Short Life Expectancy for BP Whistleblowers?

Pat Shannan
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/whistleblowers_266.html

The investigation, if it can properly be so called, of the unsolved murder of the former high ranking Pentagon official and presidential advisor John P. Wheeler III, who was also an expert on chemical and biological weapons, may be taking a turn in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Wheeler, 67, a West Point grad, was beaten and thrown into a garbage dumpster. His body was discovered in a Wilmington, Del. landfill last New Year’s weekend. Both police detectives and news commentators described it as “an apparent hit,” but little else was ever learned, and no suspects have surfaced.

There was great speculation by many at the time that Wheeler had begun to blow the whistle on the mysterious bird and fish deaths in Arkansas and Texas, and was about to expose the facts tying this to the chemtrails seen in our skies over the past decade.

Now the speculation may be reverting to British Petroleum and the gulf spill because a number of other BP whistle blowing scientists, before and since the Wheeler murder, have also died mysteriously, been jailed on questionable charges or disappeared without a trace.

Matthew Simmons, 67, a former energy advisor to President George W. Bush and admired among survivalist groups for his dire warnings on the upcoming commodity and fuel shortages about to hit this nation, died in his hot tub in Maine last August. Simmons had been gaining popularity as a whistle blower for blaming BP for its covered-up responsibility in defacing and vandalizing the Gulf of Mexico while hiding the truth from the general public.

Only four days later, Ted Stevens, the 87-year-old defrocked senator from Alaska, said to have received communications regarding BP’s faulty blowout preventer, perished in a plane crash. British Petroleum had donated $1 million to the University of Alaska to catalog the papers from Stevens’s long political career.

Roger Grooters began a cross country bike ride in Oceanside, Calif. on Sept. 10 to draw attention to the Gulf Coast oil disaster. On Oct. 6, in front of the horrified eyes of his wife, who was trailing in a support vehicle, Grooters was struck by a truck and killed instantly in Panama City, Fla.

Only a month later, Dr. Geoffrey Gardner of Lakeland, Fla. disappeared. He was investigating the unexplained bird deaths near Sarasota that are suspected to have been caused by the BP oil disaster. No one has heard from or spoken with him since.

On Nov. 15, Chitra Chaunhan was found dead of cyanide poisoning in a Temple Terrace, Fla. hotel. It was officially ruled a suicide. She worked in the Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research and left behind a husband and five-year-old child.

The following week, James Patrick Black, director of operations for BP’s restoration organization for the oil spill, died near Destin, Fla. in a small plane crash.

Dr. Thomas B. Manton was one of the first to warn the public that far more oil than what BP had reported was gushing into the gulf every day and that the massive, toxic oil and chemical plumes would travel up the eastern seaboard, contaminating beaches and wildlife all the way.

“Once the winds change, it will come eastward and pollute the beaches of the west coast of Florida, and the ‘loop current’ could carry this oil spill right around Florida, through the Florida Keys and pollute the east coast of Florida as well,” Manton wrote on May 28, 2010.

Dr. Tom Termotto, national coordinator of the Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference, says Manton was murdered in prison. Manton had been sentenced to 15 years last August on a phony child pornography charge. Termotto and others say evidence was planted on his computer.

It is not known whether or not Anthony Nicholas Tremonte, 31, posed any threat to BP, but he too was arrested in January and charged with one count of possession of child pornography. Was this charge also faked? As an officer with the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources on the Gulf Coast, he may have known enough to qualify him for membership in this exclusive series of coincidences. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted.

Pat Shannan is a contributing editor of American Free Press. He is also the author of several videos and books including One in a Million: An IRS Travesty, I Rode With Tupper and Everything They Ever Told Me Was a Lie. All of Pat’s books are available from FIRST AMENDMENT BOOKS. Call 2025475585 for availability and pricing.

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BP buys Google, Yahoo search words to keep people away from real news

http://www.examiner.com/x-33986-Political-Spin-Examiner~y2010m6d6-BP-buys-Google-Yahoo-search-engine-words-to-keep-people-away-from-real-news-on-Gulf-oil-spill-disas
BP buys Google, Yahoo search words to keep people away from real news on Gulf oil spill disaster
June 6, 1010
Political Spin Examiner
Maryann Tobin

In their most tenacious effort to control the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

BP spokesman Toby Odone confirmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought internet search terms. So now when someone searches the words ‘oil spill’, on the internet, the top link will re-direct them to BP’s official company website.

This would not be the first time that BP has tried to control information to protect the company’s public image.

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, BP executives quickly underestimated the size of the disastrous oil spill. Some suggest they did it to avoid costly EPA per-gallon spill fines. The less oil spilled, the lower the fines.

A month into the spill, the public learned through independent science, that the spill was in fact a million gallon a day gusher. BP got caught in their own lie when the used a syphon pipe in one of the broken riser pipes and proudly proclaimed that they were capturing 5,000 barrels of oil a day. With the oil obviously still gushing, they had to up their spill rate to explain the reported discrepancy in their earlier estimates.

