A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
The wording of the press release heavily implies that no waiver requests have yet been received, and says flat out, "Even if the Jones Act applies, a foreign flagged vessel can still conduct certain planned operations as part of the BP oil spill response if the vessel is an oil spill response vessel and meets the requirements of 46 USC § 55113."
And on the 10th, in response to a question about Jones Act waivers, Robert Gibbs made it clear that the Jones Act had not been an issue at all, saying "as Admiral Allen said today, we are using equipment and vessels from countries like Norway, Canada, the Netherlands. There has not been any problem with this. If there is the need for any type of waiver, that would obviously be granted. But this — we’ve not had that problem thus far in the Gulf." Again, implying that no waivers had been issued because none had been needed, and foreign-owned vessels were operating in the Gulf, assisting in the cleanup, just fine, Jones Act or no Jones Act.
And according to this June 10 Fox News blog post, Admiral Allen explicitly said "Nobody has come to me with a request for a Jones Act waiver" when asked directly about it by Fox News.
The statements about waivers in the press release, then, seem to be more along the lines of "We haven't waived anything because we haven't needed to, but in response to the issue being raised, and just in case we need them in the future, we're setting up an expedited process for waivers", and not "We had no expedited waiver process before and that was holding things up, so now we have one."
None of the foreign vessels currently operating in the Gulf as part of the cleanup required waivers, after all. What's different about all these other (presumed) offered-yet-not-accepted foreign vessels that makes the lack of waivers an issue and is preventing those ships from assisting the same way the existing non-waivered ships are assisting?
Last edited:
