Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders in al-Qaida. He was able to indulge in his hobbies... He was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes for release to the wider world.

The terrorists who have succeeded in carrying out spectacular attacks against Western targets in the past have been college-educated, technically proficient men who are capable of manufacturing and deploying chemical, radiological, and biological weapons. Al Qaeda attracts the kind of highly educated men who one day might be able to pull off such an attack.

If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.

There's some pretty good academic research that suggest that what Americans don't like is losing.

Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.

In February I secured permission to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was killed and where he had lived for the last half-decade of his life; the first, and only, journalist to do so.

Often it is important to listen to what people aren't saying.