Posted on 06/18/2002 11:42:59 PM PDT by kattracks
CAIRO, Egypt — Saudi Arabia announced yesterday it has arrested 13 suspected al-Qaida members accused of plotting attacks against “vital sites” in the kingdom, which an Arab security source said included an unsuccessful attempt to fire a ground-to-air missile at a U.S. warplane taking off from a Saudi air base.
The arrests, announced by the official Saudi Press Agency, were carried out over the last several months. They marked the first official acknowledgment by Saudi rulers that the al-Qaida organization founded by a renegade Saudi, Osama bin Laden, remains active in their country.
Coupled with the recent arrest in Morocco of three Saudi nationals planning to attack American warships in the Strait of Gibraltar, the detentions also highlighted the prominent role that citizens of the conservative Islamic kingdom play in al-Qaida, something the Saudi leadership has battled to play down since the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were natives of Saudi Arabia.
Much of the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, has untold tons of oil-soaked sand, unsuitable for concrete use.
In the mid-Seventies, we had the opportunity to work on a reclamation project to use the oil-sand as a building material.
We were successful in creating a quasi-urethane-based building block with excellent tensile and compression properties. They could build houses with it!
Unfortunately, if you lit a cigarette in such a house, it would explode! We knew it going in - we did it for the money, and the wogs had lots of money..............FRegards
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