The Threads Come Together? Obama Foreknowledge?

I want to be very careful about this post and the information presented. There will be a link below to an article posted on Oilprice.com and re-posted on Of Goats and Men where I actually took the below snippet from.

According to the Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) sources within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Pentagon and Interior and Energy Departments told the Obama Administration that the newly-discovered estimated 3-4 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico would cover America's oil needs for up to eight months if there was a military attack on Iran that resulted in the bottling up of the Strait of Hormuz to oil tanker traffic, resulting in a cut-off of oil to the United States from the Persian Gulf.

I know that Wayne Madsen has very mixed responses to a lot of his material and I, too, do not accept everything I read on WMR as fact until I check it out further. This piece, however, is breaking news that, if its accurate, is absolutely explosive. Here is the link:

ofgoatsandmen.blogspot.com...

I would wait until someone else posts this, and if someone has, you can take this down or I'll withdraw it, but I think that White House foreknowledge of the drilling at Macondo site by Deep Water Horizon changes everything. The possible value of this is that would explain a lot of why the inspection was waived or lax, why things were hurried by BP (and possibly Halliburton, as well), why there is such a total black out on information initially and information is only dribbled out, even today, and beyond corporate secrecy, why BP had everyone signing waivers not to talk.

Like I said, I do not take this as gospel truth at this point, but it is an explosive claim by Medsen and he has been right on several things I've looked into, but also wrong on occasion as well. Is the veil of secrecy on virtually every aspect of the blow out due, at least initially, because it was part of a hurried set-up for military action against Iran and what one would assume would be a retaliatory closing of the Straights of Hormuz?

Like I said, I don't know, but would like to throw it out for what you think about this.

I know some folks immediately dismiss Madsen as unreliable or dis-info and I suppose you'll let that be known no matter what I ask, but if you can just take the info and think about it and maybe add to it the information involved, it might illuminate some dark corners of the Gulf Oil Disaster.

OK. So this was mislabeled when I posted it on the UFO forum, which was my mistake for noticing that before I posted. It's been moved to skunk works, which would by all appearances be where threads go on their way to quick and hopefully, painless at least, death.

For that reason, I'm trying to add some evidence to consider to see if it can be resuscitated. Madsen only cites "inside sources" which is really not much more controversial than many NY Times stories term "unnamed" sources within the White House, Congress, Defense Department, etc. So, how can I actually try and fill in some background supporting evidence?

For starters, there has been increasing tensions with Iran for weeks now, ever since the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad several months ago. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wast
Source: www.presstv.ir...

On an interview with Fault Lines in August of last year, Admiral Mullen discussed with evident awareness of his role as the head of the US Military NOT to say too much about US policy on the difficulties facing us in Afghanistan:

www.youtube.com...

Mullen later traveled to Israel to smooth things over:

Source: www.presstv.ir...

Tensions in the Middle East have been high all year, with US drone strikes in Yemen, Joe Biden's dust up with Israel in March and subsequent statements by Hillary Clinton to back Biden and show solidarity within the WJ on Israel policy. Here's a collage of news reports from the end of 2009, beginning of 2010

Source: www.presstv.ir...

An aborted Israeli air strike against Iran supposedly occurred late this spring:

www.globalresearch.ca...

And of course the Gulf Disaster was in full swing by then. The information on the Wayne Madsen post would have been occurring simultaneously with the Israeli training and deploying of Aircraft for such a strike. The Gordon Duff article is admittedly short on dates and sources, so that has to be considered. It does seem to be well within the parameters of actions Israel has taken before against Syria and ones we feared they might take against Iraq during the First Gulf War in 1992-92.

The principles in the White Hours during Madsen's article's time frame were Stephen Chu, Secretary of the Interior Salazar, and I presume Clinton and Biden must have beeni in the loop somewhere too. So you have a plausible background for a policy to speed up oil production in the Gulf by hastening the well permitting and drilling at Macondo / Deep Horizon, the pressure of a fairly imminent Israeli action against Iran throughout first half of the year along with perceptions that we won't be able to avoid involvement if that happens. Tensions between Israel and the US since the middle of 2008 not only existed over that prospect, but led a normally politically proper Admiral Mullen to speak out in the middle of 2008 about the potential dangers of Israel mousetrapping us into a military confrontation with Iran and a lot of diplomacy being focused on the tightrope of trying to hold Israel back, intimidate Iran over the nuclear inspection issue, repair US Israeli tensions and yet be ready to move against Iran whether we wanted to or not to maintain commitments to Israel.

