from Freezerbox

Heart Attack
BY ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK

The February 27th Wild West-style dawn shootout at an Al Qaeda redoubt in East Riyadh was an appropriately dramatic coda to what was arguably the most significant terrorist act since 9/11. While the amount of blood spilled at Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refinery was small — two guards killed, eight workers wounded — and the amount of oil spilled even less, the strike was at least as significant as the 2003 and 2004 public transit attacks in Madrid and London.

This is because the foiled attack poked large holes into two theories often floated out by the Saudis and optimistic oil analysts to assuage concerns over infrastructure security in the world’s “Central Bank of Oil.”

The first theory is that Al Qaeda would never attempt to destroy the pillars of the Saudi oil industry because it plans to take the country over one day and use petro-profits to fund global Jihad. The second is that Saudi oil facilities are completely secure — better guarded than the Kingdom’s Royal Palaces, we are told — and hence any attempt on them would be futile. This latter theory, already weak for ignoring both airborne and WMD threats, took a blow when last week’s attackers sailed through Abqaiq’s first checkpoint and were able to detonate both payloads, good sized car-bombs, at the facility’s gate.

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