Before he was arrested in Pakistan, one of the masterminds of the 9/11 attack on the WTC, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was interviewed by the Arab language network al-Jazeera. According to the interview, bin al-Shieb made two attempts from Germany and two attempts from Yemen to get a visa to the United States and after these were unsuccessful, al-Qaeda decided to recruit terrorists from Saudi Arabia, a country from which it was easy to get a visa to the U.S. So the reason so many of the terrorist were from Saudi Arabia was just that our State Department provided an open door from that country.
Another interesting tidbit is how the terrorist Atta in the U.S. communicated to bin al-Shieb the date for the hijackings:
Atta called him with a "puzzle" to solve. "Two sticks and between them a dash, a cake from which a stick is dangling. Bin al-Shieb explains, "The puzzle meant the date, in other words the time of the operation; the two sticks represent the number 11 then the dash and then the cake from which a stick dangles represents the number 9; thus the picture becomes complete: 11-9."The United States is passing all sorts of laws that invade our privacy in order to be able to intercept messages and thus prevent future terrorist attacks. I dare to say that not in my lifetime will a computer program be able to flag such a message as having anything to do with a terrorist attack, much less be able to decipher it. I propose that before we give the U.S. government any more powers that invade our privacy, it first be made to prove that it can intelligently use the information it already has the power to collect.