BLACK SACRIFICE

By Jean Bush

The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf waters of the Southern United States, has all the earmarks of a planned and engineered disaster determined to destroy the last of the resilience of a people already battered by another disaster, Hurricane Katrina. In that one, dozens of people died, some on barricaded bridges where police shot those trying to flee to the next town for help and where the infirm, elderly and crippled died in their wheelchairs in an overwhelmed Superdome designed for cheering games instead of suffering and death. Katrina was a test case of our future police state where self-righteous cops wrestled licensed guns from old women, beating them to the ground when they protested their rights.

A series of deadly decisions on the oil rig as it drilled farther and farther down into the ocean floor where they had never gone before, insured that the resultant volcano of oil gushing thousands of feet below the surface would sacrifice the lives of 11 men in the fiery immediacy of death and eventually the livelihoods of the fishermen, birds, fish, dolphins and wetlands that was home to a way of life now gone forever.

As the Times of London reports:
[Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon, and one of the last workers to leave the doomed rig] claimed that the blowout preventer was then damaged when a crewman accidentally moved a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force. Pieces of rubber were found in the drilling fluid, which he said implied damage to a crucial seal. But a supervisor declared the find to be “not a big deal”, Mr. Williams alleged.
UC Berkeley engineering professor Bob Bea told 60 Minutes that a damaged blowout preventer not only may lead to a catastrophic accident like the Gulf oil spill, but leads to inaccurate pressure readings, so that the well operator doesn't know the real situation, and cannot keep the rig safe.
Bea also said that - despite the damage - BP ordered the rig operator to ignore an even more critical safety measure. Specifically, BP ordered the rig operator to remove the "drilling mud" - a heavy liquid used to keep oil and gas from escaping - before the well was sealed.
According to Bea, the accident would not have occurred had drilling mud been used.


As endless newscasters bewail the killing of “11 oil rig workers” their refusal to name these brave men whose lives where taken, not given, in the service of a company whose indifference to their deaths is more than appalling. It is pure evil. Airline crash victims are scrolled immediately down the screen of TVs and pages of newspapers within hours. But not these men. So here are their names for all to see, names that cannot be forgotten as their sacrifice to the black evil that continues to spread its shadow across the world, darkening the lives of men and women everywhere.
VENICE, Louisiana - The names of the 11 men missing since last month's oil rig explosion have been released. Their bodies have never been found, but all are presumed dead.

Jason Anderson
Aaron Dale Burkeen
Donald Clark
Stephen Curtis
Roy Wyatt Kemp
Karl Kleppinger
Gordon Jones
Blair Manuel
Dewey Revette
Shane Roshto
Adam Weise

May they rest in peace.