Quotes from Peter Bergen

Abedi appears to be one of the many thousands of Western Muslims who have embraced militant Islam, often as a way of trying to resolve the tension between their split identities.

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 war on terror, sometimes known as the 'Global War on Terror' or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.

Imprisoned by its war on terror framework, the Bush administration supported Israel in a disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS during his attack, the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11.

Again and again since 9/11, terror attacks in the West have been carried out by second-generation Muslims who are citizens of the very country they are attacking.

It is hard to imagine two more final endings to the 'war on terror' than the popular revolts against the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and the death of bin Laden.

The fact is, working stiffs with few opportunities and scant education are generally too busy getting by to engage in revolutionary projects to remake society. And history, in fact, shows us that terrorism is generally a bourgeois endeavor.

The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education, or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.

Because of the 9/11 attacks, the framing of terrorism by politicians, the media, and the public too often in the past decade and a half has been that it is Islamist political violence that is the terrorism we need to be concerned about.

The commonly accepted definition of terrorism is that it is politically motivated violence directed at civilians by entities other than a state. These kind of attacks can come from the far right, the far left, racists of every stripe, as well as jihadists.

I stepped into the bedroom where he was killed and looked up at the ceiling, where you could still see the patterns of blood that had spurted from bin Laden's head when the bullet fired by a U.S. Navy SEAL tore through the terrorist leader's face.

Typically, terrorist attacks produce a rally-around-the flag effect as was the case after 9/11 and the huge outpouring of public support that then-President George W. Bush garnered.

Sheikh Rahman had a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Harvard of Islamic thought. He also had a long history of guiding terrorist groups.

The reality is that Trump's focus on immigrants is to misconceive of the terrorist problem that exists in the United States.

9/11 was a sort of hinge event in American history, and all jihadi terrorist plots or attacks are kind of filtered through that lens.

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.

Every lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 has been carried out by an American citizen or a legal permanent resident, not by recent immigrants or by refugees. So tamping down immigration won't fix the real issue, which is 'homegrown' terrorism.

Because 9/11 was carried out by 19 foreign-born Arab hijackers, many assume that all terrorists who attack the West are foreigners.

For many terrorists, carrying out an attack allowed them to become the heroes of their own story.

The reason that attacks by American terrorists who are not jihadist militants are sometimes not called 'terrorism' is, in part, because in the United States, terrorism is a crime which has to be in some way be associated with a 'designated' terrorist group such as ISIS.

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.

The Green Berets of U.S. Special Forces 5th Group - known as 'the Legion' - who led the anti-Taliban campaign represent a textbook case of a successful Special Forces campaign.

Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.