magazine has an article on the web:
THE HOUSE OF BIN LADEN
by JANE MAYER
A family's, and a nation's, divided loyalties.
Issue of 2001-11-12
Posted 2001-11-05
On September 11th, Wafah Binladin, a twenty-six-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School, was finishing the summer holidays with her family in Geneva. Wafah's father, Yeslam, is the Geneva-based head of the Binladin family's European holding company, the Saudi Investment Company. When she learned of the terror attacks on America, Wafah, who lived in a rented loft in SoHo, became frantic. She knew several people who lived and worked in the area of the World Trade Center, and she repeatedly tried to reach friends in New York. "I was in shock," she recalled, when I reached her in Switzerland recently. "All I thought about was the people in those buildings. I couldn't get hold of my friends. . . . I live only ten blocks away. Every night, I'd walk home, down West Broadway, looking up at the Twin Towers. I have pictures of myself there with my friends. We went to Windows on the World. I kept thinking, How can anyone do such a thing?" Later, she says, she heard the news that the prime suspect was her uncle Osama bin Laden. (Some members of the family prefer "Binladin.") "I thought then, Oh, no! I'll never be able to go back to the States again."
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, meanwhile, another uncle, Abdullah bin Laden, a handsome, slightly built graduate of Harvard Law School, learned about the attack while ordering coffee at Starbucks. Abdullah, who is thirty-five and a half brother of Osama bin Laden, rushed back to his apartment to watch the news, arriving just in time to see the second plane crash, into the south tower of the World Trade Center.
By mid-October, Abdullah, who was ordinarily clean-shaven, started to let his beard grow. People who knew him well realized that he was preparing to shed his Western ways. (He lived in an apartment overlooking the Charles River, spent leisure time piloting private planes at nearby Hanscom Airfield, and dreamed of working at a Manhattan law firm.) Instead, he said not long ago, over lunch at an Afghani restaurant in Boston, he was returning home to Saudi Arabia. His mission was to persuade other members of his family—fifty siblings among them—that they had to publicly put more distance between themselves and Osama or risk losing their reputation as honorable businessmen. The bin Laden family owns and runs a five-billion-dollar-a-year global corporation that includes the largest construction firm in the Islamic world, with offices in London and Geneva.
more at link:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?011112fa_FACT3
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