A national security analyst who spent more than two decades covering terrorist group al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden is donating more than 150,000 pages of research to Georgetown University ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.
Peter Bergen began his career for CNN in the 1990s and helped produce the network’s 1997 interview with bin Laden, which was his first TV interview with a western news organization.
Notes, photographs and tapes from that assignment are part of the archive.
“I believe in history as being useful for people to try to understand,” Bergen told the Washington Post for a lengthy profile on his career and his decision to donate the archive. “Not that history repeats itself, but it does have a rhyme or two.”
Among the more unusual items is a paper copy of a fatwa issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the imprisoned cleric known as the “blind sheikh.” Bergen obtained the document after it was distributed at an al-Qaeda press conference in Afghanistan in 1998.
The archive also includes a complete run of “al-Jihad,” a magazine launched in 1984 that later became closely associated with al-Qaeda.
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar and Professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, helped connect Bergen with the university’s librarians: He told the Washington Post the collection is particularly valuable for students too young to remember the September 11 attacks.
“It makes history come alive, in essence, when you can look at these archival materials and trace this trajectory, this lineage that led to 9/11,” Hoffman said.
Bergen first traveled to the region in 1983 while a student at Oxford University. He later worked for ABC News before joining CNN in 1990 and began focusing more heavily on Afghanistan and militant networks after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Today, Bergen is a Vice President at New America, a Professor at Arizona State University and the author of “All the Presidents’ Wars.” He also wrote a book on the search for bin Laden in the 10 years following the September 11 attack.
He told the Washington Post that Georgetown was a natural home for the archive because of its location in Washington, its terrorism studies program and a family connection: his mother was among the early female students at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
The 25th anniversary of the September 11 attack is Friday. Most television news networks are planning special coverage to commemorate the event, which was the largest incident of terror-related mass murder on American soil in the country’s history.
