BP Cover Up: Are Mainstream Media and the Federal Government Helping the Oil Giant Play Us All for Fools?

Something smells fishy in the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s not the oily seafood or dead marine life.

The BP oil spill began over 100 days ago, and news coming from the Gulf has suddenly taken a drastic turn from being harrowing and tragic to overly positive and optimistic in tone. While BP’s current success plugging the leaking well with its “static kill” operation is certainly reason to rejoice, favorable reports claiming that 75% of the over 200 million gallons of leaked oil has been taken care of, fishing areas are safe to reopen, and that the region will make a quick and resilient recovery all sound a bit too good to be true.

Are BP and the federal government simply trying to sweep the nation’s worst environmental disaster under the rug, sugarcoating the true extent of the disaster, and hoping the country’s collective attention will quickly forget the mess until it’s too late to hold proper parties responsible?

Advocating outlandish conspiracy theories is one thing, but it’s not unreasonable to question the mainstream media and federal government’s collusion with BP in recently shifting the perceived attitude toward the horrendous catastrophe from justice-seeking anger to “no big deal,” especially considering BP’s history of shady behavior in restricting media access and contorting their own public image since oil began gushing from their busted deep-water well in April.

Just last week, multiple large media outlets began reporting that cleanup crews in the Gulf were having a hard time locating oil. National Incident Commander Thad Allen even said, “What we’re trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it.”

But not everyone was fooled — “Mother Jones’” Mac McClelland only had to send a few quick texts to receive firsthand reports from the Gulf that oil was not only still invading beaches and coastlines, but largely untouched by any BP crews.

Despite this, the mass deception of disappearing oil continued to be perpetuated, and with timing that seemed too precise and perfect to be mere coincidence, BP announced a “scaleback” of their costly cleanup operations.

With the oil “missing” and the well capped, the government began reopening many fishing areas. It’s understandable that BP would want to rush fisherman back to work, rather than compensate them for lost wages — but most of them aren’t buying the government’s claims that the seafood is safe, and are having a hard time believing they can just jump back into the lives they had before the spill. Dawn Nunez — whose family has a shrimp business in Louisiana — told AP: “It’s nothing but a PR move. It’s going to take years to know what damage they’ve done.”

On Wednesday, the White House released some extremely optimistic and questionable data that at least 50 percent of the oil leaked from BP’s well is completely gone from the system. HuffPost’s Dan Froomkin points out that much of the report released by the NOAA didn’t reveal the underlying methodology, “leaving much of it looking like so much guesswork.”

Even some scientists have recently switched to an upbeat outlook, with one biologist telling AP, “The system may bounce back sooner than expected,” despite evidence to the contrary in areas like Alaska and Brazil that are still struggling to recover from much smaller oil spills multiple decades later.

But the most shocking allegations of all come from MNN’s Karl Burkart, who claims BP has been engaged with the federal government in a massive militarized cover-up operation, destroying huge amounts of dead wildlife to minimize the perceived impact of the spill and exonerate itself from the heavy fines it would face as a result.

Burkart makes a strong case, not from the two anonymous tips he received, but by pointing to the no-fly zone established by the government in June over the affected Gulf area, the strict journalist restrictions that have been the cause of much controversy, and the strange fact that statistics of reported dead wildlife have been extremely minimal and below expectations when compared to the massive size of the spill, the Gulf’s extensive and diverse wildlife, and the general numbers of affected wildlife recorded from other spills, such as the 1989 Exxon-Valdez spill.

Additionally, Burkart published aerial photos of what appears to be a large coastal waste processing facility, which critics argue is being used to discreetly dispose of whales. And it’s hard to contend with the argument that the federal government’s collaboration is due to the dire consequences they would also suffer if BP went bankrupt, which would be plausible were massive amounts of dead animals to turn up.

Jerry Cope and Charles Hambleton visited the Gulf and did some firsthand digging around to further corroborate the assertions with convincing eyewitness reports of large amounts of dead wildlife being inconspicuously disposed of (while under ominous guard), and established the general scene in the Gulf as a painfully devastated environment — far from what the media has been touting.

Considering BP’s record for malfeasance, these tremendous accusations are far from dismissible, especially in light of the convincing evidence. While the general public may play into the illusion and comfortably remain impassive to the true destruction wrought, moving on won’t be so easy for the obliterated ecosystem and uprooted residents of the Gulf.