Bombshell:Saudis boobytrapped oil with dirty bombs to prevent invasion?

"According to a new book exclusively obtained by the Huffington Post, Saudi Arabia has crafted a plan to protect itself from a possible invasion or internal attack. It includes the use of a series of explosives, including radioactive “dirty bombs,” that would cripple Saudi Arabian oil production and distribution systems for decades.

Bestselling author Gerald Posner lays out this “doomsday scenario” in his forthcoming “Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-US Connection” (Random House).

According to the book, which will be released to the public on May 17, based on National Security Agency electronic intercepts, the Saudi Arabian government has in place a nationwide, self-destruction explosive system composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs strategically placed at the Kingdom’s key oil ports, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore platforms, and backup facilities. If activated, the bombs would destroy the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom’s oil would be unusable to anyone. The NSA file is dubbed internally Petro SE, for petroleum scorched earth."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/archive/2005/05/embargoed-book-claims-sau_1.html

I can't believe nobody's posted this yet.

know about it. If it was done, that would put all their people into poverty.

But, the fact that this isn't the number one story on the internet has me curious.

Except that the Saudis don't blow themselves up.

By STEVE EVERLY - The Kansas City Star
Date: 06/23/01 22:15

.... In the late 1940s, national security officials sought the oil companies' help in a top-secret plan to thwart the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Those same government officials also helped block the Justice Department's antitrust case.

The secret "denial plan" called for the oil companies to lay waste to the Mideast's ability to produce oil if the Soviets invaded. The Kansas City Star first disclosed the plan in 1996 after it was mistakenly declassified, a mistake deemed the most serious breach of security in National Archives history.

But The Star has since learned that the denial plan was far more extensive and intricate, according to documents and interviews with participants. Not only was Big Oil a full partner in a secret national security relationship, going so far as storing plastique explosives under the beds of oil company workers in the Mideast, but it also used that relationship to help thwart the antitrust case.

The relationship became one of the country's most closely guarded Cold War secrets. Saudi Arabia and other Mideast countries were not told about the denial plan. Aramco and government officials believed that a breach in secrecy would prompt those countries to expel American oil companies.

"I was told this would never come out," said James Gustin, a staffer with the federal Operations Coordinating Board, who briefed President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/printer.pat,local/3accc5c8.623,.html

OUR friends don't trust Bushit either. They know they are all crazy. If Ghawar were attached by USA and these bombs went off it would really be the end of modern civilization for decades. Ghawar represents 25% of the world's oil. The '39 depression would look like a picnic in comparison.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of this. That is how desperate the Saudis are. If they can't keep their oil than no one will get it.

Can you blame them? Remember just before the Iraqi invasion b**h pleading with the Iraqis not to destroy their oil fields?

arianna's site is one day old, I'd digest what you find there with a grain of salt.

I hope she does well, I liked her as a candidate when she ran against Arnie.

That's all he does. Look at his credits.

...but I don't doubt that those with rightwing interests are paying him very well.

...to publish this kind of crap.

That would make him kind of an establishment guy in my book. I haven't heard of the book, or checked the documentation. Have you done so?

is that it?

I mean the doomsday device. It sounds like a reasonable tactic against outside aggressors but it wouldn't work and might even encourage the radicals within the country to set off the device.

If you think far back to Bush's first speech he asked the citizens of Iraq to not blow up there oil reserves because he was so worried about their economy. It was screaming out desperateness.

long long ago.

The Genesis of the Oil-Denial Policy

As the Cold War was moving to center stage in American foreign policy in 1948, a new worry emerged in the White House: that the Soviet Union could come to control oil supplies in the Middle East. It is no coincidence that much of the early preoccupation with the potential Soviet threat after the end of World War II centered on the remaining Soviet presence in Iran. But unknown to the public until the recent declassification of National Security Council documents (first uncovered by a reporter for the Kansas City Star, Steve Everly) was the extent of Truman administration concern about the possible Soviet takeover of the oil fields. Equally surprising was that the Truman administration built its strategy not so much on defending the oil fields in the face of a possible Soviet invasion, as on denying the Soviet Union use of the oil fields if it should invade.

The administration quickly developed a detailed plan that was signed by President Truman in 1949 as NSC 26/2 and later supplemented by a series of additional NSC directives. The plan, developed in coordination with the British government and American and British oil companies without the knowledge of governments in the region, called for moving explosives to the Middle East, where they would be stored for use. In case of a Soviet invasion, and as a last resort, the oil installations and refineries would be blown up and oil fields plugged to make it impossible for the Soviet Union to use the oil resources.

So great was the fear that the Soviets might exploit the region's oil that the administration considered deploying "radiological" weapons. Ultimately that option was rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency, as revealed in another recently declassified document, NSC 26/3, dated June 29, 1950. The explanation was this: "Denial of the wells by radiological means can be accomplished to prevent an enemy from utilizing the oil fields, but it could not prevent him from forcing 'expendable' Arabs to enter contaminated areas to open well heads and deplete the reservoirs. Therefore, aside from other effects on the Arab population, it is not considered that radiological means are practicable as a conservation measure." In other words, the logic of the rejection was that besides denying oil to the enemy, the policy also sought future "conservation" of oil, which "means a preservation of the resources for our own use after our reoccupation." Ultimately, more conventional plugging methods were recommended.

The plan was implemented and explosives were moved to the region.
http://www.brookings.edu/press/REVIEW/spring2002/telhami.htm