Actually, I mis-typed. Bin Laden was not royal (though so many people in Saudi Arabia are, so it wouldn't have been far fetched). The family is moguls in the construction industry. They have a large multinational business called BinLadin Group that's active across the Middle East and Africa.

  1. Saudi Binladin Group Construction company
  2. The Saudi Binladin Group is a multinational construction conglomerate and is headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Wikipedia - tracked
  3. Founder: Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden
  4. Founded: 1950
  5. Headquarters: Jeddah, Makkah Region, Saudi Arabia
The family is religious too, I believe everybody in Saudi is, to some degree. But for Osama it got extreme, and he also mixed it up with politics.
He had access to very large funds and didn't need to work, so he started spending money on setting up radical moslem groups.

I don't believe there is ONE actual "Al Qaeda" group, that's just nice for propaganda, and simplified. It's a bunch of smaller group, some self supporting, some funded from Saudi -- people like Osama bin Laden (and he was not really unique, just the one who got on the radar).

So he spread the word that he had cash and wanted to see some jihadist struggle. I don't known precisely what people like this believe in, but I think it's; "Kick out the infidels (USA) from the holy land (Saudi Arabia)", "Death to lsгael".

Because he had some MBA-like degree, he could organise to a higher level, and manage the finances better for the groups that sponsored than what normally happened. So he became quite successful. While the USA had liked him pre '92 when he was anti-Soviet, they now realised that he was not such a freedom fighter after all. So he ended up on some international wanted list, managed by the US. But in practice, I don't think that means anything, as long as you don't attempt to go to Europe or North America.
He was travelling between the Sudan, the Emirates, Saudi and Afghanistan/Pakistan. After he was on the FBI most wanted list, the family cut him off, to preserve the good name of the business. So he had less money, but still some.

Apparently he was actually a really nice person, socially. People liked him. Soft-spoken and a good listener. Caring and charitable. Nobody had anything bad to say about his personality. He had several wives, one was interviewed who really loved him. A few others, he had more or less discarded, provided for the mother and kids financially, but nothing more. Some of those kids spoke up as well, and they just didn't know him very well, but they didn't dislike him.

However - he had crossed the line with his religion and ideology. He believed that the ends justified the means. Including killing large numbers of people.

I guess he believed that those civilians who got killed in 9-11 had made their choice, by choosing to work at the very symbol of American imperialist power and decadence, or at Pentagon

And this is assuming that he WAS behind the attacks! I think so, to 90%, but I wouldn't fall off the chair if it turned out it was some black ops inside job in the USA. It was darn convenient, allowing the USA to go ahead with the exact operations it had hampered on for the preceding decade, but had been unable to justify. After 9-11, they had carte blanche in the eyes of the US public.

Sure, what he did is condemnable and wrong. But look at the Iraq wars - the death toll is over half a million civilians. Likewise Afghanistan. The US president who authorised these wars and the military leaders have blood on their hands.

I would have admired and sympathised with the USA if it had handled the response to the attacks differently. Mourn the dead. Put the suspects on an international wanted list and start looking for them. Consider what brings about such hatred. Is it necessary to keep troops on somebody else's holy land? Ponder what the h-ll the US doing in the Middle East anyway? Nothing that happens there is a security threat to the US. No one asked for them to get involved. It's pure imperalist aggressiveness, nothing else and in 9/11 it got to pay a small fraction of a price of the suffering it imposed on others across the globe for the last 70 years.

Bowe Bergdahl could have notified his comrades so they didn't waste lives looking for him, but I sympathise with what he did (appears he got fed up and walked off...) and I wouldn't be surprised if he had a personality transformation while with the taliban. A British woman who was kidnapped by them for a while ended up becoming a moslem after she was released (Yvonne Ridley, interesting story).

Not saying that they are any angels, I personally don't sympathise with them and I certainly would run a mile to avoid them. But the story is NOT black and white.