tagged w/ Bush Administration
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Evidence now implicates top BP executives as well as its partners Chevron and Exxon and the Bush Administration in the deadly cover-up—which included falsifying a report to the Securities Exchange Commission.
Yesterday, Ecowatch.org revealed that, in September 2008, nearly two years before the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig had blown out in the Caspian Sea—which BP concealed from U.S. regulators and Congress.
Had BP, Chevron, Exxon or the Bush State Department revealed the facts of the earlier blow-out, it is likely that the Deepwater Horizon disaster would have been prevented.
Days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, a message came in to our offices in New York from an industry insider floating on a ship in the Caspian Sea. He stated there had been a blow-out, just like the one in the Gulf, and BP had covered it up.
To confirm this shocking accusation, I flew with my team to the Islamic republic of Azerbaijan. Outside the capital, Baku, near the giant BP terminal, we found workers, though too frightened to give their names, who did confirm that they were evacuated from the BP offshore platform as it filled with explosive methane gas.
Before we could get them on camera, my crew and I were arrested and the witnesses disappeared.
Expelled from Azerbaijan, we still obtained the ultimate corroboration: a secret cable from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department in Washington laying out the whole story of the 2008 Caspian blow-out.
The source of the cable, classified “SECRET,” was a disaffected U.S. soldier, Private Bradley Manning who, through WikiLeaks.org, provided hot smoking guns to The Guardian.
The information found in the U.S. embassy cables is a block-buster.
The cables confirmed what BP will not admit to this day: there was a serious blow-out and its cause was the same as in the Gulf disaster two years later—the cement (“mud”) used to cap the well had failed.
Bill Schrader, President of BP-Azerbaijan, revealed the truth to our embassy about the Caspian disaster:
“Schrader said that the September 17shutdown of the Central Azeri (CA) platform…was the largest such emergency evacuation in BP’s history. Given the explosive potential, BP was quite fortunate to have been able to evacuate everyone safely and to prevent any gas ignition. … Due to the blowout of a gas-injection well there was ‘a lot of mud’ on the platform.”
From other sources, we discovered the cement which failed had been mixed with nitrogen as a way to speed up drying, a risky process that was repeated on the Deepwater Horizon.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance and senior attorney for Natural Resources Defense Council, calls the concealment of this information, “criminal. We have laws that make it illegal to hide this.”
The cables also reveal that BP’s oil-company partners knew about the blow-out but they too concealed the information from Congress, regulators and the Securities Exchange Commission. BP’s major U.S. partners in the Caspian Sea drilling operation were Chevron and Exxon.
The State Department got involved in the matter because BP’s U.S. partners and the Azerbaijani government were losing more than $50 million per day due to the platform’s shutdown. The Embassy cabled Washington:
“BP’s ACG partners are similarly upset with BP’s performance in this episode, as they claim BP has sought to limit information flow about this event even to its ACG partners.”
Kennedy is concerned about the silent collusion of Chevron, Exxon and the Azerbaijani government. “The only reason the public doesn’t know about it is because the Azerbaijani government conspired with them to disappear the people who saw it happen and then to act in concert, in collusion, in cahoots with BP, with Exxon, with Chevron to conceal this event from the American public.”
Kennedy’s particular concern goes to the connivance of the State Department, then headed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in the cover-up and deception. Chevron, noted Kennedy, named an oil tanker after Rice who had served on the oil company’s board of directors. “BP felt comfortable—and Chevron and Exxon—in informing the Bush State Department, which was run by Condoleezza Rice,” he said, “and they felt comfortable that that wasn’t going to come out.”
The U.S. Securities Exchange Commission requires companies to report “material” events. BP filed a “20-F” report in 2009 stating, “a subsurface gas release occurred below the Central Azeri platform,” suggesting a naturally occurring crack in the seafloor, not a blow-out. This contradicted the statements of three eyewitnesses and the secret statement of BP’s Azerbaijan President in then WikiLeaks cable.
“The three big actors, Chevron, Exxon and BP all concealed this from the American public,” concludes Kennedy. “This is a criminal activity.”
And why would the Azerbaijan government cover up a disaster costing it $40 million to $50 million a day? According to another insider, Les Abrahams, it has to do with at least $75 million in bribes that he paid to Azeri officials in Baku.
By Greg Palast/ecowatch
More at the linkEvidence now implicates top BP executives as well as its partners Chevron and Exxon... more
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Cheney's obviously seen the Hunger Games
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KUALA LUMPUR, 11 May 2012 (mathaba)
"The five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered a guilty verdict against former United States President George W. Bush and his associates at the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal hearing that had started on Monday, May 7th.
On the charge of Crime of Torture and War Crimes, the tribunal finds the accused persons former U.S. President George W. Bush and his associates namely Richard Cheney, former U.S. Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, former Defence Secretary, Alberto Gonzales, then Counsel to President Bush, David Addington, then General Counsel to the Vice-President, William Haynes II, then General Counsel to Secretary of Defence, Jay Bybee, then Assistant Attorney General, and John Choon Yoo, former Deputy Assistant Attorney-General guilty as charged and convicted as war criminals for Torture and Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment of the Complainant War Crime Victims."KUALA LUMPUR, 11 May 2012 (mathaba)
"The five-panel tribunal unanimously... more
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Caught again with no place to hide.
