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.

Why should Americans care about the Nazi back story in World War II? If you don't have the Nazi back story in World War II, World War II is simply not comprehensible.

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.

So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.

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.

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.

At one point people in al Qaeda were actually drawing monthly paychecks when they were based in Sudan.