When al-Qaeda was on the run from Afghanistan crossing through Iran, some were arrested and they are imprisoned. Some of them are charged with some actions in Iran.
Punishing abuse in Iraq should not return the U.S. to Sept. 10, 2001, in the way it fights al Qaeda, while Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants remain at large and continue to plan attacks.
It has never demonstrated any desire to provide humane treatment to captured Americans. If anything, the murders of Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl declare al Qaeda's intentions to kill even innocent civilian prisoners.
The people who illegally cross into the country are from countries that have very close ties to al Qaeda, whether it's Yemen or Afghanistan, Pakistan, China. It is an absolute national disgrace.
Al Qaeda operates by launching surprise attacks on civilian targets with the goal of massive casualties. Our only means for preventing future attacks, which could use WMDs, is by acquiring information that allows for pre-emptive action.
When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's sec...
Al Qaeda is not the organization now that it was before. It is under stress organizationally. Its leadership spends more time trying to figure out how to keep from getting caught than they do trying to launch operations.
But then Iraq happened after September 2001 and America claimed that Al Qaeda was there, and we all know that was a lie and we now know that our own Prime Minister deceived the country terribly.
Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?
Involvement in Afghanistan, I thought, was totally warranted. We were attacked, we attacked back, but after six months of being in Afghanistan, I thought we had pretty well effectively wiped out al Qaeda.
But there have been many news reports that water-boarding has been used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the major al Qaeda figures that we have in U.S. custody.
If the practice is torture for the al Qaeda operative who masterminded the killing of three thousand Americans, why weren't there court-martials in the cases of those thousands of servicemen similarly treated as part of their training?
Al Qaeda has no place in Pakistan. It's a threat to Pakistan. And there should be a convergence of interests between the Pakistani state and the West on security issues, but also on wider economic and social issues.
In October 2008, American commandos launched a cross-border raid into Syria to capture an Islamic militant known as Abu Ghadiya. He was accused of being one of al Qaeda in Iraq's main smugglers of fighters and money between Iraq and Syria.
And beyond that, the next issue is how do we guarantee one of these weapons, not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons ends up in the hands of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.
No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable.
Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Q...
The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its ...
We all hoped in 2001 that we could put in place an Afghan government under President Karzai that would be able to control the country, make sure al-Qaeda didn't come back, and make sure the Taliban wasn't resurging. It didn't work out.
The plan we developed to deal with al Qaeda depended on developing sources of human and technical intelligence that could give us insights into his plans at the tactical level. This is easy to say but hard to accomplish.
Despite the obvious intelligence and security failures that contributed to the attack against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, the reality is that in one night, an al Qaeda-affiliated group destroyed a diplomatic post, killed a U.S. ambassador and thr...
