Confirmed: Obama Administration Lied to US Public to Push Their Drilling Moratorium
Posted by Jim Hoft on Wednesday, November 10, 2010, 7:31 PM
In May, Barack Obama, the worst jobs president since the Great Depression, announced that he would limit new oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
Obama knew his moratorium would cost at least 23,000 jobs but went ahead with it anyway. After all, what’s another 23,000 jobs when you’ve lost several million already?
In June it was reported that Team Obama fudged a report to support their drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico. A group of oil drilling experts claimed that the Obama Administration misrepresented their views in order to put a hold on drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
FOX News reported:
The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium — something they actually oppose.
The experts, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, say Interior Secretary Ken Salazar modified their report last month, after they signed it, to include two paragraphs calling for the moratorium on existing drilling and new permits.
Salazar’s report to Obama said a panel of seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.
“None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report,” oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox
News. “What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation.”
Today a new report from the Inspector General accuses the Obama administration of rewriting key sections of the report in order to falsely give the impression that the panel had made that recommendation.
Let’s hope Republicans delve into this scandal after they take over the House in January.
This is criminal.
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Published May 24, 2012 at 8:46 pm - 91 Comments
Mahdi Al-Dajjal commented:
And… none of this will be deemed newsworthy by the DNC Propaganda Machine (formerly known as the Mainstream Media).
Militant Conservative commented:
heard this already, this is the next battlefield.
The sychophants are leaving the station. Many do not wish to die with the Obama regime. He is a toxic socialist narcissist with a BIG ASS bison of a wife. MOOchelle, LOL What pathetic posers they are. 2012 will wash the country clean like a douche. powder is dry
gus commented:
Nothing this fu*wad does is for the benefit of the American people. Nothing.
aro5o75 commented:
George Soros??
Ginger commented:
Let’s see.. How was it that x demo rat weirdo in FL said? Die Soros die!
Ginger commented:
So if the black farmers can sue the government can the people get together and sue the fraud and his little morons?
vargas commented:
Inspector General to be fired in 3….2….1
Dave-O commented:
This should make an excellent agenda item for Rep. Darrell Issa’s Oversight Committee. Let’s get the subpoena’s tee’d up – put everybody under oath – cue the C-Span cameras, and get the ball rolling. We’ll see how many end up taking the Fifth. I’d like to see more than a few going to jail. Pass the popcorn.
regularguy commented:
This REQUIRES a Congressional level investigation. This BS shut down an industry which cannot simply flick the switch back on immediately and without the loss of thousands of jobs. It’s short and long term result is tantamount to sabotage of our economic and military security of the country.
Auntie Em commented:
So who’s gonna down Soros? He’s the only obstacle. If he goes down, there will be no more tyranny on Earth. I have a feeling that Jesus will be the One. Little tiny atheist versus REAL BIG GOD!
Ruebacca commented:
tip of the iceberg imo.
rabidfox commented:
Ginger, the out of work people probably should be a class action suit together. Put the black members front and center, though, to keep it from being bounced by some Clinton judge.
patman commented:
Okay. But were they jobs lost, or not saved???
Auntie Em commented:
I meant to preface my post with the truth that Barack Obama, in so far as he thinks so highly of himself, is nothin. Really folks, he’s a nobody, who had parents that resented his exsistence, raised by a transexual nannie, molested by a pedophile named Marshall, beat over the head with a frying pan by a pig in a skirt named Michelle, and taught how to hate everyone that was not him by Jeremiah Wright. He’s not the one…..
plainslow commented:
If I was BP, I’d use this info to help limit my damages. I’m sure some who are going after them were also hurt by the jobs lost because of this.
Buffalobob commented:
Once again we see the power of environmentalist nit wits. They along with the msn propaganda machine have conned much of the American public. Hopefully little by little the truth will come out. Like the climategate scandal. By the way algore walked away with another 12+ million from the carbon credit scam. He lives in multiple mansions while little old ladies send donations to global warming scamers from heir limited income
mark commented:
Aro5075: Bingo.
Please please…I’m volunteering for Jury Duty.
aprilnovember811 commented:
And they presented this fraudulent document to the court, lying to the court. This does qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors. He does not need to be impeached because he’s not American, but Indonesian. He should be arrested. This man has committed economic, and emotional terror on this country. In addition to Soros, he’s working for the Weather Underground. Do we even know for sure this oil disaster was an accident? Heck, our own Coast Guard and FBI can’t even be trusted anymore.
Andreas K. commented:
“After all, what’s another 23,000 jobs when you’ve lost several million already?”
Let’s change Stalin’s quote here.
“If you lose one job, it is a tragedy. If you lose 10 million, it is a statistic.”
squeaky commented:
how many of the portable rigs have moved off and are not about to return any day soon. earlier this year i read a bit about rare earth minerals along the line of shortages and how such shortages will effect our plans on alternative powers [such as electric engines]. breaking our “addiction” to oil in general and mid east oil particular……..sometimes in life every solution comes with its own set of problems. supposedly, we stopped our own resources due to environmental concern….
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Green-Economics/2010/0927/Are-there-hidden-costs-to-over-dependence-on-China-Japan-just-found-out
Chisum commented:
A Broken President
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/11/a_broken_president.html
Joan of Argghh! commented:
The whole exercise was a trial balloon. Folks in La. did not take up arms or take to the streets when they lost their jobs.
