BP oil pollution and WikiLeaks

This video fom the USA is called BP Beyond Pollution.

Bradley Manning and the oil rig cover-up

Thursday 04 April 2013

Three years ago this month, on April 20 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.

Soon thereafter a message reached my office, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, central Asia.

The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified – and with good reason.

Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this – 17 months before BP’s Deepwater Horizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.

Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause – the failure of the cement “plug.”

To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.

Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.

However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, it is nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.

The reason? Nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you’re dead.

So when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.

Our investigators discovered that the company had hidden the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US securities exchange commission. BP USA vice-president David Rainey withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths.

Channel 4 agreed to send me to Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared.” (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)

And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry. I knew I’d get out quick because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.

The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned because I had brought with me from London Austin Powers cameras-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the US, Private Bradley Manning.

Only after investigating Baku did I discover, while trawling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning.

The information was stunning. The US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.

Apparently BP refused to tell its own partners, Chevron and Exxon, why the lucrative Caspian oil flow had stopped.

Chevron bitched to the office of the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

The US ambassador in Baku got Chevron the answer – a blow-out of the nitrogen-laced cement cap on a giant Caspian Sea platform.

The information was marked “SECRET.” Apparently loose lips about sinking ships would help neither Chevron nor the Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, the beneficiary of millions of dollars in payments of oil company baksheesh.

So what about Manning? He has been charged with “aiding the enemy” – a crime punishable by death.

But Manning’s sole and only purpose was to get out the truth. It wasn’t Manning who wrote the cover-up memos, he merely wanted to get them to the victims – us.

And since when did the public become “the enemy”?

Had Manning’s memos come out just a few months earlier, the truth about BP’s deadly drilling methods would have been revealed, and there’s little doubt BP would have had to change its ways. Those 11 men could well have been alive today.

Did Manning know about this particular hush-hush cable about BP’s blow-out when he decided he had to become Paul Revere and warn the planet?

That’s unlikely, in the thousands of cables he had. But he’d seen enough evidence of murder and mendacity in other cables, so, as Manning, under oath, told a court, he tried to give it all to the New York Times to have knowledgeable reporters review the cables confidentially for life-saving information.

The New York Times immediately seized on this extraordinary opportunity … to ignore Manning. The Times only ran it when the Guardian was going to scoop – and embarrass – the New York hacks.

Though there are limits. While reporter David Leigh put the story of BP’s prior blow-out on page one of the Guardian, neither the New York Times or any other major US news outlet ran the story of the blow-out and oil industry cover-up.

No surprise there, though – the most “prestigious” US news programme, PBS Newshour, was sponsored by … Chevron Corporation.

I have more than a little distaste for toffs like the New York Times‘s former executive editor, columnist Bill Keller, who used Manning documents to cash in on a book deal and land star turns on television while simultaneously smearing his source Manning as “troubled,” “emotionally fractured,” “vague,” “inchoate” and – cover the children’s ears – “gay.”

Furthermore, while preening about their revelations from the Manning documents, the New York Times had no problem with imprisoning its source.

When it was mentioned that Manning was no different from Daniel Ellsberg, the CIA operative who released the Pentagon Papers, Keller reassured us that the Times had also told Ellsberg he was “on his own” and did not object to its source being charged as a spy.

And the Times‘s much-lauded exposure of the My Lai massacre? The late great investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour, who gave the story to Seymour Hersh, told me that he and Hersh had to effectively blackmail the Times into printing it.

Keller writes that Manning, by going to “anti-American” WikiLeaks, threatened the release of “information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed.”

Really?

This is the same Bill Keller who admits that he knew his paper’s reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were completely false, but that he – as editor – covered up his paper’s knowledge their WMD stories were simply bogus.

Those stories validated the Bush propaganda and helped tip the political balance to invade Iraq. Four thousand US soldiers died.

I guess the idea is that releasing information that kills troops is criminal, but that disinformation that kills troops is quite acceptable.

Greg Palast (gregpalast.com) investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon deaths for Channel 4. Those dispatches are contained in his highly acclaimed book Vultures’ Picnic, named book of the year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.