfare explain why an aerial campaign alone can’t defeat Hamas, what the shortcomings are of the Israeli Defense Force, and how long, complicated, and tragic this war will be.

Trump’s ridiculous terrorism claim, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of several books about terrorism, including most recently, “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.”

CNN
—
On the campaign trail on Saturday, Donald Trump asserted that there was no terrorism in the US when he was the president, a claim that is false in myriad ways.

It’s not the first time he has made the claim, which is also linked to Trump’s plans, should he become president again, to bring back a “Muslim ban” that blocked or made it very difficult to travel to the US from several Muslim-majority countries.

Despite Trump’s much-vaunted travel ban, there was plenty of terrorism on his watch as the 45th president of the United States.

On October 31, 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek resident of the US who was inspired by ISIS, plowed a truck into a group of pedestrians in Manhattan, killing eight and wounding 11.

Two years later, a member of the Saudi military shot and killed three American sailors and wounded eight others at the US Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida.

During Trump’s presidency, there were also multiple lethal attacks by far-right terrorists, most notably on August 3, 2019, when a white nationalist went on a shooting rampage at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people who he believed were Hispanic immigrants, according to the US Department of Justice.

Also, the most lethal antisemitic attack ever in the United States took place on October 27, 2018, when a terrorist killed eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

It seems, at least in Trump’s mind, that lethal acts of terrorism carried out by far-right terrorists don’t count as terrorism.

Trump, of course, also helped to instigate one of the most spectacular acts of domestic terrorism in American history when he egged on a mob of thousands of his supporters to march on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which triggered a riot that injured 114 Capitol Police officers, according to a bipartisan US Senate investigation. The riot also led to the deaths of five people.

As for Trump’s remedy to the terrorism problem, his plans to resurrect his so-called Muslim ban go beyond a simple repeat, as he said during a campaign stop in Iowa in July: “When I return to the office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before. We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers.”

When Trump was in office, the travel ban faced various legal challenges but was eventually upheld by the US Supreme Court and included visitors to the US from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen as well as North Korea and Venezuela.

The ban, of course, did nothing to impede the Uzbek terrorist who killed eight people in Manhattan or the Saudi terrorist who killed three sailors in Pensacola. Nor did it do anything to stop the domestic terrorists that are already here in the US.

Terrorism did not disappear with Trump, and his proposed “solution,” were he to become president again – amping up the Muslim travel ban – likely won’t accomplish much of anything.

If he were really serious about trying to reduce the number of victims of terrorism in the US, an excellent place to start would be restricting the ability to purchase the kinds of semi-automatic rifles that were used in the atrocities at the Walmart in El Paso, and the synagogue in Pittsburgh.

The likelihood that Trump would do much of anything on gun control is, of course, remote. In April, speaking at the National Rifle Association annual meeting, Trump boasted, “I was proud to be the most pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment president you’ve ever had in the White House,” adding, “This is not a gun problem, this is a mental health problem, this is a social problem, this is a cultural problem, this is a spiritual problem.”

As for Trump having any kind of second thoughts about the mayhem he helped unleash during the January 6 riot, forget it. When he was asked at a CNN town hall last year, if he would pardon the rioters who were convicted of federal offenses, he said he was “inclined to pardon many of them.”

At the same CNN town hall, Trump referred to January 6 as a “beautiful day.” Trump has made a lot of bizarro claims over the years, but this must surely rank among his wackiest. My wife and I live in Washington, DC, and we were so unnerved by the violence unfolding at the Capitol that we picked up our kids early from school. This was not a beautiful day, but one of the grimmest the Republic has seen in a long time.

As Trump spends more time on the campaign trail, we will surely be seeing more factually challenged statements of this type.

Fact-checking those statements will likely have zero impact on the MAGA faithful, but it may provide some small solace for those who labor in the fact-based world.

Turning Bad News into a Great Read

By: Peter L. Bergen

Nov 7 2023
Length: 43 mins
Podcast

Summary
How do two of America’s leading nonfiction writers turn some of the biggest issues affecting us into juicy narratives that change hearts and minds — and maybe even policies? Patrick Radden Keefe on how he rendered the opioid crisis as a dramatic tale of money, power, and human suffering in his book Empire of Pain, and Elizabeth Kolbert on how she illuminates what we are losing as global temperatures rise, as in her most recent book, Under a White Sky.

What’s Iran’s real plan in its proxy battle against Israel? CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN
4 minute read
Published 4:31 AM EST, Mon November 6, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
Henry Kissinger once observed that Iranian leaders must decide if Iran is a cause or a nation.

Iran seems to have decided that it’s both, exporting its militant Shia ideology to countries across the Middle East from Lebanon in the north, arming the Houthis 1,500 miles to the south in Yemen, supporting Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, propping up the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Hamas receives funding for weapons from Iran, but Hezbollah is more like an arm of the Iranian government and has a much greater military capacity than Hamas. It has 150,000 rockets and is more militarily capable than the Lebanese army.

But neither Iran nor Hezbollah seems to have had a plan for what to do following Hamas’s massacres last month in Israel. It’s possible they had an inkling that Hamas was planning something without knowing the scale and ferocity of what the world saw on October 7.

Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes as the attacks continue on the 29th day in Gaza City, Gaza on November 03, 2023.
Opinion: Israel-Hamas war’s endgame
Indeed, US intelligence sources say that senior Iranian officials appeared surprised by Hamas’s attacks.

