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Factors that were going on in the gulf. you have dead people. you have a rig at the bottom of the gulf. you have injury to the fisheries. you have all kinds of things happening there. a catastrophe and the administration simply says, look, we needed to have a six-month time-out here to do that so tough for these folks to go into court and force the hand, get rid of the moratorium by saying the government did something wrong. >> yeah. and this is something the president wants so do you see this moratorium getting overturned? >> reporter: you know, this is sort of more of a political issue right...

A catastrophe and the administration simply says, look, we needed to have a six-month time-out here to do that so tough for these folks to go into court and force the hand, get rid of the moratorium by saying the government did something wrong. >> yeah. and this is something the president wants so do you see this moratorium getting overturned? >> reporter: you know, this is sort of more of a political issue right now in a lot of ways and there are people on capitol hill who were talking about ways to do this. legally it's very difficult, but mary landrieu, the senator from louisiana, for examp...

Operators being able to operate the rig safely. on an ongoing basis. and because of the size of the atlantis, four to five times the output of the deepwater, any fall your there would be four to five times the problem with the deepwater. >> when did you first bring the problems to bp and what did they say, how did they respond? >> anderson, what really bothers me is i have seen, you know, i tried for a year and a half to get the problem fixed. i knew from my experience as a project controls engineer that this was a deadly recipe for problems and for catastrophic errors, and it just didn't happ...

Into this disaster. and you still have this problem on the ground where our local leaders, and i mean, look, anderson, one of the big frustration is the local leaders are the only ones coming up with ideas to protect the marsh from the oil and told from bp and the federal government is, no, and they just find too many ways to say no instead of having real alternatives. they don't have any alternatives. all they do is tell our folks, well, there's reasons we don't want to do this or that instead of saying we want to work with you to stop this problem from getting into the marshes and the ecosys...

To what one official called catastrophic operator errors because they would assume they were correct. and why doesn't the interior department step in and shut down atlantis while bp gets the paper work in order? press secretary for the department said they could not comment because the matter is under litigation, but in a court filing, interior secretary ken salazar said the investigation of claims about atlantis should be done by mid-september. joe johns, cnn, washington. kenneth abbott is the whistle-blower you heard in joe's report. he gist just testified before congress. here's what he t...