The context does nothing to diminish Madsen's claims. Does it do enough to make it more credible? This week a fleet movement of 12 US ships, including a carrier moved through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea and beyond. It was accompanied by one Israeli Corvette. It may not be unprecedented, but why is an Israeli ship in that flotilla? I don't think at all that the Gulf Disaster is a false flag. The dimensions are too enormously "self damaging" to be that, but are we going ahead with a preemptive strike that was on the table to keep Israel from igniting a full-scale Middle East War on their volition? The potential consequences of that seem enormous too, but we've building pressure on Iran since the middle of the Bush Administration - enough to provoke the normally non-political Admiral Mullen to break silence near the end of the Bush term which is tantalizing sign that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al were actually planning to widen Middle East hostilities against Iran, as Seynour Hersch claimed in the April 17, 2008 issue of the New Yorker.

www.newyorker.com...

As I said, before, I don't claim Madsen is right. I do claim it's worth discussing.

Something to Ponder: What's in a Name



Macondo Formation ...the BP well-head gusher in the GoM

Macondo: 'The novel is the history of the founding, development, and death of a human settlement, Macondo, and of the most important family in that town, the Buendias"
......the Novel: 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'Marquez ........


Is there a 'woo-woo' synchronicity wrapped up in the name 'Macondo'?


can the Novels' main family, ~the Buendias~ be an analog of the present day BP and the whole Mega Oil Family & their brood of Lobbysts... who are as equally as deranged, lascivious, morally challenged as the novel's Buendias'

Will this Gulf contamination result in its own "100 years of solitude" ...as in a dead, hydrocarbon sea?


Why did this site get named 'Macondo"?
is there a hidden coincidence/ or drama being played out because of the name ->
or was there a subliminal psyche drive to name the place & formation 'Macondo'
... because it was either destiny or human direction which has a hand in the ongoing disaster, which we do not quite understand?

it all gives a fuzzy edge to the idea that this was all pre-planned, plotted,
perhaps not exactly as has transpired...but with and equivelent final outcome... the GoM becoming a dead sea for generations = 100 years of Solitude?


the cornerstone of this plot theory:

records.viu.ca...

[edit on 23-6-2010 by St Udio]

reply to post by St Udio


Wow! You must like going down backalleys a lot to get to this thread! I read the piece on Marquez and it's pretty interesting.

The narrative is given to us, for the most part, following this linear sense of time, so that we always know roughly where we are in this linear story. And we know because of the nature of the various "invasions" which occur. Usually outsiders arrive bringing the latest in technology or bureaucracy: gypsies, government officials, priests, various military forces, the ubiquitous lawyers, the railway, the American capitalists, the European with the bicycle and the passion for airplanes, and so on. We repeatedly experience these invasions as something over which the town has no control and which have come with no previous warning. And in most cases the people have no immediate sense of how to react. The reactions we do witness, from Jose Arcadio's response to the gypsies to the reaction of the citizens to the telephone and movies, are often amusingly eccentric and unpredictable, but they point to a constant in the world of Macondo: the powerlessness of the people to take charge of the invasions which arrive from outside. Macondo, you will recall, is founded initially almost by accident. It just happens to be where the Buendia expedition decides to stop. There is no particular reason for stopping there, and no one has a very clear idea of where they are, except that they are in the middle of a number of natural barriers, for all they know cut off from all contact with civilization. And so they found Macondo, the city of mirrors or mirages, an innocent and idyllic community, with no sense of history or no particular political reason for being there. It is an expression of the imaginative desires of Jose Arcadio, who has sought to flee his past and is incapable, because of his overheated imagination, of creating a political future for his community

Nice post! Thanks for responding and I think there is either tremendous irony at play there, or something more insidious. I'm not sure which.

This thread has recently been rescued from the limbo of Skunkworks, so I'd like to add a few things to consider along side the information posted above.

