"Fahrenheit 9/11" to Open June 25th in 1,000 Theaters

Did bin Laden family members have any important information to impart to the FBI?

The term "bin Laden family member" is rather misleading, as it is often mistakenly assumed to indicate a person with close ties to Osama bin Laden. By most accounts, Osama bin Laden was one of more than fifty children fathered by the same man; the bin Laden family is huge, with hundreds (if not thousands) of members spread all over the globe. Many, many of these family members are only tangentially related to Osama bin Laden and never had much (if any) contact with Osama himself. Moreover, his family disowned him after he fled Saudi Arabia in 1991 and was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 for smuggling weapons from Yemen. According to another news account about Saudis leaving the U.S. in the wake of the September 11 attacks:

Most of Mr. bin Laden's relatives were attending high school and college. They are among the 4,000 Saudi students in the United States. King Fahd, the ailing Saudi ruler, sent an urgent message to his embassy here saying there were "bin Laden children all over America" and ordered, "Take measures to protect the innocents," the ambassador said.3

The fact that "most of Mr. bin Laden's relatives were attending high school and college" in 2001 means that most of them were somewhere between 4 and 12 years old when Osama bin Laden fled Saudi Arabia. Students who were mere children when Osama bin Laden left Saudi Arabia, and who had spent at least some of their intervening years living in the U.S., were not likely sources for information regarding his current whereabouts and operations:

"We did everything that needed to be done," said John Iannarelli, a bureau spokesman. "There's nothing to indicate that any of these people had any information that could have assisted us."9