CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen to discuss the hunt for Osama bin Laden

October 5, 2011

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Peter Bergen, an award-winning journalist and one of the world’s leading experts on al-Qaida and global terrorism, will speak on Oct. 12 at the University of Florida’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service.

Over the last decade, through his reporting for CNN, Bergen has proved to be one of the world’s most insightful analysts on Osama bin Laden and Islamic terrorism. In 1997, as a producer for CNN, Bergen got bin Laden to give his first U.S. television interview, in which he declared war against the United States for the first time to a Western audience. “Manhunt: The Search for Osama bin Laden” begins at 6 p.m. in Pugh Hall’s Ocora.

Bergen’s appearance comes just months after a U.S. Navy SEALs team killed bin Laden at a safe house in Pakistan, an operation that has triggered a reappraisal of the American relationship with that nation.

This event is free and open to the public. It will also be streamed live at the Bob Graham Center website: www.bobgrahamcenter.ufl.edu.

Bergen has reported all over the world for CNN and a variety of top magazines, and has written several books on bin Laden and al-Qaida. His latest, “The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al-Qaeda,” has won rave reviews as the most definitive history of al-Qaeda to date. His other books include “The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al-Qaeda’s Leader” and “Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Bin Laden.”

“For readers interested in a highly informed, wide-angled, single-volume briefing on the war on terror so far, ‘The Longest War’ is clearly that essential book,” wrote New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani.

Bergen is also the director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a research fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security. In 2008, he was an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and he has worked as an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.