Peter Bergen

Bannon should never have had a permanent seat on the NSC, as he is a political operative, and the NSC has traditionally been a place where American interests are considered rather than narrow Republican or Democratic interests.

In the public's mind, Special Forces are often confused with the 'door kickers' of Special Operations Forces - such as SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force - who are the United States' elite counterterrorism operators.

Will there be a political backlash against British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose ruling Conservative Party is traditionally seen as 'stronger' on terrorism than its main rival, the Labour Party?

Typically, terrorist attacks produce a rally-around-the flag effect as was the case after 9/11 and the huge outpouring of public support that then-President George W. Bush garnered.

Because of the 9/11 attacks, the framing of terrorism by politicians, the media, and the public too often in the past decade and a half has been that it is Islamist political violence that is the terrorism we need to be concerned about.

Since Snowden went public, companies such as Apple and Google - two of the world's most valuable companies - have incorporated much greater encryption into their products and have also been at pains to show that they will not go along with U.S. government demands to access their encrypted products.

The Bush administration's approach to the war on terror collided badly with another of its doctrines, spreading democracy in the Middle East as a panacea to reduce radicalism.

There is considerable merit to the notion of treating gun violence as a public health matter.

Zero Dark Thirty' is a great piece of filmmaking and does a valuable public service by raising difficult questions most Hollywood movies shy away from, but as of this writing, it seems that one of its central themes - that torture was instrumental to tracking down bin Laden - is not supported by the facts.

Think of ISIS as a pathogen that preys on weak hosts in the Muslim world. In fact, there is something of a political law: The weaker a Muslim state, the stronger will be the presence of ISIS or like-minded groups.

Bush administration officials, of course, deny that they didn't take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating that in their public utterances, private meetings, and actions, the al Qaeda threat barely registered.

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it.