By Eric Margolis

Calgary

Could Alberta's sprawling oil and gas industry become a target of foreign extremists?

This week, a Washington outfit linked to Israel that provides the U.S. media with edited translations of material from Mideast sources reported that a Saudi extremist group had posted an e-mail threatening Canada, Venezuela and Mexico.

A group styling itself "al-Qaida in Arabia" warned that it planned to attack these energy-producing nations because they supplied the United States.

Canada is America's leading source of oil, followed by Venezuela. The bulk of Mideast oil goes to Europe and Asia.

Should Canadians be worried? The answer is: Not worried, but vigilant.

Al-Qaida in Arabia is a group of militants fighting to overthrow Saudi Arabia's royalist regime. Contrary to mistaken Canadian media reports, it has no organizational or operational links to Osama bin Laden's original al-Qaida, which never numbered more than some 300 members.

The Saudi group, which embraces bin Laden's vision of driving U.S. influence from the Muslim world, simply adopted the al-Qaida name, as have like-minded anti-western jihadist groups in Iraq, North Africa and Somalia.

Saudi security forces have by now almost destroyed al-Qaida in Arabia and other anti-Saudi groups. An attempt last year by al-Qaida in Arabia to attack one of the kingdom's largest oil facilities fizzled due to poor execution and amateurishness. So al-Qaida in Arabia is unlikely to be a major threat right now to Canada; however, Saudi Arabia remains a hotbed of anti-Western militancy and has many wealthy supporters of Islamic jihadist groups.

Any threat to Canada's oil and gas industry is limited by the difficulty a small group would have in seriously interrupting pumping or distribution in Edmonton or Montreal.

During the eight year Iran-Iraq War, Iraq's warplanes bombed Iran's oil export terminals for years, but managed to only briefly interrupt oil exports.

Interestingly, in the 1980s, a Ukrainian immigrant who had lived north of Edmonton for two decades turned himself in to police. He claimed to have been sent to Canada in the 1950s as a deep sleeper agent by the Soviet KGB.

His mission was straight out of a Cold War novel. In the event of war between the U.S.S.R. and the West, he would receive a call from his KGB controller, then take a trunk containing explosives he had hidden in his cellar, and blow up a major oil pumping station near Edmonton.

WAITING FOR A CALL?

One wonders how many other elderly Soviet would-be saboteurs are still waiting out there for their phones to ring.

Osama bin Laden's strategy is to attack America's economy, which he calls its "Achilles heel."

Anti-American groups in the Mideast have periodically attacked oil facilities and tankers. So attacks against Canada's poorly protected oil industry must be seen as a moderate possibility.

Particularly so now that Ottawa has made itself a prime target by recklessly charging into Afghanistan, taking sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and joining what most of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims wrongly or rightly consider U.S. President George W. Bush's crusade against the Islamic world.

It seems foolish to make air travellers remove their shoes when the nation's vital energy industry is so plainly vulnerable. Even the dimmest extremists must realize they can kill two birds at once by attacking Canada's energy exports to the U.S.

Anti-Western groups could easily recruit a few technicians from Mid-east oil fields who are skilled in the use of explosives and know how to disable large petroleum facilities. But assembling enough explosives to do major, long-lasting damage would be very difficult -- but not impossible.

A few powerful explosions would not cripple Canada's energy industry, but they would send oil and financial markets into a panic and the U.S. government into a rage.

Washington's furious reaction to such an event would likely be far worse than the attack, with the U.S. demanding a security clampdown in Canada and perhaps a greater role in its domestic and border security.

So it behooves Canada to get serious quickly about energy security.

Source: edmontonsun.com, http://www.edmontonsun.com/Comment/2007/02/18/3642293-sun.html