Why isn't this page one news here in the US? 97 hostages held for 11 days!

Not one word of this has appeared on the news shows I watch! WHY?!?!

Why haven’t we taken action? Where is Delta force? The SEALs? The Marine Corps Special Expeditionary Forces?

WHY THE HECK HASN’T “TWO-GUN GEORGE” DONE SOMETHING?!?! :confused: :mad: :confused: :mad: :mad: :confused:

Heard about this for the first time this morning on Public Radio. I don’t know why it isn’t more prominent.

For the same reason you never saw or heard anything about the thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. There are no pictures.

His two guns are pointed elsewhere. It’s not like the captors have WMD, after all, although they do have oil…

The answer to your first question is contained in the news story you have cited. Specifically that the negotiators imposed a **news blackout ** to allow them some time to work.

As for your other questions, how do you propose that these forces reach the oil platforms undetected? Per the news story, they are 25 miles out in open water - no cover, no way to approach without being seen, even at night an oil platform is light up like a christmas tree, so there’s not much chance of a night approach either. Perhaps you have a teleporter system handy that they could use?

Sarcasm aside, this isn’t exactly an easy situation to resolve. I would speculate that some form of hostage rescue plan is being devised, but US special forces aren’t just some magic wand that Pres. Bush can wave around to fix everything whenever he wants to. I suppose they could use a submarine to approach the platforms, but again with four platforms involved, they would need to execute a simultaneous strike on all four platforms. That’s a lot of resources to get together is such a short period of time.

It appears the press have just learned about this incident within the past 24 hours. This story was featured prominently on Pacifica Radio this morning.

This is not the first time expatriate workers have been held hostage on rigs offshore Nigeria. I’ll see if I can locate a cite.

The most likely reason no one has heard about this until now is because it has taken place in a more or less closed environment, and because the companies involved have preferred to try to negotiate their way out rather than to publicize it and call for military help (previous negotiations of this nature have been successful).

There’s no question that Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places for oil-industry expats to work (Colombia and Yemen are others). In the past month, ChevronTexaco, I believe, has pulled most of its personnel out of the country due to the lack of security, and Shell employees have been threatened frequently in recent months. Last year I was dealing with a personnel recruiter who was obviously still hurting from injuries he’d recieved when he was nearly beaten to death by his own employees while working as a geologist in Nigeria.