Bomb Attack In Saudi Arabia: Hearings Before The Committee On Armed Services, U.s. Senate

by Strom Thurmond (Editor)

A hearing on the circumstances & consequences of a terrorist bomb attack on the Khobar Towers (KT) in Dhahram, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996. The attack resulted in the deaths of 19 U.S. servicemen & injuries to 550 others, including 250 Americans. the extent to which it was recognized that U.S. military personnel housed in the KT were vulnerable to a terrorist attack, the degree to which any concerns were made known up the chain of command, the measures that were taken to meet the threats that were identified & why safeguards that might have thwarted such an attack or minimized casualties were not in place.

154 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1996

About the author

James Strom Thurmond was an American politician who served as the 103rd Governor of South Carolina and as a United States Senator. He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat) candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes. Thurmond later represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to April 1956 and November 1956 to January 2003, at first as a Democrat and after 1964 as a Republican, switching parties as the conservative base shifted.

He left office as the only senator to reach the age of 100 while still in office and as the oldest-serving and longest-serving senator in U.S. history (although he was later surpassed in the latter by Robert Byrd). Thurmond holds the record for the longest serving Dean of the United States Senate in U.S. history at 14 years. He conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop. He later moderated his position on race, but continued to defend his early segregationist campaigns on the basis of states' rights in the context of Southern society at the time, never fully renouncing his earlier viewpoints. After his death it was revealed that Thurmond and a black maid, Carrie Butler, had a daughter whom Thurmond never publicly acknowledged.