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BP Whistleblowers Paying High Price for Confessions
By Victor Thorn
Oil industry critic Charles Hamel realizes the dangers facing those who expose the Gulf of Mexico cover-up. “These oil interests are very powerful. They’ll stop at nothing to stop you,” he has said.
A host of casualties prove his point. First is whistleblower Mike Mason, who worked for BP subcontractor Nabors Drilling. In 2005 he told investigators that BP regularly falsified blowout preventer (BOP) tests at Alaskan facilities.
His employer immediately fired him following these disclosures, but not before Mason reported to Hamel’s Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission that BP’s safety procedure is to “look the other way when it’s convenient for them.”
Hamel had been chronicling BP abuses since the 1980s, costing them millions in repairs to the Alaskan pipeline. As retaliation, journalist Marcus Baram reported on May 12 that a BP subsidiary in Alaska “hired a private security firm, Wackenhut, to conduct surveillance on Hamel.” Their tactics included wiretaps and forced entries into his home. They watched his house and his family and even hired attractive women to try to persuade him to divulge his secret sources.
Hamel sued BP, Exxon and Wackenhut in the 1990s for harassment and invasion of privacy and reportedly settled for an undisclosed amount believed to be in the millions of dollars.
The Alaska connection continues with former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), who died in an airplane crash on Aug. 9, 2010.
During two recent interviews, British filmmaker and 19-year oil industry veteran Ian Crane told this writer that Stevens had been a longtime BP crony on Capitol Hill. Further, after Stevens announced that his diaries and personal papers would be given to the University of Alaska, BP promptly offered $1 million to “catalog” these items.
Of particular interest once again is Hamel, who presented allegations of BP’s dangerous cost-cutting methods to Stevens. These reports included Mason’s accounts of BP blatantly falsifying BOP tests that eventually led to the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe.
Stevens most certainly knew of BP’s underhanded practices, and that BP was also making dramatic cuts in safety and security procedures in its role as 47 percent owner of the Alaskan pipeline. As Alaska’s “Man of the Century,” Stevens loved his state, and the potentially explosive data contained within these files could easily lead to another embarrassing BP scandal.
The former senator’s death in a plane crash is nothing new to our 49th state, with some coining the term “Alaska’s Bermuda Triangle.” Most notable was the Oct. 16, 1972 crash of U.S. Rep. Hale Boggs (D-LA) near Malaspina Glacier. As a Warren Commission member in the early 1960s, Boggs had later publicly expressed doubts over the official JFK single-shooter theory.
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Shortly before his tragic demise, Boggs denounced FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the House floor, then later told an aide, “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Warren Commission—on Oswald, Ruby, their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”
Even more bizarre, the man who drove Boggs to the airport in Texas to begin a campaign tour was none other than future president Bill Clinton, who later amassed his own sizeable body count amid the infamous Clinton scandals.
Another passenger to die in the Boggs crash was Rep. Nick Begich (D-Alaska), whose son, Mark, eventually defeated the scandal-plagued Stevens for his senatorial seat in 2008. Coincidentally, Mark Begich’s brother, Nick Jr., is a vociferous critic of the notorious HAARP program, which Stevens initially funded with earmarks in 1990.
HAARP is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska. The official HAARP web site claims the system’s complex antenna arrays for transmitting in both low and high frequencies constitute benign research of the ionosphere, but critics maintain it has secretly been used to manipulate the weather and for other nefarious operations. HAARP itself, however, admits that it has both civilian and military uses.
Over the past few decades, investigators have revealed an undeniable number of anomalies in the Boggs crash, many of which have been ignored and suppressed by Boggs’s own daughter, ABC News cover-up artist Mary “Cokie” Roberts.
Another suspicious death in recent weeks involved a questionable character named Matthew Simmons. As a Council on Foreign Relations member and past energy advisor to former President George W. Bush, Simmons pushed the peak oil theory, which led to skyrocketing prices during the Bush-Cheney era.
However, Crane revealed during interviews with AFP that Simmons made a startling charge in July. Specifically, he claimed that BP switched their live undersea camera feed from the gushing well, to one that had already been capped.
Simmons also stressed that BP’s use of the chemical Corexit as an oil dispersant would produce wide-ranging health hazards in the Gulf of Mexico, and that government officials were downplaying the magnitude of this ecological calamity. Further, Simmons questioned BP’s flow-rate under estimations, saying that there were other oil leaks in the seabed.
On Aug. 9, 2010—the very day that Stevens perished in a plane crash—Simmons was discovered dead in a hot tub at his home in Maine. Initial reports stated that he “drowned.”
Crane, whose latest documentary is entitled “BP, Population Reduction & the End of an Age,” wrote in his August newsletter, “The timing of Matthew Simmons’s unfortunate demise could not be more opportune for BP, the U.S. government and the oil industry at large.”
Finally, even BP’s former CEO John Browne did not escape unscathed. He initially negotiated for the release of Pan Am Flight 103 “terrorist” Abdelbaset Al Megrahi to ensure BP’s oil deal with Libya. Crane speculates that this move, along with Browne’s ruthless business tactics, so enraged his Bilderberg counterparts that they sabotaged him by unveiling the details of a sordid homosexual prostitution scandal.
Browne was forced to resign, replaced by lackey Tony Hayward, who infuriated gulf residents with his callous disregard for life in that region.
Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and the author of many books on 9-11 and the New World Order. These include 9-11 Evil: The Israeli Role in 9-11 and Phantom Flight 93.
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(Issue # 35, August 30, 2010)
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