BP
Cover-up
Part 2: Bribery, George Bush and WikiLeaks
Friday, April 20, 2012
by Greg Palast - Exclusive
for EcoWatch.org
Friday, 20. April, 2012
Evidence now implicates top BP executives as well as its
partners Chevron and Exxon and the Bush Administration in the deadly cover-up
---- which included falsifying a report to the Securities Exchange Commission.
Yesterday, Ecowatch.org revealed that, in September 2008, nearly
two years before the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, another
BP rig had blown out in the Caspian Sea----which BP concealed from U.S.
regulators and Congress.
Had BP, Chevron, Exxon or the Bush State Department revealed
the facts of the earlier blow-out, it is likely that the Deepwater Horizon
disaster would have been prevented.
Days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, a message came in
to our offices in New York from an industry insider floating on a ship in the
Caspian Sea. He stated there had been a blow-out, just like the one in the
Gulf, and BP had covered it up.
To confirm this shocking accusation, I flew with my team to
the Islamic republic of Azerbaijan. Outside the capital, Baku, near the
giant BP terminal, we found workers, though too frightened to give their names,
who did confirm that they were evacuated from the BP offshore platform as it filled
with explosive methane gas.
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Before we could get them on camera, my crew and I were
arrested and the witnesses disappeared.
Expelled from Azerbaijan, we still obtained the ultimate
corroboration: a secret cable from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department in
Washington laying out the whole story of the 2008 Caspian blow-out.
The source of the cable, classified "SECRET," was
a disaffected US soldier, Private Bradley Manning who, through WikiLeaks
provided hot smoking guns to The Guardian. The information
found in the U.S. embassy cables is a block-buster.
The cables confirmed what BP will not admit to this day:
there was a serious blow-out and its cause was the same as in the Gulf disaster
two years later: the cement ("mud") used to cap the well had failed.
Bill Schrader, President of BP-Azerbaijan, revealed the truth to our embassy about the Caspian
disaster:
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