Word: binning
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When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld turned up at an ornate royal palace in Saudi Arabia last week, he shook hands with ailing King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al Saud and then exchanged views about the war on terrorism with Crown Prince Abdullah, who runs the kingdom's day-to-day affairs. Rumsfeld might have got a somewhat different perspective if he had stopped by al Masaa, a cafe in the heart of the capital, where patrons hail Osama bin Laden as an Arab hero...
...Afghanistan in 1979. The Saudis had supported Islamic political groups throughout the Middle East for decades, but the training of thousands of young Wahhabis was their first real taste of jihad. Among the recruits was a 21-year-old business administration graduate of King Abdul Aziz University named Osama bin Laden, a scion of a Jidda construction clan that made a fortune building the kingdom's infrastructure...
...Bin Laden is not the first to challenge the al Sauds' right to rule. Fanatical Ikhwan, once allies of the al Sauds, rebelled in 1929, objecting to foreign influences such as the introduction of radio broadcasts, forcing Ibn Saud to crush them with loyalist tribesmen. In 1979 King Khalid harshly put down a fanatical group that seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in a violent two-week clash that left 127 Saudi troops and 117 insurgents dead. The message of all these groups has been the same: pure Islam has been corrupted by the al Saud rule...
...nothing has threatened to shake the foundations of the al Saud rule like the challenge posed by the latest generation of Islamic militants. While bin Laden never concentrated on building a political organization, he is loosely connected to like-minded comrades inside the kingdom, from fellow veterans of the Afghan war to a network of fiery young mid-rank clerics who share his views on fighting America and destroying Israel. It was the upshot of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait that ignited their anger. King Fahd's agreement to act as host to U.S. troops, bin Laden charged, revealed...
...enforce Saddam's continued isolation, some 6,000 U.S. troops remain in the kingdom, and the eviction of the "Crusader" forces is one of bin Laden's oft-repeated aims. Bomb attacks at U.S. facilities in Riyadh in 1995 and at Khobar Towers in 1996 left 24 Americans dead; bin Laden's role in the blasts, if any, is sketchy. The Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. left Saudi officials almost as stunned as they were by the roll of Saddam's tanks 11 years earlier. "What shocks me most," says a Saudi diplomat, "is why they hit America...