New evidence reveals US downplayed affect of BP spill on wildlife

Dead Sperm Whale after the Gulf disaster

We have written numerous blogs about the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the consequences of it that will not be fully known for years, including the effect on BlueFin tuna and other marine life that spawn there.

Like Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans as well as the failure of the Bush Administration to respond to it, the BP spill has quietly disappeared from the big business media.  The events of 911 although far less destructive than Katrina or the BP spill are kept in our collective memory as it is the result of foreigners we are told and is always useful in energizing domestic support for US foreign policy and its predatory wars.  The destruction that Katrina and the BP spill caused were results of domestic failure, no need to let the public in on the details of this.

But Greenpeace has information that the US government kept details of the BP spill and its damage to wildlife from the public's eye.  This shouldn't surprise us. 

The Guardian UK reported today:

"The images from the summer of 2010 were undoubtedly gruesome: the carcass of a young sperm whale, decayed and partially eaten by sharks, sighted at sea south of the Deepwater Horizon oil well.
It was the first confirmed sighting of a dead whale since the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April that year – a time of huge public interest in the fate of whales, dolphins, sea turtles and other threatened animals – and yet US government officials supressed the first reports of the discovery and blocked all images until now.

The photographs, along with a cache of emails obtained by the campaign group Greenpeace under freedom of information provisions and made available to the Guardian, offer a rare glimpse into how many whales came into close contact with the gushing BP well during the oil spill.

They also show Obama administration officials tightly controlling information about whales and other wildlife caught up in the disaster."

Where the Mississippi meets the Gulf of Mexico for a distance of 150 miles out was referred to as The Dead Zone prior to the BP spill as life was absent there due to the runnoff from farmland with all the poisons and fertilizers used in industrial farming.  Who knows what the BP spill has done, it is likely we will never know the full impact of this catastrophe, or the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.  We can be certain that the government will not inform us as this information provided by Greenpeace shows.

Read the rest of the article at the Guardian UK.