As the dead bodies of birds, turtles and dolphins began showing up on land, BP used a private security company as their ‘oil spill police’ to try to keep photographers and reporters away from the true death toll from their spill. Tides of black goo lapping a shore lined in corpses did not portray the company image Tony Hayward and his oil rich executives wanted.

BP can spend millions on advertising campaigns, and they can try to misdirect people on the internet. But no matter how hard BP tries or how much money they spend on public relations, they will never be able to hide the apocalypse unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. You just can’t buy or smile your way out of a multi-billion gallon oil spill disaster.

The world is watching the Gulf of Mexico from airplanes, boats and satellite images. Sending people to the BP company website when they click on the words ‘oil spill’ is not going to erase the horrors of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, nor will the trickery of British Petroleum.

Is BP trying to cap the Gulf oil well, or keep it flowing?

http://www.naturalnews.com/028898_British_Petroleum_Gulf_Coast.html

Is BP trying to cap the Gulf oil well, or keep it flowing? (opinion)
Monday, May 31, 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) Today, I spent my time interviewing people on the Gulf Coast from Mississippi to Louisiana. Several of those interviews were conducted on camera, and you'll be seeing those videos as early as tomorrow here on NaturalNews.

Interestingly, it turns out that a lot of the people living on the Gulf Coast have a history of working with oil companies -- and even on oil rigs. I spoke to several people who have a work history with BP, and two of them told me they are certain that British Petroleum is NOT trying to stop the oil coming out of the well. What they are trying to do, I was told, is SAVE the oil well so that they can capture the oil and sell it.

This claim stands in direct contradiction to what BP says. The company insists it's trying to stop the flow of oil from the well. But if you look at BP's actions, what they're really trying to do is siphon off the gushing oil where it can be pumped to a tanker ship and sold as crude. It is a simple matter, by the way, for oil companies to separate water from oil. They do it all the time in oil fields all across America. So if they can siphon off the oil from the Deepwater Horizon well -- even if it's mixed with water -- they can sell it for potentially billions of dollars.

It raises the question: Is the economic promise of captured oil causing BP to avoid using its best effort to cap the well?

Tapping, not capping

Notice that the new device they're lowering onto the well is designed not to close it off but to pump the oil to an awaiting ship. This is a plan to "capture" the oil, not to seal off the well.

The mainstream media hasn't picked up on this yet, by the way. To my knowledge, no one is yet reporting this story that BP may have never had any intention of actually capping the deep sea well.

We already know BP has been extremely dishonest with the media about this entire situation. By distorting the truth and lying to the public, BP has lost all credibility with almost everyone (Governors, Senators, journalists, etc.). So how can we trust that BP is actually trying to cap this well when there's so much money to be made from allowing it to keep spilling oil that can soon be captured?

In other words, it's in BP's financial interests to avoid capping the well and claim the well can't be capped when, in reality, what they may be trying to do is buy more time until they can lower a "capture containment device" onto the well head that can direct all the outflowing crude oil to BP's awaiting tanker ships.

In talking to the people face to face here on Gulf Coast, I learned that Gulf Coast people don't trust BP, and they don't trust the company's intentions. Today was the first I had heard of the BP agenda to "keep the well flowing" yet suddenly this theory makes sense. BP, after all, went through all the trouble and expense to drill the well. Why wouldn't they want to cash in on the crude oil coming out of it?

To collapse the well and plug it for good would destroy BP's chance to siphon off oil and sell it for profit (until at least August, when the pressure relief wells are expected to be completed). And that is perhaps the single most important reason why oil is still flowing out of that well right now.

As one person I interviewed today put it, "Why should a British petroleum company care about what happens to America's shores?" After all, the financial payoffs to the businesses hurt by the spill may pale in comparison to the billions of dollars in profit to be had from tapping -- not capping -- the well and turning crude oil into raw cash.

There will be more to this story. Let's see if the mainstream media picks up on this angle.

By the way, I don't yet have conclusive proof that BP's intentions are to avoid capping this well. It's just a working theory based on people I've talked to here on the Gulf Coast who appear to know what they're talking about. BP would obviously deny this, but then again BP has denied many things that we know to be true (like the fact that the beach cleanup crews specifically cleaned the beach on Grand Isle before Obama showed up, then left promptly as soon as he left).

Nationalize BP and Other Criminal Corporations

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/20-10

Thursday, May 20, 2010 by Ted Rall
Nationalize BP and Other Criminal Corporations
by Ted Rall

The Supreme Court says that corporations have the same rights as individuals. When they misbehave, shouldn't they face consequences as serious as those imposed upon an individual?

It goes without saying that a person who commits a crime ought to face punishment proportional to the offense. Large and midsize corporations, which employ thousands of employees, have far vaster reach and power than even the wealthiest ordinary citizens. So their crimes can be breathtaking in scope. The 1984 industrial catastrophe at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India killed 15,000 people. An additional 200,000 have since suffered serious injuries. Compared to the boards of directors of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical, which bought the company in 2001, Ted Bundy was small potatoes.

