Here’s an interesting piece by Arnaud de Borchgrave on the admiration many members of the Saudi royal family have for Osama bin Laden: Osama’s Saudi Moles.

The royal family is not a monolith. There are 7,000 princes (all on generous stipends from birth) plus their wives (many still have three or four) and sisters and daughters, for a total of 24,000 members of the House of Saud. Male princes get $500,000 a year for expenses. The Saud family budget is about $3 billion a year, though the kingdom is now in hock to foreign banks to the tune of $225 billion.

Many of these princes still think of bin Laden as a larger-than-life hero who defeated the mighty Soviet Union and gave the world’s only superpower its biggest blow since Pearl Harbor. Even Prince Naef, one of the Sudeiri Seven (sons of King Abdul Aziz, also known as Ibn Saud, the founder of the dynasty, and the same mother), has said publicly that bin Laden was not involved in 9/11. Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, did it, he said, regurgitating an old chestnut first peddled by a former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Hamid Gul, who is also a fundamentalist extremist.

Bin Laden remains an immensely popular figure in Saudi Arabia. Many Wahhabi clerics revere him as some sort of miracle man.