Around Thanksgiving I spent some quality time on the phone with investigative journalist and longtime friend of SG Greg Palast. The topic of our conversation was his new book, Vultures' Picnic, which chronicles his investigations into big oil and the unbelievable corruption he uncovered. And I don't use the word "unbelievable" lightly. They say truth is stranger than fiction; Greg's book is a fine example of this. The dirt he finds on the energy corporations and various governments is so outrageous, it's hard to conceive that it's true. Even Greg is aware of the problem. Indeed, he starts his book off with the following sentence:
Everything that happened here, happened.
I know it happened the way he tells it, because I know and trust Greg (and I did a lot of my own fact checking as I was editing the interview). As if to underline this though, as I was double (and triple) checking my transcription while traveling back from London to Los Angeles after the Christmas/New Year break, I bumped into two very pertinent individuals.
I met the first while waiting for my flight at Heathrow Airport. A chap who was sat opposite me in a lounge saw me typing away on my laptop and asked me what I was working on. I explained it was an interview in which an investigative journalist talked about how he uncovered a prior, almost identical blowout to the Gulf Deepwater Horizon one. It occurred in the Caspian Sea but was covered up. My inquisitor then revealed that he was a helicopter pilot that worked for a private aviation company based out of Azerbaijan. He said he'd frequently flown low over the Caspian Sea, and had observed the resulting oil slicks - the ones that weren't supposed to be there that Greg had written about in his book.
My second accidental Vultures' Picnic-relevant encounter happened after boarding. I was sat in the middle of the plane, sandwiched between two gentlemen. I introduced myself to the person on my left, who it turned out wrote code for an LA-based computer games company. The person on my right however, by some coincidence, said he was a nuclear safety inspector and that he was flying in to inspect a facility just south of Los Angeles. (I wonder if it was this one!)
I explained to him that I was currently working on an interview with a writer who had also done some private investigation work for the nuclear industry, and that he had written about the real cause of the Fukushima meltdown in his latest book; That the emergency generators that were meant to kick in, but failed, would never have been capable of functioning in the way they needed to - and everyone knew it. My flight companion confirmed that this was something he was aware of, and that it was absolutely the case.
And thus, it seemed like the universe was conspiring to independently corroborate two key aspects of Greg's Vultures' Picnic story. So, if you read this interview and a voice in your head tells you it can't possibly be true, just know, unfortunately, it's not only possible, it's 100% truth...
More truth than you want to handle maybe, but truth nonetheless.