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When the U.S. wants to fund, train, arm or otherwise align itself with a Terrorist group or state sponsor of Terror — as it often does — it at least usually has the tact to first remove them from its formal terrorist list (as the U.S. did when it wanted to support Saddam in 1982 and work with Libya in 2006), or it just keeps them off the list altogether despite what former Council on Foreign Relations writer Lionel Beehner described as “mounds of evidence that [they] at one time or another abetted terrorists” (as it has done with close U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, along with the El Salvadoran death squads and Nicaraguan contras armed and funded in the 1980s by the Reagan administration). But according to a new, multi-sourced report from The New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh, the U.S. did not even bother going through those motions when, during the Bush years, it trained the Iranian dissident group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) at a secretive Department of Energy site in Nevada:
Full Article: http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/report_us_trained_terror_group/singleton/When the U.S. wants to fund, train, arm or otherwise align itself with a Terrorist... more
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KB723
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Remember when Stephen Chu, then Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and now President Obama’s Secretary of Energy, said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Now that gasoline prices are headed in just the direction the esteemed Dr Chu wanted to see, he’s taking back that comment. A man more cynical than your Editor might suspect that President Obama “suggested” to Dr Chu that he needed to make that retraction. Do you remember when Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), who was running for the presidency, criticized President Bush, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for gasoline prices approaching $4.00 a gallon? Looks like we are seeing some karmic justice here!
It looks as though the Obama Administration is on its way to achieving the desire expressed by Dr Chu, before his retraction, without ever having had the first bit of control over it, or doing so by any means of which they would have approved. Wagonwheel wanted gasoline prices to be increased, though he wanted it done by increasing taxes. Taxes were not increased, but the price has gone up anyway, so the federal government does not gain any additional revenue, but has to spend more money for fuel. About the only good that your Editor can see from all of this is the increased possibility that Mr Obama will get a four-year head start on his presidential memoirs. The increased fuel prices might not be the President’s fault, but he was certainly of the opinion that they were the President’s responsibility . . . or at least he was in 2008. Your Editor would like to see the voters hold him responsible for gasoline prices this coming November.
http://www.journal14.com/2012/03/15/senator-obama-rising-gas-prices-are-president-bushs-fault-president-obama-rising-gas-prices-are-someone-elses-faultpart-2/Remember when Stephen Chu, then Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,... more
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What a difference nine years makes
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Matt Taibbi tells it like it is!!!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101715757
"I told my father after 911 that this was Fraud and that these folks who believed and went out and bought a house would live to regret it... Sadly I was Correct!!!" =(Matt Taibbi tells it like it is!!!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101715757... more
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KB723
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asherp
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According to published sources, a former Bush administration official, representing the powerful payroll processing industry, is responsible for a letter to House Republicans encouraging them to reject the Senate plan to extend the payroll tax cut for working-class Americans. The letter has now become a major talking point for the Teapubicans in defense of their treasonous acts against average taxpayers.
http://veracitystew.com/2011/12/20/former-bush-official-payroll-lobby-behind-rejection-of-payroll-tax-cut/According to published sources, a former Bush administration official, representing... more
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Most of you who have followed this blog from its inception have surmised, rightly or wrongly, that I do not buy into the official 9/11 account. I never did,- at first, believing it was an inside job with no outside interference. As more facts surfaced, I began to believe the involvement of other nations. I shared my feelings with few, knowing what a volatile and sensitive subject this was. I had also learned that people believe what they want, regardless of what is presented as far as solid hard facts. I became tired and fatigued by the constant harassment I had received for my views.
As far back as 2006, I have now learned, America was told, first by Donald Rumsfeld, who had another famous 'slip' of the tongue, and later confirmed by the other worldly Dick Cheney on September 6, 2011 in an interview on Fox News with Chris Wallace that Flight 93 was shot down on his orders.
Did you know that? I didn't know that. And I read headlines in several languages every bloody day of the week. Not a peep. For five years, we have known that at least one of the planes that was 'supposedly' hijacked and 'heroically' driven into the ground by its passengers was blown out of the sky on the order of the vice president of the United States. Didn't we just see memorials on the anniversary of that dreadful, awful, hair-raising day in New York, and Washington DC, and in Pennsylvania?
WHY DID THIS NOT MAKE HEADLINES? Why the cover up? Will people now finally begin to ask questions about the plane that vanished into the Pentagon leaving no footprint of itself? Truly, America has taken idiocy to a formidable level. Where's the debris? the body parts? Were they not able to ensure that someone's passport would be found as they did at Ground Zero? How dumb are we, seriously?
