"I’m quite optimistic. In the long term, I’m confident they’ll go out of business. ... If they’re very lucky, they may succeed in shutting down a major American city for quite some time but clearly they won’t end the American way of life.”
-- Peter Bergen, CNN’s terrorism analyst and author of “The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader,” speaking about al Qaeda and its threat throughout the world in the future, during the Schreyer Honors College’s Signature Lecture Monday (Feb. 11) in Schwab Auditorium on Penn State’s University Park campus. In 1997, as a producer for CNN, Bergen produced bin Laden’s first television interview. Since then, Bergen has traveled repeatedly to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to report on bin Laden and al Qaeda. His appearance was also sponsored by the Penn State Dickinson School of Law, the Rock Ethics Institute and the Department of Political Science in the College of the Liberal Arts.