Unlike small-time serial killers, however, corporations get away with murder. For at least a year, management of the Toyota auto company knew that brakes in millions of its cars might fail. A 2009 ABC News investigation found that at least 16 people had died. "Safety analysts found an estimated 2000 cases in which owners of Toyota cars including Camry, Prius and Lexus, reported that their cars surged without warning up to speeds of 100 miles per hour," reported the network. Yet Toyota did nothing. Instead they blamed their customers, saying they were resting their floormats on the gas pedals.

On May 18th, Toyota finally faced the wrath of the federal government. Its "punishment": a paltry $16.5 million fine, not one cent of which went to the victims or their families. The fine, which amounted to a ridiculous 5.5 percent of its 2009 profit, went into the U.S. Treasury's general fund--in other words, to kill Afghans and Iraqis.

Available to Congress and the President is a far more appropriate punishment: nationalization without compensation. Toyota's American operations ought to be seized and operated by the federal government. The top officials of the parent company in Japan, whose willful negligence murdered at least 16 American citizens, ought to be extradited and face trial in U.S. federal court.

Extreme? Expropriating private property is commonplace--when the target is Joe and Jane Sixpack. Just ask hundreds of homeowners of New London, Connecticut. When the city destroyed an entire neighborhood to build a luxury office development, the U.S. Supreme Court backed them up, radically expanding the concept of eminent domain. Unlike a lot of evil corporations, those homeowners didn't do anything wrong.
The U.S. government has not only the right but the duty to take over criminal corporations.

A 5.5 percent fine is a slap on the wrist. Nationalizing a company, on the other hand, protects the public interest. Hitting corporations in the balance sheet is a genuine deterrent to the managers of other companies contemplating lawless behavior. It brings in significant cash assets that can be used to compensate the victims of the company's criminal activities.

Nationalization can also serve the interest of public safety. The mine explosion that left at least 25 coal miners dead in West Virginia earlier this year left members of the public feeling helpless and frustrated at the slow and inept rescue attempt by Massey Energy, the site's owner and operator. Setting aside the obvious argument that natural resources ought to be exploited for the benefit of the American people rather than private businesspeople, the rescue operation would have benefited from the involvement of top experts at such government agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers.

In 2009 the Upper Big Branch mine received 450 safety violations. Massey Energy paid the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration less than $1 million total. That's less than one percent of its annual profits. That's roughly $2,000 per violation.

If you get caught speeding in Virginia, you'll pay more than what Massey Energy pays for deliberately risking the lives of its employees.

British Petroleum is spending $6 million a day on its response to the explosion at its Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. But that's a drop in the bucket next to the cost that will be borne by the people of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. The disaster is spilling the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez wreck into the Gulf every four days--and it's been three weeks. Thousands of fishermen will be ruined. The tourism industry, already in trouble due to the economic collapse, will be devastated. The full extent of the ecological damage--dead animals and aquatic plants, huge dead zones devoid of oxygen--won't be understood for years.

BP failed to ensure that a "blowout preventer" at the Deepwater Horizon would work in the event of an emergency. But their real crime was drilling for oil 5,000 feet down in the first place.

Here again, it's easy to see how nationalization might help. Rather than wait for the clueless execs at BP to come up with a solution, a BP seized by the federal government (its American operations, anyway) would come under the jurisdiction of an organization that could assign experts from NOAA and the U.S. Navy, among other agencies, to stop the leak. After the leak is plugged, the publicly-owned former BP's profits would help defray the costs of the cleanup and extend benefits to fisherman and other victims.

Imagine the possibilities. What if Too Big to Fail had been turned into Too Big to Resist?

As a nationalized asset Citibank, which received $306 billion in bailouts, would be worth $152 trillion to taxpayers. Goldman Sachs got $15 billion; they're worth $70 trillion. Sell them off and no one would ever pay college tuition again. Or to see a doctor. Or we could give everyone a 50 percent tax cut. We're a rich country--the problem is that out-of-control corporations are hogging the wealth.

Businessmen charter corporations for the express purpose of avoiding individual legal liability. Isn't it high time we started holding criminal businessmen accountable?

© 2010 Ted Rall

Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

Slick Operator: The BP I've known too well

by Greg Palast for Truthout.org
May 5, 2010

I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum. That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf over a week ago, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans ("OSRP") which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.
To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called "boom." Quickly surround a spill or leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of it at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department; even when all is operating A-OK. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan Natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set boom in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the Natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, LA, said the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping-out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania which has infected the American body politic. While the "tea baggers" are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's de-regulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby; Toyota accelerators speed us to our death; banks blow our savings on gambling sprees; and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it's, "where was hell was the Government!" Why didn't the government do something to stop it?

The answer is, because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rulebooks. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rulebook. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence.

When the choice is between Dan Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Dan's my man.
*
This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews who therefore poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So it blew.

Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," says Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone's lying here: the man on the platform - or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana?

Greg Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez disaster for the Chucagh Native villages of Alaska's Prince William Sound. An expert on corporate regulation, Palast, now a journalist, authored the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Support Palast's work by making a tax-deductible donation.

British Petroleum, 2009

“It is unlikely that an accidental oil spill release would occur from the proposed activities... Due to the distance to shore and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected.”


British Petroleum, 2009, when they began the deepwater drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico