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Companies involved in the sinking of the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon made "some very major mistakes," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday after meeting with executives from the oil company BP.

Salazar would not elaborate, telling reporters in Houston, Texas, that the cause remains under investigation. But he said the failure of the rig's blowout preventer -- a critical piece of equipment designed to shut off the flow of oil in an emergency -- was "a huge malfunction" that has left oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

"The investigation will lead to conclusions about what exactly happened, but it didn't work the way it was supposed to work," Salazar said. "And from my own preliminary observations, there were some very major mistakes that were made by the companies that were involved. But today is not really the day to deal with those issues."

The Coast Guard and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service are leading the investigation into the loss of the drill rig, owned by BP contractor Transocean Ltd.

BP owns the damaged well at the heart of the slick. Efforts to shut down the well have failed, leaving it spewing about 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico.

There was no immediate response to Salazar's comments from BP, which has blamed Transocean.

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The oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills.

U.S. regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn't have one. With the remote control, a crew can attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself is damaged or evacuated.

The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn't needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.

An acoustic trigger costs about $500,000, industry officials said. The Deepwater Horizon had a replacement cost of about $560 million, and BP says it is spending $6 million a day to battle the oil spill. On Wednesday, crews set fire to part of the oil spill in an attempt to limit environmental damage.

While U.S. regulators have called the acoustic switches unreliable and prone, in the past, to cause unnecessary shut-downs, Inger Anda, a spokeswoman for Norway's Petroleum Safety Authority, said the switches have a good track record in the North Sea. "It's been seen as the most successful and effective option," she said.

Industry critics cite the lack of the remote control as a sign U.S. drilling policy has been too lax. "What we see, going back two decades, is an oil industry that has had way too much sway with federal regulations," said Dan McLaughlin, a spokesman for Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson. "We are seeing our worst nightmare coming true."

U.S. regulators have considered mandating the use of remote-control acoustic switches or other back-up equipment at least since 2000. After a drilling ship accidentally released oil, the Minerals Management Service issued a safety notice that said a back-up system is "an essential component of a deepwater drilling system."

The industry argued against the acoustic systems. A 2001 report from the International Association of Drilling Contractors said "significant doubts remain in regard to the ability of this type of system to provide a reliable emergency back-up control system during an actual well flowing incident."

By 2003, U.S. regulators decided remote-controlled safeguards needed more study. A report commissioned by the Minerals Management Service said "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."

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Environmental Attorney Mike Papantonio explains how Bush-Cheney Deregulation directly led to the British Petroleum Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, by allowing Big Oil to skip a simple and inexpensive safety measure that many other nations require. The BP spill was threatening the gulf from Louisiana to Florida at the time this video was uploaded. "License To Spill" was granted by then-vice president Dick Cheney at his infamous closed-door meeting with oil company.

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A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force in 2001 - something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recent as last week by industry officials testifying before the US Congress.
The document shows that officials from Exxon Mobil, Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil and BP America met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides, who were developing a national energy policy, of which some parts became law while others are still being debated.

In addition, Cheney had a separate meeting with John Browne, BP America's chief executive, a person familiar with the task force's work said. That meeting is not noted in the document.

Alan Huffman, who was a Conoco manager until the 2002 merger with Phillips, confirmed meeting with the task force. "We met in the Executive Office Building, if I remember correctly," he said.

The person familiar with the task force's work said the document was based on records kept by the Secret Service of people admitted to the White House complex. Most meetings were with Andrew Lundquist, the task force executive director, and Cheney aide Karen Knutson.

On March 22, the task force met with BP America regional president Bob Malone, chief economist Peter Davies and company employees Graham Barr and Deb Beaubien.

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Bill Galston makes a very convincing case that the Bush Administration's pro-oil disdain for environmental regulation, starring Dick Cheney, prevented the government from requiring a remote control backup device that would have prevented the spill. The device costs $500,000 per well. The spill will cost billions.:

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After the Bush administration took office, the MMS (Minerals Management Service) became a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest. In September 2008, Earl Devaney, Interior’s Inspector General, delivered a report to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that has to be read to be believed. One section, headlined “A Culture of Ethical Failure,” documented the belief among numerous MMS staff that they were “exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the Federal Government.” They adopted a “private sector approach to essentially everything they did.” This included “opting themselves out of the Ethics in Government Act.” On at least 135 occasions, they accepted gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies with whom they worked. One of the employees even had a lucrative consulting arrangement with a firm doing business with the government. And in a laconic sentence that speaks volumes, the IG reported: “When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse.”

Is there a connection between his infamous secret energy task force and the corrupt mindset that came to dominate a key program within MMS? Would $500,000 per rig have been regarded as an unacceptably expensive insurance policy if a drill-baby-drill administration hadn’t placed its thumb so heavily on the scale?

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David Corn is the first to preach the narrative that a secret energy task force led by Cheney resulted in negligent oil drilling regulations. "Remember the Dick Cheney energy task force. It actually recommended against doing that [having an emergency shut-off switch] because it was too expensive," Corn said.

On CNN, RFK Jr. recounts the same notion, blaming Dick Cheney.

Radio host Bill Press today: "Let's keep our eye on the prize here, right. The focus, the villain here is BP, the villain is Transocean as you pointed out, the villain is Halliburton and the villain is the Bush-Cheney interior department that let these guys get away with murder."

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While the Right furiously tries to pin the Gulf Oil Spill on President Obama, the facts tell a different story. This is the story of rampant deregulation in a never-ending ode to Profit as King, as propagated by the Bush/Cheney administration across all sectors of our economy, which didn’t end with Wall Street or mortgage lending or Enron. Indeed, the deregulation scandals extend now to off-shore drilling in the form of the missing Valve, a remote shut-off device called an acoustic switch. Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton (an oil-services company), may have had his hand in the Department of Interior’s decision not to mandate the valve for off-shore oil rigs.

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