The Obama administration used the names of drilling experts to justify a ban on deep water drilling - despite the fact that 8 of these experts who were listed in the Interior Department report used as a basis for the moratorium say that their names had been used to justify a political decision:

When President Obama last month announced his six-month deepwater moratorium, he pointed to an Interior Department report of new "safety" recommendations. That report prominently noted that the recommendations it contained-including the six-month drilling ban-had been "peer-reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." It also boasted that Interior "consulted with a wide range" of other experts. The clear implication was that the nation's drilling brain trust agreed a moratorium was necessary.

As these columns reported last week, the opposite is true. In a scathing document, eight of the "experts" the Administration listed in its report said their names had been "used" to "justify" a "political decision." The draft they reviewed had not included a six-month drilling moratorium. The Administration added that provision only after it had secured sign-off. In their document, the eight forcefully rejected a moratorium, which they argued could prove more economically devastating than the oil spill itself and "counterproductive" to "safety."

The Administration insisted this was much ado about nothing. An Interior spokesman claimed the experts clearly had been called to review the report on a "technical basis," whereas the moratorium was a "comprehensive" question. Obama environment czar Carol Browner declared: "No one's been deceived or misrepresented." Really? We can only imagine the uproar if a group of climate scientists had claimed the Bush Administration misappropriated their views.

It gets worse.

The experts were certainly under the impression they were reviewing a comprehensive document, as some of the recommendations would take six months or even a year to implement. And the report they agreed to did address moratoria: It recommended a six-month ban on new deepwater permits. Yet Benton Baugh, president of Radoil, said that in at least two separate hour-and-a-half phone calls among Interior and the experts, there was no discussion of a moratorium on existing drilling. "Because if anybody had [made that suggestion], we'd have said 'that's craziness.'" 

The Obama administration is almost as good at "craziness" as they are at lying.