This excerpt from Steve Coll's book The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century makes for quite fascinating reading. And I'm pretty sure I heard Coll being interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR yesterday:
The Bin Laden family saga also provides a particularly consequential thread of the troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened, and, ultimately--to both sides--unconvincing alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia during the oil age. Until Osama announced himself as an international terrorist, his family was much more heavily invested in the United States than has generally been understood--his brothers and sisters owned American shopping centers, apartment complexes, condominiums, luxury estates, privatized prisons in Massachusetts, corporate stocks, an airport, and much else. They attended American universities, maintained friendships and business partnerships with Americans, and sought American passports for their children.
According to the excerpt, they also assisted, along with King Fahd, in funding St. Ronnie's favorite thugs, the Contras, in Central America. Nice, eh?
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