Vanity Fair on the Saudis

Interesting article on the Saudi connection to 9-11. A lot of it is familiar; for example the Bayoumi/Al Midhar/Al Hazmi menage. On the other hand, it does explain some of the supposed warnings that the Saudis claim to have given:

As the months passed, leading Saudis would suggest publicly that their nation had been entirely open with the United States on the security front all along—even claim that they had alerted Washington in advance to possible calamity.

A year after 9/11, Prince Turki expounded at length on the relationship the G.I.D. had had with the C.I.A. From about 1996, he wrote, “at the instruction of the senior Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we had collected on bin Laden and al-Qaeda with the C.I.A. And in 1997 the Saudi minister of defense, Prince Sultan, established a joint intelligence committee with the United States to share information on terrorism in general and on bin Laden (and al-Qaeda) in particular.”

(two paragraphs snipped)

Though there was no official U.S. reaction to that claim, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit, later dismissed it in his book Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq as a “fabrication.”

It will be interesting to see the reactions of the various factions of the Truther brigades; I assume that the "Muslims didn't do 9-11" crowd will hate the article.