Top managers appeared to be targeted in Saudi attack

[Judi Lynn]

May 3, 2004, 11:39PM

Top managers appeared to be targeted in Saudi attack
By BILL MURPHY
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Gunmen who carried out a terrorist attack in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, on Saturday appear to have targeted senior managers at ABB Lummus Global.

At a meeting with Yanbu's American community Monday, the U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia had a simple message: Go home. We cannot protect you, the Associated Press reported.

Four ABB Lummus employees who were working on a project managed out of its Houston office, including Phillip Coplen, 53, of Houston, and an ABB subcontractor, were killed by gunmen in the company's office building in Yanbu, an industrial city on the Red Sea.

ABB's corporate office in Zurich on Monday identified the remaining two company employees killed in the attack: Stephen LaGuardia, 62, an American engineer, and Michael Hardy, 44, of Britain.
(snip/...)

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/2547494
(It may be necessary to complete free registration to read this)

[Iceburg]

1. with a name like "ABB Lummus Global" they are destined to be targets

[gottaB]

2. The biggest obstacle to defeating terrorism

is GWB and all the nastiness he represents.

I did not get the sense from this report or any that I read that the boys from the school or the passersby were inspired or pleased by the mutilation of the corpse. It was brutal and disgusting. Everybody thinks that.

The US should be winning the war of images--but, no. Not in a Scalia-Cheney puppet theatre. The cult of the righteous violence and duplicity created the fiasco that still dominates headlines today. It goes higher than Sanchez, believe you me. It goes to the Gestapo, to borrow Powell's sobriquet. It goes to the person who appointed Negroponte to cover up the dirty work of the paramilitary death squads. It's known as seditious conspiracy in our own code. In international law it is the gravest of crimes.

Cluephone to Neocons: Nobody expects terrorists to act humanely, much less be characterized by magnaminity. Now, thanks to you, nobody expects that of the US either.

</rant>