Here are the videos for your consumption:
Rumsfeld slips up and admits flight 93 shot down -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNuosBnlw5s&feature=related and best for last:
Dick Cheney admits Flight 93 was shot down - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC1QAR5gQrc&feature=related
continued on Women's Lens>>Most of you who have followed this blog from its inception have surmised, rightly or... more
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Barack Obama has been just as zealous as George Bush in stripping away environmental, health and safety protection at the behest of industry, it turns out.
Some environmental organisations were beginning to suspect this, after Obama over-ruled his scientific advisors and blocked stronger ozone standards. Now, a new report [pdf] from the Centre for Progressive Reform has dug up some key data revealing that the White House in the age of Obama has been just as receptive to the pleadings of industry lobbyists as it was in the Bush era. And it goes far beyond ozone.
Under Obama, a little known corner of the White House - known as the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or Oira - has changed more than 80% of the rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
None of these were changes for the good, the report says.
"Every single study of its performance, including this one, shows that Oira serves as a one-way ratchet, eroding the protections that agency specialists have decided are necessary under detailed statutory mandates, following years — even decades — of work."
Oira was set up by Congress with the purpose of performing a last review of government regulations to see how they would work once they were put into effect. Its current chief is Cass Sunstein, a friend of Obama from his days teaching at Harvard Law School.
In practice, critics say the office operates as a one-stop wrecking machine undoing environmental, health, and worker safety protections that could cause political problems for the White House.
When lobbying Congress and the president fails to delay or weaken a regulation, industry has learned over the years that Oira can be their last best resort, the report says.
"A steady stream of industry lobbyists — appearing some 3,760 times over the ten-year period we studied — uses OIRA as a court of last resort when they fail to convince experts at agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to weaken pending regulations."
The lobbyists were particularly obsessed with trying to undo environmental protections. Corporate executives and indusry lobbyists turned up at the White House about once a week over the last decade to try to delay or weaken EPA regulations, or more than 440 meetings.
The steady stream of oil and coal industry lobbyists to Oira did not end when Bush left office – arguably it turned into a flood. Environmental regulations made up only 10% of Oira business in Bush's time, but 36% of the office's business was meeting with outside lobbyists.
Under Obama, Oira has dedicated more than half of its meetings, 51%, to discussing pending environmental regulations with industry lobbyists, the report says.
And for industry the meetings paid off – about as much under Obama as under Bush. Following those meetings with outsiders, Oira changed 84% of EPA rules during the Bush era. Depending on how you calculate it, the change rate was even higher under Obama. Oira changed 81% of environmental rules after meetings with lobbyists. But the change rate rises to 85% once all Oira decisions on environmental regulations are factored in.
Oira does not make public records of those meetings.
Is there any chance that Obama is unaware of what Oira is up to? Rena Steinzor, the law professor at the University of Maryland who wrote the report, doesn't think so. She notes that Sunstein is a longtime friend of Obama, who has for years advocated against government regulations.
Obama will have to own those decisions – and the failure to live up to his election promises of 2008 to run a government that made decisions based on science and expertise, not political calculus.
"To us this is a sharp departure from what we were promised when this president was elected," Steinzor said. "From sound practice what we really want is for the experts to be making decisions at government agencies – the toxicologists, the pediatricians, the geologists. That's what modern government is supposed to be about, not having the decisions made by an office that is not accountable for what it does."
She went on: "What Obama meant to us, what a transformative presidency meant was that the lobbyists wouldn't control government any more. We would be transparent to a fault. We would run a transparency presidency and we would have very protective rules. We have arguably in this specific case not gotten any of this and it is disappointing."Barack Obama has been just as zealous as George Bush in stripping away environmental,... more
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The Canadian government should be prepared to bring criminal charges against former US Vice President Dick Cheney for his alleged role in the torture of detainees when he visits Vancouver on September 26, 2011, Human Rights Watch said today.The Canadian government should be prepared to bring criminal charges against former US... more
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Former airman Keith Boyea explores how war reshaped his worldview
'I have not faced the consequences of war up-close and have nothing but awe for those who have. But my own, much more cloistered experience as a war supporter is similar. I will never think of America the same way after the Bush-Cheney administration....
It has sickened me - the lack of morality, the lack of accountability, the constant recourse to mass amnesia. And in a man like Perry, you see all the characteristics of this belligerent, diplomatically autistic, aggressively stupid, and fundamentalist psyche. The dragon we thought we had slain is stalking the land again.
http://tinyurl.com/3o2ab9wFormer airman Keith Boyea explores how war reshaped his worldview
'I have not... more
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LOrion
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Rather than judicially review significant evidence in the events of September 11, 2001, on April 27, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s dismissal of an Army Specialist’s complaint against former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers.
One of Plaintiff April Gallop’s attorneys, William Veale, didn’t know whether to relate the decision to “Kafka, Orwell, Carroll, or Huxley,” referring to the absurdity and dearth of reason emanating from the court regarding the deadliest attack on U.S. soil the nation has ever faced.....
http://www.factoverfiction.com/article/4170Rather than judicially review significant evidence in the events of September 11,... more
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