If Wayne Madsen is correct that BP was hurried by the White House to develop the Macondo site in preparation for an eventual strike against Iran that would involve a retaliatory closing of oil traffic through the Straights of Hormuz, what kind of things might more directly support the perception that that might happen?

I ran across this morning after I posted the thread.

www.ibtimes.com...

and this:

www.almasryalyoum.com...

Iran planned, announced and ran Revolutionary Guard exercises over the course of a few days starting on April 21-22, 2010

They did this in response to Hillary Clinton's ongoing negotiations with China to join in sanctions on Iran in March.

www.reuters.com...

Negotiations which would be successfully concluded just this month. This is from an Esquire article from April 22, 2010 as well:

"With a country like China — which gets a significant amount of its oil from Iran, which has investments in Iran, whose single-minded devotion to increasing the standard of living of its people depends on having the national resources to do so — how do we make the case that this is not an easy choice for you: We understand that. But if your goal is to ensure that you have the natural resources in order to be able to grow your economy, then you have to be aware of what instability in the Gulf and potential conflict would do to you. [The Chinese] have to know that there are neighbors of Iran that will even go to the extent of engaging in military action to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons, which could very likely shut down the Gulf, and therefore that would be a direct that would be far beyond any abstract notion of instability. It would hit their bottom line and their pocketbook." Read more: www.esquire.com...

Pressure on Iran has been building since the early 2000s, but in the first part of 2010 Clinton and Obama's UN representative were bringing on a renewed level of pressure after it had dropped off a bit because of CIA reports in 2008 that Iran had no discernible nuclear weapons development activity. By May this year the UN would sign onto another round of inspections through the IEAE:

www.reuters.com...

Obama's Iran policy is shaping up very much like the Bush policy from 2005-08, complete with infiltration of Iran by US special forces to prepare for an anti-nuclear strike against Iran right now:

www.timesonline.co.uk...=OTC-RSS&attr=797093

So all of this is circumstantial support that White House may have been applying pressure on BP for the Deep Horizon Well which compounded the stress aboard the rigs and led to a series of hurried jobs and fatal errors.

When we consider the somewhat lackadaisical reaction or claims that Obama was "studying the problem" when confronted by the leading edge of the Deepwater Disaster, his response could be interpreted as stonewalling instead. If he had something to had and plans for military intervention in process, the perception that the Gulf Coast was exposed to long-term or permanent damage would not have aided his future attempt to rally Americans behind an Iran strike, either by special forces or air, especially not if the air strikes were nuclear at a point.

This should be at the front of the thread, but I've been working on Madsen's thesis and it's only just coming together in fuller form now. Once again, that doesn't mean I'm arguing it's true - only laying out the argument why it might be.

That fore-knowledge of the Obama administration does change everything. I'm not surprised. Its just a really large scientific experiment, lets find the results. Not me, not BP who wants to be done with this disaster.

If you or I were president, would we not call on all US oil companies to assist BP in their efforts? Not mandatory, but beneficial to them for their co-operation.

This oil spill is but a stepping stone in a much bigger plot.

Nice thread S&F. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out BP was being pushed for the PTB's plans against Iran. They are after all criminals in the end and our well being, safety, and wishes are none of their concern when it comes to their actions and policies.

reply to post by TC Mike


Hi TC, The whole things smells of something more than it seems on the surface; that I would agree and, yes, If I were president and I would have immediately put out a call for - or actually I wouldn't have had to because people were offering - help.

I'm an academic by trade, so I was trained to dismiss the whole ideas of "conspiracies" throughout my college years and a little of that still remains. Things turned upside down for me when I agreed to help a friend look into the mysterious "suicide" of her father who had been a naval intelligence officer and worked on classified projects with a local think tank in the Silicon Valley. Since I was a Cold War historian, she thought I might see something she was missing. Somehow, I had gone through a master's degree and almost a PhD, without having heard of MkUltra and when she told me about it I just kept saying nah, nah, nah, they're not that crazy; it doesn't work that way. But, f&@%k me, if project after project wasn't verifiably true.

