Obama Stonewalling Gulf Oil Spill Disclosure

[Geee]

American Thinker:

The Obama administration is desperately trying to avoid coming clean about its role in delaying capping the Gulf Oil Spill. Billions of dollars in fines are at stake, so BP is fighting in court to force release of correspondence related to handling the Gulf Oil Spill which might indicate that the federal government unnecessarily and substantially delayed the use of technology that was ultimately proven successful.

Rebecca Mowbray of the New Orleans Times-Picayune has the details of the battle underway in a New Orleans federal court:

In a letter filed in federal court Tuesday, the U.S. government charges that if BP is successful at forcing the release of 21 pieces of correspondence about responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it will harm future disaster response efforts because public officials won't be able to confer frankly about the challenges before them. U.S. Department of Justice attorney Sarah Himmelhoch told Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan that the U.S. government has produced millions of documents in the litigation, and only wants to keep 119 documents confidential, but BP continues to try to force the government to disclose 21 of them. The documents involve communications between top Obama Administration officials in the White House, Department of Energy, Department of Interior and Department of Homeland Security.

We can reasonably infer that the authors of those 21 documents may include President Barack Obama, his then-chief of Staff Rahm "Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste" Emanuel, and Energy and Climate Change Czarina Carol "Midnight Moratorium" Browner from the White House, not to mention Energy Secretary Steven "Solyndra" Chu, Interior Secretary Ken "Boot on Their Neck" Salazar, and Admiral Thad "An Overabundance of Caution" Allen of Homeland Security's United States Coast Guard. All of them had a lot to say and or do publicly during the oil spill containment operations. Now it seems that BP wants to let the American public know about what its people were doing in private as they commanded BP's operations. BP knows what its employees did in private, as it was on the receiving end of those orders. They now want to share the details of those orders with the general public. The response of the Obama administration is positively Nixonian, revisiting the claims of executive privilege once espoused by Richard Nixon during the debate regarding the release of the Watergate tapes. Can it be that the people voted for "hope and change" and got the Ghost of Richard Nixon?

"To order the release of the 21 documents at this point sends the message that there is no protected space for government workers and decision makers in the midst of a national emergency," the letter reads.