Nigerian Militants Blow Up Pipeline

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February 20,2006 | LAGOS, Nigeria -- Militants holding nine foreign hostages in southern Nigeria destroyed an oil pipeline Monday and blew up a boat in violence that has cut about 20 percent of crude production in Africa's oil giant.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said it attacked a Shell-operated oil-pipeline switching station known as a "manifold" and a military houseboat in the oil-rich southern region. "Both were destroyed with explosives," the group said in an e-mail...

The West African nation is reeling from weekend attacks in which militants blasted oil and gas pipelines and sabotaged a key oil loading terminal belonging to Royal Dutch Shell. That and an earlier attack has forced the company to halt the flow of about 455,000 barrels a day -- about one-fifth of daily output in Africa's top crude producer.

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THIS gets press -- the persistent and methodical genocide of Nigerian Tribes, sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell against those tribes that have refused to allow Shell to drill where they live -- that doesn't get much press at all.

(They hate Shell for its freedom, I guess -- its freedom to pay corrupt Nigerian officals to kill those who think Shell doesn't necessarily have a God-given right to own all that oil that's been under the land for the past hundred million years, and who think Shell doesn't have a right to destroy their land and their tribe in order to increase their profits. Terrorists, right?)