Ever since then I've been poking into the darkest shadows of the MIC and intelligence world. So, nothing surprises me totally anymore and I never reject the idea that a conspiracy might exist unless I can prove it doesn't. I know proving it does is much more difficult so preponderance of evidence is my guide.

Is this one big experiment? It would be the mother of all of experiments if it were. Will scientists working on the problem turn it into an experiment while they work? Count on it; that's the way the scientific mind works and we don't teach many ethics in science programs, so if a puzzle is interesting enough, who it might hurt goes out the window. Not necessarily because of inherent evil, but simply because good and evil are not relevant once the work is on.

Politics is different and I think it may everything to do with that, or at least a good deal to do with that. But politicians are usually trained with some political science background or learn to operate withing their theories and nearly all political science theory in America derives from psychology and game theory and there you are back at MkUltra and science gone deeply, deeply wrong. In poli-sci ethics rarely escapes the gravity of Machiavelli or Nietzsche and so ethics doesn't count much there either.

The psychology comes in the side door through mathematics and game theory and the idea of Nash Equilibrium - that we are all rational actors and will choose to maximize our own interests and other people are so motivated that way too. Psychology reduced to a mathematically quantifiable set of behaviors or decisions. This took hold at RAND Institute and political science still is dominated by games like the "prisoner's dilemma." No one ever thought they maybe should reassess the theory even after it failed miserably to produce the results they wanted when they tried it out on their working class staff who tended to cooperate rather than balance interests against each other. It did tend to work with people from elite circles though, probably because they Yale or Harvard revel in Machiavelli.

My point is this: I think this may be a convergence of scientific experiment with elite political psychology and all in a shell of big corporate power games and Washington D.C. politcs/geopolitics gone wrong. That may me entirely over thinking it, but if that's what you mean by experiment - at least in the neighborhood of it, I agree. If you think they set out to see what would happen if they blew the well and had results in mind from that, I kind of doubt it because I can't see what the end game might be, with the possible exception of de-population and that could be achieved so much easier and with less cost with bio-agents. On the other hand, the Gulf coast is inhabited with the old and African Americans who are "expendable" people.

reply to post by Redwookieaz


Thanks Redwookieaz, the idea just really tweaked me when I read it and I know enough about politics and Cold War history to know that people do make plans and sometimes plans go badly wrong as elites push the boundaries of their power as it balances with their plans - or goes out of balance in this case, which I think may be a plausible explanation for this.

Last thing I want to do is let BP off the hook for this, and I don't think they wold be necessarily because they might have seen major potential in both sales of oil to the Strategic Oil Reserve and get to try pushing the boundaries of anything they'd drilled in the past to see if it could be done. If they were under time pressure though as the White House put the screws on their deadlines, it would explain them cutting corners and screwing up. And it also would explain the complete laxness of government inspectors beyond the simply the typically cozy relationship they tend to have with the industries they regulate.

Pressure is rolling downhill all the way. From the pressure on the White House and Pentagon of a potential Israeli strike on Iran which blow up the Middle East completely, to the Pentagon to get plans for a preemptive strike together and Hillary Clinton to try and assemble a package of sanctions and inspections to put pressure on Iran to open up to inspections, to covering our energy ass (and China's) in case the Straights of Hormuz get closed if it comes to a strike against Iran by getting BP to tap this immense deep water oil field in record time and at record depths.

The responsibility nests in the White House though, because there always other options to handle a crisis like that without resorting to simply hitting Iran before Israel does. And it also rests there because everything Obama would do or didn't do and didn't disclose is built on covering the White House role in this.

I hate to think this is the case, but it kind of fits a lot of the somewhat curious response we've been seeing. Why the hell, for instance, are armed guards keeping people off the waters and away from the beaches? If it was just BP's fault? Of course, there are other possible less shadowy answers: like BP just trying to limit knowledge to avoid the potential magnitude of fines and that no doubt plays a part, but why would the White House not be trying then to bring it out in full daylight every step of the way and just blame the damn oil company? It would be good for the President's approval ratings. Why is the navy and Coast Guard out there destroying animal corpses before people know the magnitude of ecological destruction and on and on? It's a complicate puzzle, but Occam's razor was a rule of thumb, not something meant to explain every situation.

If you have more to add. Please do: this is way beyond my overstretched mind or resources.