On Friday, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, spoke publicly for the first time about the war in Gaza. Nasrallah was at pains to say that Hamas’ October 7 attacks in Israel were “100 percent” a Palestinian operation, publicly discounting that Hezbollah and Iran had anything to with the operation, as some reports have suggested.

Nasrallah also said that “All options are on the table” when it came to Hezbollah’s possible military response against Israel — the kind of threat that may not mean very much at all.

Nasrallah became a “new icon” across the Arab world during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers, which triggered a 34-day war that ended in something of a stalemate. The conflict killed more than 1,100 Lebanese and 158 Israelis.

Hezbollah is a potent military force, but it is also a political movement. Following last year’s election in Lebanon, 58 out of 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament are in the pro-Hezbollah bloc, so Hezbollah must be somewhat responsive to Lebanese popular opinion. Given Lebanon’s ruined economy, the Lebanese people are unlikely to be eager for a repeat of the 2006 war, which caused billions of dollars of damage to their country.

The Lebanese people are unlikely to be eager for a repeat of the 2006 war, which caused billions of dollars of damage to their country.

Also, any decision by Hezbollah to widen the war would likely have to be cleared by Tehran, and right now, Tehran and its proxy forces in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen seem to want to keep up pressure on Israel and US forces in the region with harassing attacks, but not to instigate a wider war.

Iran itself appears to be doing nothing visible to foment further conflict, while letting its proxies do the work for it. The Houthis, who control much of Yemen and are supported and supplied by Iran, have fired missiles, which were intercepted, at Israeli targets in recent days. For the moment, both Hezbollah and Israel are exchanging tit-for-tat fire along Israel’s northern border that falls short of anything close to a full-blown war.

Meanwhile, in Iraq and Syria, US military bases have come under fire from rockets and drones 24 times in the past month. Iranian proxies almost certainly launched those attacks. Twenty one US servicemembers were treated for “minor injuries” according to the Pentagon.

Iran’s ayatollahs may, at least rhetorically, seek the destruction of the state of Israel because the third holiest site in Islam, the Al Aqsa Mosque compound is in Jerusalem — which is also the holiest site in Judaism known as the Temple Mount. They also know that Israel is their most powerful military foe in the region.

But Iran is unlikely to instigate a full-scale regional war with Israel, which might well also draw in the United States, which has recently moved two aircraft carrier groups to the Middle East.

Also, the leaders of Iran’s theocratic regime have faced a significant domestic protest movement over the past year largely led by women fed up with regulations requiring wearing the hijab in public, while they also have an economy that is hamstrung by significant sanctions imposed by the US and its allies. The Iranian riyal has halved in value against the dollar since the protest movement began a little over a year ago, while the Iranian inflation rate is around 40 %.

The Iranians, in short, have enough problems of their own not to start a shooting war with Israel backed by its American ally. They prefer to act through their proxies in the region, keeping up some heat on Israel and the United States, but certainly not by dialing that heat up to 11.

A General and a Military Historian Say Israel-Hamas War is Most Challenging Conflict Since 1945

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Oct 31 2023
Length: 31 mins
Podcast

Summary
General David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts, co-authors of the new book “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine,” discuss how they believe this war will evolve, how it compares to other conflicts of the last seven and a half decades, and what we can learn from the mistakes made during those wars.

Can the Next Mass Shooting Be Prevented?

By: Peter L. Bergen

Oct 27 2023
Length: 46 mins

Another mass shooting is making headlines in the United States. With it comes the familiar feeling of powerlessness. But a rare peek inside the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit reveals that at least some shootings are being prevented, using techniques to identify people headed down the ‘pathway to violence.’ In the absence of gun reform, agents share what ordinary people can do to help. And a mother recounts the harrowing story of how she discovered her son’s plans to shoot up a school — and what happened next.

How Does the Russian Propaganda Machine Work?

When Ukrainian soldiers liberated the town of Bucha, Ukraine in March, 2022, news reports showed scenes of bodies lying in the streets. Human Rights Watch documented cases of summary executions. But on Russian state television, the news was presented as “fake,” a staged event. Objective reporting about the war in Ukraine is now against the law in Russia and journalists can’t even use the word “war” in their stories. But it wasn’t always like this. Two veteran Russian journalists who’ve experienced the changes firsthand, explain what has happened.

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Oct 24 2023
Length: 41 mins
Podcast

You Should Worry About A.I., but Not for the Reason You Think

Episode 26: You Should Worry About A.I., but Not for the Reason You Think
Oct 17 2023
New tools like Chat GPT have sparked futuristic fears about intelligent machines wiping people out or, at the very least, taking all our jobs. But there’s a more immediate A.I. threat coming for us, as soon as the next election.

42 mins

International and Homegrown Threats Today, CELL, Denver, ONLINE

International and Homegrown Threats Today
International and Homegrown Threats Today
ft. PETER BERGEN
CNN National Security Analyst, Award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author
November 13th – 6 PM MST
Are you concerned about the rising threat of violent extremism and its impact on our nation’s security? Join us for a thought-provoking speaker series that aims to shed light on this pressing issue and explore effective strategies to counter extremism. This engaging event brings together experts, practitioners, and community members to foster meaningful dialogue and promote a united effort in safeguarding our nation.

Can’t make it? Don’t worry! Registrants will be sent a replay link following each event.

This project was supported by grant #22PIBV23CELL, issued by the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. The discounted $0.25 per-participant charge for this program has been graciously underwritten by the CELL’s underwriters.