That’s a grossly simplistic view. Nothing’s ever that simple.
This isn’t new information- but it is largely ignored information.
Not one of the pilots was a Saudi; and according to the braggart bin Laden, only the pilots knew the details, knew it was a one-way suicide mission; the muscle they brought along- the Saudis who were brought in towards the very end [the teams were compartmentalized] and trained in the physical arts for their one role - to kill the stewardeses and shock everyone on the flights into submission - thought it was a hijacking, not a suicide mission, though they all prepared to be martyred just in case. Bin Laden, the face of the umbrella group al Qaeda, laughed about that.
Meanwhile, the guy who was in the know and led the entire mission that day, Mohammed Atta, was Egyptian, just like the brains of al Qaeda, Zawahiri, was and is.
Atta, with connections to both Syria and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood since his days in Aleppo, where he dreamed of a city without western influence because he saw western architecture as the ruination of the city, stripping privacy away from family homes where walls and such would otherwise insure an protect muslim women’s modesty. Seriously, that was his college research paper’s gist.
And the hijackers formed their plot in Hamburg, where they drew their inspiration from a Syrian imam of a mosque that has been a source of other jihadists. Hamburg, where a Syrian who worked for a Syrian-run front company [run by a guy named Tatari with connections to Assad’s family] helped finance their 9/11 attack, a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood agent and the local Taiba mosque’s preacher named Darkanzanli, also involved in bomb attacks in Spain as well illegal smuggling linked with the Iraqi oil for food program. Recall Atta’s trip to Spain prior to the attacks. And then there was the Hamburg cell’s Zammar, another Syrian and the cell’s recruiter for the attacks. And there was also in the front company that provided cover, a guy named M M Said, who was the head of Syrian intelligence from 67 to 94... and who in the very year of the 9/11 attacks was a member of Syria’s National Security Council.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-wanted-mamoun-darkazanli/article/239796
Darkanzanli the Syrian did preach from a Sunni mosque that was later closed down, but to think it was a Saudi government operation just because the dumb thugs used to overcome stewardesses were Saudis, while ignoring everyone else involved is just plain birdbrained.
The brains of al Qaeda have always been Egyptian; AQ chief Zawahiri needed bin Laden’s business acumen because Zawahiri never had enough money to finance his objectives on his own and sure as heck wasn’t sponsored by Egypt. And most of the terrorists anywhere you look at tend to link back to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The EMB, though Salafist, isn’t affiliated with the run-of-the-mill Saudi Wahabbis as much as they are tight with Shiite Iran; and they were tight with Iran in Bosnia when kicked out of Egypt, too. Zawahiri’s even related by marriage to a leading mullah in Iran. As far as Saudis go, the Royal family is factionalized and fights among itself; the leadership’s always tried to keep the hardline Salafists appeased, giving them the religious police to run, feeding the alligator in the hopes it will eat them last. Well, the alligator stuck explosives up its arse and darn near killed their intel chief. And even they have to deal with Iran’s influence within their borders- Iran backed Saudi Hezbollah... same folks who set off bombs in the kingdom, including Khobar.
We too play the feeding the alligator game with the palestinians, terrorists like Abbas, hoping to appease.
Everyone’s suffered terrorist attacks in their country - except Iran. Funny, that.
Yet the Iranians as a people are probably the best folks you can ask for. Problem is, their leadership is super cunning, know much more than anyone on how to stop revolts, and they have a far greater potential to be a problem than their more primitively tribal neighbors.