by Greg Palast exclusive for Truthout/Buzzflash
Greg Palast investigating BP's blowout in the Caspian, Baku, Azerbaijan 2010.
Only 17 months before BP's Deepwater Horizon rig suffered a deadly blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP deepwater oil platform also blew out.
You've heard and seen much about the Gulf disaster that killed 11 BP workers. If you have not heard about the earlier blowout, it's because BP has kept the full story under wraps. Nor did BP inform Congress or US safety regulators, and BP, along with its oil industry partners, have preferred to keep it that way.
The earlier blowout occurred in September 2008 on BP's Central Azeri platform in the Caspian Sea.
As one memo marked "secret" puts it, "Given the explosive potential, BP was quite fortunate to have been able to evacuate everyone safely and to prevent any gas ignition." The Caspian oil platform was a spark away from exploding, but luck was with the 211 rig workers.
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Catch Amy Goodman, John Perkins and Greg Palast in Chicago this Saturday, May 16 at Greenfestival, Navy Pier.
Greg Palast will be speaking at 2pm - Topic: Burn the Banks.
Palast will also attend Netroots Nation Salon at No Exit Cafe, (6970 North Glenwood) Chicago at 8pm.
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By Dahlia Lithwick | Slate
Posted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 6:24 PM ET
Last week, in her testimony before the House judiciary committee, Monica Goodling referred several times to "vote caging" possibly done by Arkansas' soon to be ex-interim, never-confirmed U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin. Yet Goodling was questioned about this almost not at all, nor did the media do much more than report the words of the former liaison between the White House and Alberto Gonzales (why a "liaison" is required between two institutions with no boundaries between them is incomprehensible, but perhaps another story). Meanwhile, liberal talk radio, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the blogosphere went nuts. So, which is it: Is vote caging the most underreported part of this U.S. attorneys scandal or the most over-hyped?
One of the reasons the mainstream news reports (including mine) barley touched the vote-caging story was that nobody had any idea what Goodling was talking about. "Vote caging, what's that?" we e-mailed each other at Slate. The confusion seemed to extend to Goodling herself. The subject came up in her testimony about former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. In saying he had not been forthright with the House judiciary committee in his testimony on the firing of the U.S. attorneys, she cited three areas, one of which was McNulty's failure "to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in 'vote caging' in the president's 2004 campaign," when he spoke to Congress.
Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., asked Goodling to "explain what caging is," clarifying that she was unfamiliar with the term. Goodling fumbled around, muttered something about, "it's a direct-mail term, that people who do direct mail, when, when they separate addresses that may be good versus addresses that may be bad," then made sure to end with, "I don't … I believe that Mr. Griffin doesn't believe that he, that he did anything wrong there and there, there actually is a very good reason for it, for a very good explanation." Which explanation Goodling did not then provide.
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by Greg Palast
He had accomplices. Don't kid yourself: 23-year-old Cho Seung-hui didn't forge his two little pistols in his smithy shop.
He had a dealer, a guns-and-bullets pusher-man who put the heat in his hand, took the kid's money and
pocketed it with a grin.
"Whether you are looking for a pistol for affordable training or simply the excitement of shooting, the P22 is the pistol for you!"
That's the ad on the Walther website for the student-reaper, a Walther .22.
Not that Walther, or its fellow murder-maker, Glock, which crafted the other Weapon of Student Mass Destruction, the Glock 9mm, kept all of the killer kid's money. The gun makers religiously tithe a portion of their grim reapings to their friends in Washington.
This report isn't about gun control legislation or the right to bear arms or any of that sideways crap. This is about a group of co-conspirators who dropped two killing devices into the hands of someone who shouldn't have had access to a plastic spoon.
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