Ow Bradley Manning Could Have Prevented the Deepwater Horizon Explosion

7/28/2019 Ow Bradley Manning Could Have Prevented the Deepwater Horizon Explosion

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OW BRADLEY MANNING COULD HAVEPREVENTED THE DEEPWATER HORIZONEXPLOSION

GREG PALAST'S COLUMNByGreg Palast

4 points onreddit

Greg Palast at an oil drilling platform on the Caspian See, Azerbaijan.

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose

reports appear on BBCNewsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out.

Catch his reports and films atwww.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your

documents marked, "confidential".

Bradley Manningtried to save theeleven men who died burned alive on the Deepwater Horizon

oil rig in 2010. But Barack Obama and the New York Timesmade sure that wouldnt happen.

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

Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office's chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, 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 hed be identified and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe

method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BPs 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.
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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 BPs penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in usingit in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.

The fire on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Photo via Creative Commons.

The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill

the drilling platform with explosive gasand boom, youre 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 hid the information from its own shareholders, from

British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA,

David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before

the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was latercharged with obstruction of justiceon a spill-related matter.)

Channel 4agreed to send meto the benighted nation of 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 didnt talk, but they still disappeared.)
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And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the

Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew Id get out quick, because throwing

a reporter of Her Majestys Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil -o-crats.

The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasnt overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny

handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which Id 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 USA: Pvt

Bradley Manning.

Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling 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. (George

Bushs cabinet member should not be confused with the 129,000-tonne oil tanker "CondoleezzaRice", which Chevron named after their former board member.)

The US Ambassador 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 beneficiaryof millions of

dollars in payments of oil company baksheesh.
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A Manning/Wiki cable. Photovia.

So what about Bradley Manning?

Manning has been charged with aiding the enemy a crime punishable by death.

But Mannings sole and only purpose was to get out the truth. It wasnt 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?
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Had Mannings memos come out just a few months earlier, the truth about BPs deadly drilling

methods would have been revealed, and theres little doubt BP would have had to change its ways.

Those eleven men could well have been alive today.

Did Manning know about this particular hush-hush cable about BPs blow-out when he decided he

had to become Paul Revere and warn the planet?

Thats unlikely, in the thousands of cables he had. But hed 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 Timesimmediately seized on this extraordinary opportunity to ignore Manning.

The Timesonly 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 BPs prior blow-out on page one

of theGuardian, 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, thoughthe most prestigious US news

programme, PBS Newshour,was sponsored by Chevron Corporation.
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Chevron-pulling-sponsorship-of-PBS-NewsHour-2323961.phphttp://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Chevron-pulling-sponsorship-of-PBS-NewsHour-2323961.phphttp://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Chevron-pulling-sponsorship-of-PBS-NewsHour-2323961.php


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Bradley Manning. Photovia.

Hanging their source while taking his applause

As a working journalist, and one whose head is likely to be in the foggy gun-sights of some jet jockey

or a dictators goon squad, I have more than a little distaste for toffs likeNew York Times' former

executive editor, columnist Bill Keller, who used Manning documents to cash in on a book deal and

land star turns on television while simultaneouslysmearing his source Manning as, troubled",

"emotionally fractured", "vague", "inchoate and cover the children's earsgay.

Furthermore, while preening about their revelations from the Manning documents, the Times had no

problem with imprisoning their source. I do acknowledge that the Times and Keller did editorialise that

a sentence of life imprisonment without parole would be overkill. How white of them.

When it was mentioned that Manning is no different fromDaniel Ellsberg, the CIA operative who

released the Pentagon Papers, Keller reassured that the Timesalso told Ellsberg he was on his ownand did not object to their source being charged as a spy.
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And the Times'much-lauded exposure of theMy Lai massacre? My late good friend, the 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.

Manning: an aid to the enemy?

Times man Kellerwritesthat 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 papers reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein

had weapons of mass destruction were completely false, but that he as editorcovered uphis

papers knowledge their WDM 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.

Maybe Im just cranky because I wouldnt have seen my own sources vanish and my film grabbed if

the Timeshad only run the Manning facts about BP and Caspian when they had the chance.

Look, Im only picking on theNew York Times and PBS Newshourbecause they are the best in

America, God help us.

What other lives have been saved by the Manning revelations? Lots. Watch this space. I promise

more aid to the enemies of the state which is you, by the way.

Follow Greg on Twitter:@Greg_Palast

Previously -The Real Reason for the Iraq War

****

Greg Palast investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon deaths for Channel 4. Those dispatches are

contained in his book,Vultures Picnic. On April the 5th, there will bea gatheringin New York with

Daniel Ellsberg and defenders of Bradley Manning. VisitGregs Facebook pagefor more

information.

ByGreg Palast19 hours ago
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Ow Bradley Manning Could Have Prevented the Deepwater Horizon Explosion