What Peter Arnett asked Osama bin Laden

By Peter Bergen

CNN

Updated Dec 19, 2025

It was a bitterly cold night in March 1997 in a mud hut high in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan and we were surrounded by well-armed al-Qaeda fighters.

Peter Arnett asked their leader a simple question: “What are your future plans?”

Osama bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing,”

It was bin Laden’s first TV interview, and he and his team had chosen Arnett and CNN to conduct it, an interview I produced.

In the following year, bin Laden made good on his chilling threat with al-Qaeda’s near-simultaneous attacks on two US embassies in Africa that killed more than 200 people. In 2000, his men bombed the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors. Then, of course, there were the 9/11 attacks which killed almost 3,000 people and resulted in a “Global War on Terror.”

I first got to know Arnett, who died on Wednesday, in 1993. He was then one of the world’s most famous people and certainly its most well-known foreign correspondent. It was only two years after the first Gulf War and Arnett’s brave decision to remain in Baghdad after other Western reporters left, while American bombs were raining down on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, transformed CNN’s standing among viewers around the world. And it turned Arnett into a global celebrity.

You often heard Arnett before you saw him coming; a stocky man with a booming New Zealand-accented voice that could cut through glass. And then you saw the man himself: Larger than life does not do him justice; Arnett was a newsman’s newsman, full of tales of derring-do in Vietnam and many other wars around the globe.

I was thirty when I first met Arnett and I’d never been to a war zone. And soon, we were flying into Afghanistan in the middle of the civil war there. Kabul, the capital, was in ruins resembling Dresden after World War II; various warlords were fighting block to block. Child soldiers were a common sight. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan prime minister, had the distinction of likely being the only prime minister in history to shell his own capital on a daily basis.

Arnett interviewed all the major players in the civil war for CNN including Hekmatyar, Hekmatyar’s main opponent Ahmad Shah Massoud — who would be assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before 9/11 — and Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani who was killed by the Taliban in 2011.

During the Afghan civil war, shells were dropping constantly on Kabul and various ethnic and sectarian militias were battling each other in continuous firefights, yet Arnett seemed completely content. He wanted to be where the action was and Afghanistan in 1993 had action aplenty.

One piece of advice Arnett gave me then has stayed with me: “Never do anything for fun in a war zone,” which struck me as wise counsel.

We were in Afghanistan because we were tracking the bombers of the World Trade Center in 1993, a group of men – some of whom had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s or had supported that effort – who had parked a van packed with explosives in the basement aiming to bring down the Twin Towers. They failed to do so but six people were killed.

In 1997, I spent weeks negotiating with a group of bin Laden associates living in London to try and secure an interview with the al-Qaeda leader. We believed that bin Laden might have had a role in the 1993 Trade Center bombing. (We didn’t know it then, but Ramzi Yousef who masterminded the 1993 bombing, was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s operational commander of the 9/11 attacks.)

Other networks were also pursuing an interview, including the BBC, and CBS “60 Minutes”. I believe that Arnett’s reputation for fairness in covering the Gulf War was crucial in CNN securing the interview.

Back on the Afghan mountaintop, Arnett asked bin Laden why he was declaring a jihad, holy war, against the United States.

Bin Laden gave a long answer critiquing American support for Israel and US allies in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia.

This reply undercut President George W. Bush’s frequent later claims after 9/11 that the United States was attacked because of its “freedoms.”

In his CNN interview four years before 9/11, bin Laden said his rationale for jihad against the United States was American foreign policy in the Middle East.

It was a privilege to spend many weeks in Afghanistan with Arnett in 1993 and then again four year later producing the first TV interview with bin Laden.

Arnett was a man who fear seemed to have no hold over. And I’ve never done anything for fun in an active war zone since.

The Mosque to Commerce

Bin Laden’s special complaint with the World Trade Center.

By Laurie Kerr

SLATE

Dec 28, 2001

Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as “a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area.” True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca’s courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city’s bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites—the Qa’ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s. #911receipts

The Western world runs on a Zionist operating system. All Banks, Media & Tech companies are just apps from their app store. And we wonder why they have so much power.

