May 18 2010

For Your Consideration: Government Censorship of the Eco-Catastrophe? Up Dated

(2PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

Is the Obama government censoring the information about the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

WEAR WABC-3 in Pensacola, FL filed this report:

Over the weekend, a research crew from the University of Southern Mississippi found evidence that there are 3 to 5 plumes… About 5 miles wide, 10 miles long and 3 hundred feet in depth.

But after giving that information to the press, the lead researcher now says he has been asked by the federal government… Which funds his research… To quit giving interviews until further testing is done.

(emphasis mine)

Even the University’s web site blog has gone silent since Saturday.

Jim White at FDL poses the questions:

The question now becomes whether the government, in the form of NOAA (which sponsored the research) is merely asking for a pause in order to process data more fully, or if it is putting the lid on a story that shows the oil spill to be far worse than the surface slick would suggest. One way to judge the answer to that question will be to see how quickly the research team is able to find ship time for gathering more data. Here is one of the researchers, Dr. Vernon Asper, speaking with NPR on May 16 with interviewer Guy Raz (in the only post-May 15 interview I’ve been able to find for any of the researchers):

   

RAZ: Vernon Asper, what will you and the scientists aboard the Pelican be looking at in the coming days and weeks?

   Dr. ASPER: The first thing we’re going to do is analyze our data and analyze the samples. And, of course, we’re planning our next cruises. We’re already making inquiries into finding ship time. It turns out that the limiting factor for studying this plume is the availability of research vessels.

   The research fleet in the United States for academic purposes has been dwindling over the last few decades, and there just aren’t ships available. So we’re having a hard time getting access to vessels that can take us out there.

Why is this option not being discussed more in the MSM and by the government? I don’t watch Fox News but Shephard Smith has been on target many times.

h/t to Crooks and Liars

Your thoughts.

Cross posted at Antemedius

38 comments

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    • TMC on May 18, 2010 at 17:02
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    • #

  2. is really like a really bad movie.  

    • Edger on May 18, 2010 at 20:56
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    and unstoppable, that the governments main concern now is to hide it to, from their point of view “avoid panic”.

    If so, and if it is unstoppable, they are in the longer term (a week or two?) going to have mass panic when it becomes unhideable as well as unstoppable…. ?

    Like an asteroid on a collision course, and to avoid panic they’ll not give the people on the Gulf Coast any real information with which to prepare?

    • Edger on May 18, 2010 at 21:13
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    a link for that WABC-3 report?

  5. when the entry of the Army Corps of Engineers is seen as a good thing.  Omg.

  6. oxygen depleted uncontrolled expanding dead zone and how a whole new universe of alien, marine microbes might behave.

     

  7. …of guilt and obfuscation:

    A prominent oceanographer, who was among the first to say official estimates understated the volume of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, charged Tuesday that a federal agency is punishing scientists whose findings disagree with government figures.

    Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer with Florida State University, who more than two weeks ago said the oil spill was likely five times as large as the 5,000 barrel-a-day estimate from the National Oceanic Atmospheric and Administration, said the agency is attacking scientists who challenged government estimates, while itself doing little to glean new information about the spill size.

    “The scientific community in the Gulf of Mexico is fairly small … and we’ve been very dedicated for a long time and not only is nobody listening to us in this, but it seems like they really want us to shut up,” MacDonald said. “It’s very, very punitive and anybody who is doing this is getting attacked by NOAA.”

    A NOAA spokesman did not address MacDonald’s claims directly, but said that the agency’s spill response includes scientists with key federal agencies as well as partners in the scientific community and the private sector.

    This report was in the Houston Chronicle,

    Florida State scientist: NOAA ignores spill findings

    By MONICA HATCHER

    HOUSTON CHRONICLE.

    and can be found      here      

    May 18, 2010, 10:42PM

  8. Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald… one of the four GTMO exiled reporters, a co-writer of this good article:

    “Certainly at this point in time, it’s a relief to know the oil from the leak has not reached the Keys,” said Becky Herrin, a spokeswoman for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. “You have to keep in mind we’re still preparing for the possibility and keeping a close eye.”

    The discoveries of the tar balls in the Keys earlier in the week stirred many concerns. For the environment, should the oil waste reach the Keys’ precious mangroves. For the Florida economy, both its tourism and fishing industries, after federal authorities imposed a fishing ban in 19 percent of the Gulf of Mexico.

    And then for Florida’s East Coast. U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., released fresh research predicting traces of Deepwater Horizon’s slick reaching the Keys by this weekend and the Miami area sometime next week.

    The study was conducted by the University of South Florida College of Marine Science in St. Petersburg and included a tracking map that graphically showed a black oil slick encircling the Florida peninsula in 10 days.

    “While I always hope for the best,” Nelson said in a statement, “this is looking like really out-of-control bad.”

    Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/201…

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