What changed the game in the Gulf

[impik]

Eugene Robinson:


Flying back to Washington from Pensacola, Fla., on June 15, President Obama and the man he put in charge of handling the gulf oil spill, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, had a come-to-Jesus talk. The administration was getting hammered for a slow and disorganized response to the environmental disaster, and the president wanted to know, then and there, what resources Allen needed to get the job done. Obama made clear, in Allen's words, that "there would be no do-overs."

That conversation aboard Air Force One marked what Allen, in a recent interview, told me was the "pivotal point" in the effort to contain the biggest spill in U.S. history. Allen said he told Obama that his most urgent problem wasn't with anything that was taking place underwater or along the Gulf of Mexico coastline, but in the sky.

Helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft were buzzing above the oil spill in an uncoordinated swarm, accomplishing little of value and barely managing not to crash into one another -- there had already been eight near-miss incidents. What he desperately needed, Allen told the president, was military control of the airspace. Obama gave the order to make it so.

"We needed to manage the situation as a three-dimensional battle space," Allen recalls. "I got up at four the next morning and wrote an e-mail explaining to everyone that we were going to move away from a traditional spill response and go to 3-D battle management."

Allen said this change made all the difference. With a command center at Tyndall Air Force Base near Pensacola coordinating all air traffic in the area, Allen could stop worrying so much about possible accidents and deploy his ad hoc fleet of military and civilian aircraft more effectively to find the widely dispersed sheets and ribbons of oil.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/09/AR2010080904869.html

[alcibiades_mystery]

1. NO! Military command of the airspace was an attempt to censor blah blah vblah

...all the brilliant journalists at Z Magazine...blah blah blah...who report the TRUTH, speak TRUTH to blah blah blah...

[lunatica]

2. I have become very cynical about this

Now we get a story about how good it is to control prying eyes, without actually saying it. It was those pesky people wildly flying around that were hindering the efforts. The fact that there were no accidents and that we have to take his word for it that said aircraft were getting in the way can now be dismissed as irrelevant.

Sorry, but for me this doesn't pass the smell test. They're catapulting that propaganda as hard as they can, and the Washington Post is their catapult. I didn't see any evidence of investigative follow up on anything Thad Allen said.