I'm checking out for the night, but will check back in on this tomorrow. AS I put this to bed, though, I want to add some material that might or would got to the argument that BP is simply not a responsible, methodical or human rights friendly or environmentally friendly company. Here's and article on the half billion dollar grant BP was on the verge of giving (and did eventually give) UCB when Seven Chu was there. I'll put an example up from this student opposition article (there was also major faculty opposition) on the BP pipeline from Azerbajian to to Turkey.

Since construction work began on the pipeline, there have also been various reports of construction problems and irregularities. In February 2004, the British Sunday Times revealed that a faulty paint had been used for the many of the joints in Azerbaijan and Georgia, potentially requiring the pipeline to be dug up and recoated. In June of 2004, there were reports from engineers working on the pipeline who documented a number of failings in pipeline construction methods, such as the use of inappropriate materials and a failure to hire proper specialists to advise on crossing seismic faults in the earthquake-prone region. One industry expert said “We are engineers, not soothsayers. Pipelines are designed on proven evidence to work. But in the case of BTC it has an in-built flaw and will eventually fail.” In November 2003, BP secretly suspended construction work on the Azeri and Georgian sectors of the project for 10 weeks after cracking was discovered in the pipeline coating. BP later admitted that more than a quarter of the Georgian joints were cracked. The company claims to have rectified the cracking with heat treatment; however, experience in other pipelines reveals that this solution does not work.

here's the website where you can find the whole article and other documents on BP>

www.corpwatch.org...

There are literally dozens of docs and article here and at:

www.stopbp-berkeley.org...

It's a slice of what we know about them outside Exxon Valdeez.

One more link that boosts a BP "only" side of the argument. A very similar kind disaster at a Texas Oil Refinery owned by BP sometime before 2007 a few years:

www.chron.com...

The Texas City explosion occurred when part of the plant's isomerization unit, which boosts the level of octane in gasoline, overfilled with highly flammable liquid hydrocarbons. A geyser-like release of flammable liquid and vapor ignited as the unit started up. Alarms and gauges that should have warned of the overfilling equipment failed to work at the plant about 40 miles southeast of Houston. The unit had a history of problems and was not hooked up to a flare system that burns off vapor and could have prevented or minimized the accident, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, one of several agencies looking into the blast.

BP may have a history of using cutting edge technology, but not particularly one of using it safely, or well.

I know this thread has been fairly well dormant for a week or two, but I came across this article that might strengthen, slightly, the idea that Obama or the White House might have been exerting some pressure on BP to get Macondo up and running.

www.google.com...

If the US was (or is) preparing for an action against Iran, they will need to include plans that their Afghanistan oil will not get interrupted should the Straight of Hormuz be closed in a conflict with Iran or from retaliation by any US strike on Iran. BP would be one of the major suppliers they would depend on to keep the oil flowing and this a little bit of proof for that. Not decisive support by any means, but brick by brick . . .

From your link...

President Obama and Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were informed that BP would drill an unprecedented 35,000 feet well bore at the Macondo site off the coast of Louisiana. In September 2009, the Deepwater Horizon successfully sunk a well bore at a depth of 35,055 below sea level at the Tiber Prospect in the Keathley Canyon block 102 in the Gulf of Mexico, southeast of Houston.

During the September drilling operations, the Deepwater Horizon drill penetrated a massive undersea oil deposit but BP's priorities changed when the Macondo site in the Mississippi Canyon off the coast of Louisiana was found to contain some 3-4 billion barrels of oil in an underground cavern estimated to be about the size of Mount Everest. It was as a result of another 35,000 feet well bore sank by the Deepwater Horizon at the Macondo site that the catastrophic explosion occurred on April 20.

Correct me if I am reading this wrong, but it sounds like the motivation for leaving the 35,000' tiber well site was the huge size of the Macondo prospect, 3-4 billion barrels.

According to Wiki the Tiber oil reserve is 4-6 billion barrels.

Are we back to that 35,000 ft figure again? That is what I was seeing a month or more ago. BP's own graphics say it's only 18,000 from the surface, or 13,000 from the seafloor. The depth issue was discussed in one of the threads here but I don't recall which one.