BP Oil Spill Conspiracy: What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?

Se we "established" yesterday that the key player in the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill conspiracy/cover-up was Rahm Emanuel, who had the cash and the contacts to make the "accident" happen. Perhaps he did it to save Obama from himself, or from the hard Left, but the question still remains: Did Obama order the explosion, or was he clueless about the entire operation?

Based on this story from Rolling Stone, it appears as if he was clueless. And incompetent. And a participant in a cover-up. Remember, the oil rig blew on April 20th:

The president himself was occupied elsewhere. After returning from his vacation, Obama spent Monday, April 26th palling around with Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees, congratulating them on their World Series victory. He later took time to chat with the president of Honduras. When he put in a call to Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, it was to talk about tornadoes that had caused damage in that state, with only a brief mention of the oil spill. On Tuesday the 27th, Obama visited a wind-turbine plant in Iowa. Wednesday the 28th, he toured a biofuels refinery in Missouri and talked up financial reform in Quincy, Illinois. He didn’t mention the oil spill or the Gulf.

Was his lack of concern an attempt to feign innocence, or just a result of ignorance? But things changed on April 28th, at least inside the White House:

That evening, administration officials received news that – to judge from their subsequent response – scared the shit out of them. “The following is not public,” a confidential NOAA advisory stressed. “Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked, resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought. There is no official change in the volume released but the [Coast Guard] is no longer stating that the release rate is 1,000 barrels a day. Instead they are saying that they are preparing for a worst-case release and bringing all assets to bear.” …

After he was briefed that evening, Obama told his deputies to contact the Pentagon. The following day, Napolitano declared the BP disaster, which was now approaching the size of Puerto Rico, an “Oil Spill of National Significance” – the designation required to draw on regional resources and to appoint an incident commander to coordinate a federal response. It had taken a full week after Deepwater Horizon exploded for the government to become fully engaged – a critical lapse that allowed the crisis to spiral out of control.

Again - was this a result of Obama's utter incompetence, or part of the conspiracy - let the spill become large enough to warrant the revocation of drilling permits and the imposition of oil taxes and "cap and trade" legislation?

And how long did Obama sit on the NOAA report saying things had gone from bad to worse? The Coast Guard seems to have released some info saying the spill may be "five times larger than originally believed" on April 28th, but NOAA's concerns seemed to have...lowballed a bit, to say the least. Rolling Stone alleges that Obama:

...deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.
Even after the president’s press conference,Rolling Stone has learned, the administration knew the spill could be far worse than its “best estimate” acknowledged. That same day, the president’s Flow Rate Technical Group – a team of scientists charged with establishing the gusher’s output – announced a new estimate of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels, based on calculations from video of the plume. In fact, according to interviews with team members and scientists familiar with its work, that figure represents the plume group’s minimum estimate....“The upper bound from the plume group, if it had come out, is very high,” says Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University who has consulted with the government’s team. “That’s why they had resistance internally. We’re talking 100,000 barrels a day.”

A lot of oil. Too much to be covered with some slick, misleading information fed to a compliant media. The president can lie, but if the fish and the birds start to die, nothing will stop those pitiful pictures from reaching the public's eye...

So what did Barack know? Everything.

When did he know it? Sooner than everyone else.

What did he do about it? Passed the buck and covered up the bad news.

You would almost think he had something to hide....