An amazingly well-researched article from the Rolling Stone--not a magazine I associate with hard-care reportage, but why not? Its a clear field these days.

From the start, the administration has seemed intent on allowing BP to operate in near-total secrecy. Much of what the public knows about the crisis it owes to Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Under pressure from Markey, BP was forced to release footage of the gusher, admit that its early estimates put the leak as high as 14,000 barrels a day and post a live feed of its undersea operations on the Internet – video that administration officials had possessed from the earliest days of the disaster. "We cannot trust BP," Markey said. "It's clear they have been hiding the actual consequences of this spill."

But rather than applying such skepticism to BP's math, the Obama administration has instead attacked scientists who released independent estimates of the spill. When one scientist funded by NOAA released a figure much higher than the government's estimate, he found himself being pressured to retract it by officials at the agency. "Are you sure you want to keep saying this?" they badgered him. Lubchenco, the head of NOAA, even denounced as "misleading" and "premature" reports that scientists aboard the research vessel Pelican had discovered a massive subsea oil plume. Speaking to PBS, she offered a bizarre denial of the obvious. "It's clear that there is something at depth," she said, "but we don't even know that it's oil yet."

Scientists were stunned that NOAA, an agency widely respected for its scientific integrity, appeared to have been co-opted by the White House spin machine. "NOAA has actively pushed back on every fact that has ever come out," says one ocean scientist who works with the agency. "They're denying until the facts are so overwhelming, they finally come out and issue an admittance." Others are furious at the agency for criticizing the work of scientists studying the oil plumes rather than leading them. "Why they didn't have vessels there right then and start to gather the scientific data on oil and what the impacts are to different organisms is inexcusable," says a former government marine biologist. "They should have been right on top of that." Only six weeks into the disaster did the agency finally deploy its own research vessel to investigate the plumes.

Its a long article, but well worth the read.

Its ironic, from my view, that the Gulf spill has finally crystallized a narrative that joins the evil twins in common cause. The left are down on corporate America, and in my experience, they are right--large corporations are bureaucracies every bit as "evil" as the right's boogeyman--the federal government. My perspective on this has never been popular, because the political environment was always either/or. Here finally, we see how mega-bureaucracies whether government or public corporation, avoid accountability, liability and disclosure whenever possible and frankly even when its impossible. The system rewards appearances and actively discourages expressions of character such as accountability, initiative, courage, etc...

Is it possible to change large bureaucracies? I've seen good evidence that principled leadership can mitigate the worst effects. Clearly that's not going to happen while Barack Obama remains President, and in BP's case, not while its current management team holds the reins.