Dispatches from the Danger Zone: You Think Gas Prices are Bad Now? (RWC)

Then imagine another terrorist attack, especially one on Saudi oil refineries.

Our friend former CIA Director Jim Woolsey had some interesting things to say about that possibility this week, according to a front page story in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

If terrorists took out the sulfur-cleaning towers in northeastern Saudi Arabia, crude oil prices could easily top $150 a barrel and stay there for more than a year, Woolsey said. 

Just such a scenario was mentioned in a recent book by former CIA officer Bob Baer.

A barrel of oil is now selling for around $73 with gas prices in the United States hovering around $3 a gallon.

Consider that Americans could be paying twice that amount.

Woolsey also made the point that Americans don't want to think about where some of the money goes when they buy gasoline and other oil products: to groups that threaten the U.S. or are hostile to the West in other ways.

He didn’t mean just terrorists. 

He meant established and repressive Middle Eastern regimes.  They trounce on women's rights, have miserable educational systems and high  unemployment caused by a government-fostered spoiled and entitled attitude that keeps citizens from finding jobs while imported foreign labor does their work for them. 

"If you want to see who's paying for all that - next time you pull in to fill up, turn the rearview mirror a little bit so you can look at yourself for a minute as you get out with your credit card," Woolsey said during a meeting with editors of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

One way to hit Islamic extremists in the pocketbook is for Americans to begin using renewable fuel, Woolsey said. 

That includes ethanol and bio-fuels as alternatives to gas and diesel.

In the U.S., ethanol is mostly made from corn and bio-diesel from vegetable oil. Both are mixed with gasoline or diesel.

Neither is widely produced or used now, but could be in coming years, in part because of skyrocketing gas costs.

Buying less foreign oil will make the United States more secure, Woolsey said, by providing less money to Middle Eastern groups, particularly radical Islamists.

The Danger Zone audio archive is available here.