That’s the official line, and I could have swallowed it — except for a message I received from a very nervous source floating in the Caspian Sea. The source told me he’d been an eye-witness to the BP/Transocean oil rig blow-out — not the one in the Gulf, but an IDENTICAL blow-out in the Caspian that happened just 17 months before its Gulf companion exploded.
The hunt for the truth took me to Baku, Azerbaijan, in Central Asia (and detention by the dictatorship’s not-so-secret police), meetings with MI-6 sources in London, and beaches on the Gulf Coast and in the Arctic. Watch this video from my investigation for Britain’s Channel 4 Dispatches. It ran world-wide…except in the USA.
If you don’t know about the earlier blow-out, it’s because BP didn’t tell you, didn’t tell anyone but its drilling partners Exxon and Chevron — and in a top secret cable, George W. Bush’s State Department. The oil company chieftains kept the devastating information tightly concealed — even though US law required they report such rig failures to the US Department of Interior.
If BP had reported the disaster to Interior, the 11 men would be alive today, because Interior’s experts had tried to stop BP from drilling in the unstable deep waters of the
— source gregpalast.com | Greg Palast | Apr 19, 2021