that it is the equipment that makes deepwater drilling inherently risky, not drilling depth alone. quoting from his memo from monday, performance problems have also been identified in recent weeks with the blowout preventers on the relief wells that bp is drilling. the problems have been uncovered during new testing requirements that were imposed on the relief well, after the bp oil spill, thus providing more evidence that prior testing requirements were inadequate. it is unlikely that these problems are unique to bp. we re joined now by bob cavnar. who writes for the huffington post as well as his own website, the daily hurricane. bob, good evening. hi, keith, how are you? a 24-hour delay in testing that s now underway tonight. the testing will be underway tonight at some point, presumably. do you buy the explanations and the entire endeavor? no, i don t, keith. i don t understand this whole operation that they re undergoing right now. sunday was the first time i heard the wor
exceedingly careful that we don t do more damage as we try to solve this problem. and this, of course, begs the consideration of what to do about possible future problems in the gulf and in other deepwater drilling areas. once again, the administration has tried for a moratorium on drilling. we ll see how the courts handle this one. the last one, they stepped on it. is it necessary to have a moratorium when there are still questions about 45% to 50% of the blowout preventers on the deepwater wells? look it, there s 33 rigs out there. transocean has 10 of them. transocean is a swiss registered company that works out of the marshall islands and had a norwegian company doing the safety check on the deepwater horizon that sank to the bottom of the american gulf of mexico. and so we have to be very careful here. the only thing that s worse than one rig at the bottom of the
you uncovered it. you re the reason that a lot of this is being reported and actually looked into in the first place. good stuff. thanks. still ahead, we are talking about critics of the president s ban on deepwater drilling. they found an ally on the president s own oil spill commission. but whether or not that actually makes a difference for rig workers whose jobs are in limbo is another story. we ll talk about it with julia reed, contributor for newsweek and someone who s been very critical of the administration s deepwater drilling ban. we ll get her take still ahead.
drilling agreement between libya and british oil giant, bp. you are convinced there was a deal struck here. oh, absolutely. i smell the rat. we now see that bp had spoken to the uk, talk about this enormous $20 billion deal that might go on with libya and it might be soured if this man was returned. reporter: lautenberg and three other democratic senators are demanding investigations by the british government, the u.s. state department and the senate foreign relations committee. you re not a fan of offshore oil drilling. certainly deepwater drilling and bp. i mean these are not right. yeah,er in s not my choices, but that has nothing to do. the fact that it s bp? coincidence. reporter: the state department said it will look at the senator s request for an investigation but it seems not much can be done at this point about al megrahi s release. we also checked with bp. a spokesman said it is a matter of public record that in 2007 the company spoke with its
review? was it safe, yes. the white house says deepwater drilling is too dangerous until the cause of the spill is discover bud gulf coast resident says they cannot wait that long to get back to work. local officials in the gulf the obama administration s moratorium on deep water drilling is compounding the suffering in that region. charlotte made her case to the commission yesterday. what is it you believe, i think one of the concerns that the administration has is, okay if there is another blow, oil well that blew up tomorrow in a deepwater area in the gulf that they couldn t respond properly and it would completely make things andmy kill drilling forever in the gulf what do you say? i think what they are saying is that they are not sufficient