Airport security is a giant exercise in arse-covering — and it doesn’t work (obviously)

Christina Lamb mentioned Abdullah al-Asiri on these pages a few weeks ago, but she was rather coy on detail. Allow me to be less so. Al-Asiri was the al-Qa’eda operative who — following a sojourn in the bogey-country de jour of Yemen — had defected back to Saudi Arabia, on the condition that he be debriefed personally by the Saudi anti-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef.