July 16, 2010 archive

Washington’s Blog thursday…

…numerous industry experts have warned that there is no upside to temporarily capping the well as part of the well integrity test, and that it might actually cause the well to blow out.  

Admiral Thad Allen previously said that the test will be considered a success if pressure in the well stays at 8,000 psi or higher for 48 hours.   So we won’t know for a couple of days whether the test has succeeded.

As AP correctly notes:

Now begins a waiting period to see if the cap can hold the oil without  blowing a new leak in the well. Engineers will monitor pressure readings  incrementally for up to 48 hours before reopening the cap while they  decide what to do.

Interestingly, as CNN’s Situation Room noted a couple of minutes ago, the cap might soon be re-opened, and closed again only during hurricanes:  

Admiral Thad Allen releasing a statement to us just a  short while ago…

He cautions “This isn’t over”…

Very interesting here. He talks about the cap as a temporary  measure to be used for hurricanes…

“It remains likely that we will return to the containment  process… until the relief well is completed”

So it looks like the plan is to go back to releasing the oil  and letting it pump up to the surface.

 (hat tip FloridaOilSpillLaw).

So is the well integrity test a meaningless PR stunt, which is delaying completion of the relief wells, and failing to bring us any closer to permanently killing the oil gusher?

From Glenn Greenwald…

Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance — literally — occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry.  While a small portion of that is legitimately classified, these whistle blower prosecutions and other disclosure controversies demonstrate that the vast majority of this secrecy is devoted to avoiding embarrassment and accountability.  It has nothing to do with “national security” — one of the all-justifying terms (along with Terrorism) for what the Government does.  Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption.  That’s why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics.  They’re one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.

The great irony is that there is a perfect inverse relationship between the secrecy powers of the Government (which rapidly increase) and the privacy rights of citizens (which erode just as rapidly). The citizenry meekly acquiesces to the notion that it must sacrifice more and more privacy to the Government in order to deter and expose criminality, corruption and other dangerous acts of private citizens, yet refuses to apply that same rationale to demand greater transparency from the Government itself.  The Government (and its private corporate partners) know more and more about citizens, while citizens know less and less about the actions of the government-corporate axis which governs them.

Glenn Greenwald posted this pearl in the pigpen of American political discourse on Bastille Day, July 14th, and isn’t all the relevant evidence excruciatingly familiar to all of us in the progressive blogosphere, and didn’t we totally overlook the simple and now obvious “inverse relationship between the secrecy powers of the Government and the privacy rights of citizens?”

So let’s take a moment to thank our (not very) lucky stars for bloggers like Glenn Greenwald and Paul Krugman and Dean Baker, and ask ourselves why all of them are blogging, instead of running the show.