Saudi Terror Plot Averted State Dept

Saudi Terror Plot Averted
State Dept.: Terrorism up 30%

Condi Rice wanted to delay the news, but it has broken on two fronts.

Warren Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy report that the annual State Department on terrorism will report a nearly 30% rise over the previous year, most of it accounted for by attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In other words Cheney has it exactly backwards. The US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is feeding terrorism, not preventing or lessening it. “They” won’t follow us home if we leave. But they might if we don’t.

As if to put an exclamation point on the State Department report, the Saudis were constrained to arrest some 172 persons involved in al-Qaeda terror cells in the Kingdom, who were planning to hijack planes and fly them into the Saudi oil fields. If they targeted the oil facilities cleverly, the terrorists could have taken 10% of the world petroleum supply off the market, at least for a while.

Saudi Arabia pumps roughly 8.56 million barrels a day of the some 86 million barrels a day of oil that are pumped in the whole world. You take any substantial amount of that off the market even for a month, and it would have a major negative impact on world energy supplies and prices.