Bitcoin is the “Linux” to those “Microsoft” scumbags

Users need to revolt against what will very likely be an even more widespread effort to censor voices critical of Israel.

Good morning, friends!

This week's Financial Freedom Report #102 is out and features the following in global news:

-Venezuela | María Corina Machado Awarded Nobel Peace Prize

-Russia | Increased Cash Use Amid Internet Outages and Financial Controls

-Cuba | Former Economy Minister Sentenced to Life in Espionage Case

In #Bitcoin and Freedom Tech News:

-Save the Children | Bitcoin Fund Launched

-MetaMask | Bitcoin Support Added

-PlebQR | Pay in Bitcoin in Thailand

We end with the livestreams of the 2025 Africa Bitcoin Conference!

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In 2000, Saddam Hussein did something very few people paid attention to.

He announced Iraq would start selling oil in euros, not U.S. dollars.

Three years later, the United States invaded Iraq.

No weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

But something else happened quietly.

Iraqi oil went right back to being priced in dollars.

Most people call that a coincidence.

I call it a lesson.

In 2009, Muammar Gaddafi proposed something even more dangerous.

A gold-backed African currency — the gold dinar.

It would have allowed African nations to buy oil without using dollars.

In 2011, NATO intervened in Libya for “humanitarian reasons.”

Gaddafi was killed.

The gold dinar disappeared.

Libyan oil? Back to dollars.

Another coincidence.

I’m noticing a pattern.

Go back further.

In 1971, President Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard.

The dollar was no longer backed by gold — only a promise.

By all historical logic, the dollar should have collapsed.

It didn’t.

Why?

Because three years later, Henry Kissinger cut a deal with Saudi Arabia.

The deal was simple:

Sell oil only in U.S. dollars, and the U.S. military will protect the regime.

From that moment on, every country on earth needed dollars to buy energy.

That wasn’t free-market economics.

That was force-backed monetary policy.

Or, more honestly, a protection racket.

And it works — as long as the military can enforce it.

Watch what happens when countries challenge it.

Russia demands rubles for natural gas?

Sanctions. Escalation.

Syria discusses pipelines priced outside the dollar system?

Civil war intensifies. Pipeline never happens.

Iran tries to sell oil outside the dollar?

Decades of sanctions.

I’m not saying these are good governments or bad governments.

I’m saying watch what happens when anyone threatens the petrodollar system.

Once you see it, the pattern isn’t subtle.

SWIFT is not a neutral payment system.

It’s a weapon.

Get cut off from SWIFT, and you’re locked out of global trade.

Russia.

Iran.

Cuba.

Venezuela.

Different politics. Same outcome.

They don’t teach this in school because it’s uncomfortable.

We don’t send 18-year-olds to die for “freedom.”

We send them to protect reserve currency status.

Currency funds the military.

The military protects the currency.

That’s how empires work.

Britain learned this the hard way.

The British pound was the world’s reserve currency for nearly 200 years.

After World War II, Britain lost reserve status.

Within two decades, the British Empire collapsed.

Same cycle.

Dutch guilder.

British pound.

Now the U.S. dollar.

Ray Dalio has been warning about this for years.

Late-stage empire looks like this:

• Military overextension

• Rising debt

• Currency weakening

• Rivals building alternatives

China’s Belt and Road isn’t charity.

It’s about creating debt relationships denominated in yuan.

BRICS aren’t talking about alternatives because they’re friends.

They’re building an exit ramp from dollar dependence.

When the dollar loses reserve status — not if, when — the ability to print money without consequences disappears.

- Then the military contracts.

- Then the empire ends.

- You can call this cynical.

I call it financial history.

Every war in my lifetime had a currency angle — if you knew where to look.

“Freedom and democracy” is the marketing.

The actual policy documents talk about

“maintaining dollar liquidity in global energy markets.”

I’m not anti-military.

I’m anti-bullshit.

If we’re sending people to fight…

We should at least be honest about why.