Sen. Ted Stevens Killed In Plane Crash (He Got A Million From BP And Knew Blow Out Preventer Was A Problem. Was He Whacked?)

The Anchorage Daily News reports that the family of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is concerned that he may have been on-board a GCI-owned plane that reportedly crashed near Dillingham, Alaska. Stevens was on his way to the GCI-owned Agulowak Lodge near Lake Aleknagik.

The Alaska Air National Guard, the Alaska State Police and NTSB are all reportedly en route to the scene of the crash, and hoped to arrive at the scene nearly four hours ago. The plane was reportedly carrying up to 8 passengers and rescue teams are expecting fatalities; local NBC affiliate KTUU reports that the Air National Guard first received word of the crash at 7:00 pm local (11:00 pm EST) time.

Continue tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/reports-sen-ted-stevens-may-have-been-in-plane-crash.php

Former Sen. Stevens knew BP was cheating on BOP tests. Could he have been whacked because what he knew ties directly into the Gulf oil disaster?

 The 48-year-old veteran oil worker claims that in the oil industry, particularly at BP, “the culture is basically safety procedures are shoved down your throat and then they look the other way when it’s convenient for them.” He claims that oil operators often wouldn’t report spills and that when he spilled chemical fluid in 2003, he was told by his superiors not to report it. Mason, who now runs a small operation hauling freight in the Alaskan bush and owns guest cabins, says he was fired by a drilling company in 2006 after he wrote a letter to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News to condemn the firm for incorporating overseas and thereby avoiding taxes.

Mason and another oil worker provided sworn statements in a 2003 lawsuit that rig supervisors “routinely falsified reports to show equipment designed to prevent blowouts was passing state-mandated performance tests,” reported the Wall Street Journal in 2005.

Mason was interviewed by the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in 2005 during a probe into allegations that Nabors Drilling, a subcontractor to BP, falsified such tests, among other claims that BP failed to report blowouts at the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field. The probe was spurred by oil industry critic Charles Hamel, who forwarded his allegation to then-Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.

In full www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/bp-whistleblower-claimed_n_573839.html

BP Gives $1 Million to UAF to process Ted Steven’s papers

British Petroleum is donating $1 million to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to catalog the papers from Ted Stevens’ four-decade political career.

Stevens sent more than 4,500 boxes of documents to the university’s library. Without the BP grant, the Rasmuson Library told The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner it would have taken decades to sort.

In full www.ktuu.com/Global/story.asp?S=11549859