By Bilal Y. Saab, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Bilal Y. Saab is visiting fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bilal Y. Saab.

The Washington Post ran a story Thursday with the headline “Suicide attack in Syria makes international action less likely.” The author concludes that the recent upswing in terrorist violence actually decreases the chances of U.S., NATO or Arab-Turkish military intervention in Syria.

I argue it may well be the opposite. FULL POST

Editor's note: Peter Bergen, CNN's national security analyst, is the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad", from which the article is adapted.

In a new book, a "60 Minutes" interview and other recent public statements, Jose Rodriguez, a three-decade veteran of the CIA who rose to become head of the National Clandestine Service, has stoutly defended the CIA's use of coercive interrogation techniques on al Qaeda detainees.

Rodriguez asserts, for instance, "Information obtained from senior al Qaeda terrorists, who became compliant after receiving enhanced interrogation techniques, was key to the U.S. government learning of the existence of a courier who was bin Laden's lifeline."

Let us turn to what is available on the public record to consider if this is true.

Read more of the story from Peter Bergen

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

Whatever you thought of President Obama's recent speech on Afghanistan, it is now increasingly clear that the United States is winding down its massive military commitments to the two wars of the last decade.

We are out of Iraq and we will soon be largely out of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self. Threats remain but these are being handled using special forces and intelligence. So, finally, after a decade, we seem to be right-sizing the threat from terrorist groups.

Or are we? FULL POST

Editor's note: Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, is the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, From 9/11 to Abbottabad," from which this article is adapted.

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

We climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Osama bin Laden died early in the morning of May 2, 2011. I stepped into the bedroom where he was killed and looked up at the ceiling, where you could still see the patterns of blood that had spurted from bin Laden's head when the bullet fired by a U.S. Navy SEAL tore through the terrorist leader's face.

The height of the room was low for someone as tall as bin Laden, who was 6 foot 4.

Outside the bedroom was a small terrace surrounded by a high wall. Overlooking the enclosed terrace were large and now broken plate glass windows that would have provided a lot of light for bin Laden during the day.

In the bedroom in which al-Qaeda's leader finally was killed, I had expected a frisson of something; perhaps a sensation like exploring Hitler's bunker complex beneath the streets of Berlin at the end of World War II.

Read on here.

Editor's Note: Micah Zenko is a fellow for conflict prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he blogs. You can also follow him on Twitter. The following is reprinted with the permission of CFR.org.

By Micah Zenko, CFR.org

Last week, the Obama campaign released a video starring Bill Clinton, in which he extolled the president’s decision to authorize the raid that killed Osama bin Laden one year ago. In the video, Clinton hypothesized: “Suppose the Navy Seals had gone in there, and it hadn’t been bin Laden. Suppose they’d been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for [Obama].” According to the former president, Obama’s decision was “the harder and more honorable path.”

Obama’s authorization of the bin Laden raid was indeed risky: based on incomplete information (such as the lack of definitive proof that the al Qaeda leader was in the Abbotabad compound) and objections from a split cabinet. Even if the operation had failed or cost American lives, many analysts and commentators — including Clinton — exaggerate the likely political costs to the president. FULL POST

By Pam Benson, CNN

No one is writing al Qaeda's obituary yet. But one year after its leader Osama bin Laden was shot dead by U.S. commandos, U.S. officials and experts say the terror network's core group holed up in Pakistan is hemorrhaging and could be in its final days.

CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen, for one, maintains that al Qaeda – at least its components based in south central Asia – is in terrible shape.

"Their record of failure speaks for itself: No success in the west since the London attacks of 2005, no attacks in the United States since 9/11 (2001), almost the entire top leadership dead or captured," said Bergen.

Adds Robert Grenier, the former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, "The movement has essentially been marginalized."

Do you agree?

This is not a scientific poll.

Check out the full post here at CNN's Security Clearance blog.

By Matthew Rojansky – Special to CNN

Details are scarce, but we know for now that two dozen or more people have been injured in multiple bombing attacks in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk. The first bomb struck mid-day at a crowded trolleybus stop in the city center, and three more explosions are believed to have occurred in central locations soon afterward. Throughout the afternoon and evening, local residents and security services have been seen rounding up trashcans from public places, for fear they might be used to conceal another bomb.

How can these shocking acts be explained? More information will surely become available as an official investigation gets underway, but for now, there are several very troubling possibilities, each of which at least bears careful consideration by the Ukrainian authorities and the public. FULL POST

Editor's Note: The following is reprinted with the permission of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Anders Behring Breivik addressed a Norwegian court today, calling his admitted murder of seventy-seven people last summer the most "spectacular sophisticated political act" since World War II (NYT), while vowing to do it over again if given the opportunity. Breivik said he acted– setting off a car bomb in central Oslo that killed eight and gunning down sixty-nine others at a nearby youth summer camp on July 22, 2011–as part of a Norwegian resistance movement in defense of the alleged Islamic "colonization" of Norway. Breivik, who asked the court to acquit him, said his victims were not innocent because they supported multiculturalism. FULL POST

Editor's note: Peter Bergen, CNN's national security analyst, is a director at the New America Foundation. His book "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden; From 9/11 to Abbottabad" will be published on May 1. Jennifer Rowland is a program associate at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank which seeks innovative solutions across the ideological spectrum.

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, and Jennifer Rowland, Special to CNN

The past year has seen the number of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan plummet. In the first three months of 2012, there were 11, compared with 21 in the first three months of 2011 and a record 28 in the first quarter of 2010.

On Monday, Pakistan's parliament started to debate whether the United States should be made to stop CIA drone strikes altogether in the Pakistani border regions with Afghanistan and also whether the U.S. should apologize for NATO airstrikes that killed some two dozen Pakistani soldiers late last year.

Given the high level of hostility to the United States in Pakistan, the results of the parliamentary debate are pretty much a foregone conclusion. The parliament will almost certainly vote against the allowing the continuation of the drone strikes and will also demand an American apology for the deaths of its soldiers.

Read on here.

Editor's note: Richard J. Chasdi is an adjunct assistant professor at the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State University and the author of "Counterterror Offensives for the Ghost War World: The Rudiments of Counterterrorism Policy" (Lexington Books, 2010).

By Richard J. Chasdi - Special to CNN

World leaders are meeting in Seoul this week to discuss how to deal with the threat of nuclear terrorism.

The effort to prevent the misuse of nuclear materials and the spread of nuclear weapons has long-placed most emphasis on defensive measures. These are essentially on the "supply side" - aiming to choke off the flow of nuclear weapon components and radiological materials to terrorists. While there is a place for such steps, there is another, and perhaps more successful way, to accomplish the goal.

One of the gravest threats to nuclear proliferation arises from the nations that use proxy groups - seemingly independent organizations that are paid to further the interests of governments.

Ending or reducing the use of such proxy groups has real potential to reduce the availability of such materials to terrorists. Perhaps the single, most dominant security threat stems from the nuclear-tipped country of Pakistan, with its accepted use of proxy groups to promote the perceived national interest.

Third-party transfer, where a country receiving weapons sells or gives them to another party, is always a danger, and with it looms the possible catastrophe of nuclear weapons in the wrong hands.

Read on here.