So noted.
Mannie commented:
Zerobama lied? Wou would have thought? I’m shocked. Shocked, I say!
Stuart commented:
Joan of Argghh #24
Folks in La. did not take up arms or take to the street because they probably went on unemployment for the next 99 weeks. When that runs out Katie bar the door.
Ken Arnold commented:
As the only one mentioned by name in the story i thought I should set the record straight for those who care to know what happened…as opposed to those who just want to use this to bash the administration:
The Interim Report to the President was a well written report prepared by the DOI with a lot of input from industry, especially API and IADC. They adopted all the recommendations of task groups put together by API and IADC and listened to the comments and reviews of those peer reviewers nominated by NAE (not me) and those contributors and other reviewers (including me) listed by name in Appendix 1. The only problem we had is that the Secretary included a recommendation for a moratorium in the Executive Summary which did not exist in the documents we reviewed, and in the final draft.
The paragraph which has the moratorium is immediately followed by the following paragraph:
“The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering. Those experts, who volunteered their time and expertise, are identified in Appendix 1. The Department also consulted with a wide range of experts from government, academia and industry.”
If you read these words carefully, they are actually correct. They talk about the recommendations “in this report” and the moratorium does not appear in the report. However, because of the juxtaposition of the two paragraphs, we felt there was an implication that we had agreed with the moratorium. In fact, it turns out as a group we saw the necessity for a moratorium but disagreed with the definition of the moratorium and felt there was a better definition which would meet the Secretary’s needs but still allow the drilling of “less risky” wells.
We objected to the Secretary’s office but got no response, so went public with our objection. Three things then happened:
1. The Secretary apologized publically in testimony before Congress taking full blame for the moratorium (which I understand to be his idea) and saying he did not mean to imply we agreed
2. He wrote and signed individual letters to the members of the group
3. He invited us to a teleconference to discuss our concerns with him.
The result of the teleconference was an invitation to come to Washington to meet with him, which was scheduled around my availability. Since I was flying to Ho Chi Minh City the following Tuesday, the Secretary freed his schedule so he could meet with us the coming Monday morning, June 21. Present in the Secretary’s office were Salazar, his Deputy, his Chief of Staff, Steve Black on the phone (he was on vacation), Mike Bromwich and some lesser staff. This was Bromwich’s first day on the job and we met at 10 AM so I am guessing it was his first meeting as Director of BOEM. The meeting lasted one hour in which I gave a power point presentation of our concerns and recommendation. Salazar, Bromwich, etc. were very attentive and asked many good questions to thoroughly understand what we were saying.
At the end Secretary Salazar raised a question I should have been prepared for and was not, “We have all our resources mobilized to clean up this spill. What do I say to the American people if I allow drilling and there is another spill? We are barely able to handle this one.” I answered something to the effect of how unlikely that would be given our past record and the fact that we were only recommending drilling the “less risky” wells. But even to me, it sounded like the type of thing industry (including me) had been saying and assuring the public prior to the Macondo blowout. With all the finger pointing going on at that time between BP, Halliburton, etc., and the well meaning comments by people at the Univeristy of California at Berkeley which were interpreted to mean that not only BP but the rest of the industry doesn’t care about safety and only cares about operational targets, why would the Secretary or anyone else believe me?
At the end, Salazar said he appreciated our comments and he invited us to come back “in the near future to make this presentation to a wider audience.” I believed he was sincere in this, but events overtook any rational discussion of redefining the moratorium. I think the Hornbeck Marine lawsuit which made it impossible for the DOI to redefine the moratorium was filed on June 20 (the day before our meeting). Once you are focused on defending the right to issue any kind of moratorium, it weakens your case if you start to back pedal
In all of my dealings I have found Salazar to be a reasonable person. I did not meet with anyone in the Executive Office, but although I disagree with their position I can understand where they are coming from. Remember, this is the only administration, Republican or Democrat, which looked at our energy situation and was trying to open access in more areas of the Gulf of Mexico and the East Coast as part of an overall energy bill. Don’t forget, the George W. Bush administration, which was suppose to be pro-oil, actually removed from access a large part of the Gulf of Mexico which had been scheduled for leasing under the Clinton administration.
To me, anyone trying to make a witch hunt out of this latest report by the Inspector General of the DOI, is just playing politics and not helping us address the real questions of how the industry and DOI are going to work together to get the permit system working and recover the momentum for greater access. The people I disagree with are the ones clamoring for investigations based on the IG’s report as if this is the real issue. That way they can keep the Obama administration occupied, make sure it does not have a success and fulfill Mitch McConnell’s greatest priority for the new Congress. We will never know if Clinton had been able to put 10% of the effort he was forced to waste on impeachment into concentrating on Al Qaida (remember all the “wag the dog” accusations when he launched missiles against them), would the Bush administration have been better able to “connect the dots” prior to 9/11.
I said all this when approached by a producer for Anderson Cooper’s show yesterday and suggested it was old news. Several of my Gang of 9 were also approached by AP and gave them the same message. I don’t know whether the story was covered on Anderson Cooper last night, but Fox News did dredge up an old quote of mine from June or July and used it in at least one story.