On September 11, 2001, at 4:46 p.m. in Saudi Arabia, Mansour was visiting his parents in his hometown of Buraidah. He was sitting in the living room watching Al-Jazeera, the Arab CNN, beaming out of Qatar since 1996. State-funded but much freer than the stale, state-controlled news on offer in Arab countries, the channel was quickly making a name for itself—it had already broadcast two interviews with Osama bin Laden.
