Meeting CNN Security Analyst Peter Bergen

By: Madeline (Madie) Fleishman, EC Scholar and Honors College Freshman

The following blog post details a unique opportunity for a handful of Honors College students to meet with CNN Security Analyst Peter Bergen.

Many extremely interesting events are advertised at ECU, but they don’t necessarily offer insight into my unique career goals; so when Peter Bergen’s name came across my email, I knew I had to jump on the opportunity to meet him. Peter Bergen is a CNN Security analyst, among many things, who has spent the majority of his life studying, traveling the world, and focusing on major threats to our security. Most famously, this led him to become the first person to hold a televised interview with Osama Bin Laden. Needless to say, Peter Bergen was an incredible person to ask probing questions about national security.

The first question to be answered and ultimately the one on all of our minds was, “what was it like to interview Osama bin Laden?” What struck me was the calmness with which he answered the question while describing the terrifying layers of security he endured in order to meet Bin Laden. Little did Mr. Bergen know who bin Laden would eventually become, but using his education in Security Studies, he was initially suspicious of the power of this man. From there, a discussion erupted about the future threat that ISIS poses to our world. The discussion was both a rousing debate and a chance for us to learn from Mr. Bergen. He shared first-hand information about ISIS that is almost impossible to find on one’s own. Other topics discussed in the session included the future of our cyber security and the current European refugee crisis.

All in all, the information session was incredibly useful tool that allowed me to learn about world security threats from a first-hand perspective. Often it is difficult to understand the full perspective of world issues from Greenville, NC, but Peter Bergen allowed us to gain a needed understanding of our world.