In its voluminous report on last year's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill found numerous examples of highly questionable, if not downright negligent, actions by BP officials that led to the rig explosion and well blowout.

So naturally, the White House-appointed panel blamed everyone in the oil industry for the problem. That's a convenient conclusion used to justify the administration's favored policies on drilling and energy.

According to the report, "Most of the mistakes and oversights ... can be traced back to a single overarching failure — a failure of management." Those failures included not adequately identifying risks created by late changes to well design and procedures, and not having adequate controls in place to ensure that key engineering decisions were safe or sound.

Furthermore, BP did not share important information with its contractors, or sometimes internally even with members of its own team.

Those general conclusions are buttressed with several specific examples where decisions made by BP (as well as contractors Transocean and Halliburton) managers increased the risk of a blowout. BP, however, had final say on the project. Better decisions, the panel argues, would have prevented disaster.

"A blowout in deepwater was not a statistical inevitability," the report says.

That echoes previous investigations of accidents involving BP properties going back several years. The company was found to lack "operating discipline," failed to communicate critical information and showed "complacency" toward risks. BP took shortcuts that put costs before safety.

So after indicting BP for failing to learn from its past mistakes, why does the Deepwater Horizon panel accuse the entire drilling industry of being complicit in the debacle? The commission believes systemic failures across the industry contributed to the tragedy.

For instance, it notes that Transocean and Halliburton work with other drilling companies. But the report shows that BP overruled its contractors on several key issues that led to the rig explosion and well blowout.

Why paint with such a broad brush? Not every drilling company has the same safety record, and BP's was the worst even before the Deepwater Horizon.

Accusing the entire industry allows the Obama administration to justify its blanket ban on drilling in 85 percent of America's waters and advocate for stronger regulatory controls. This also rewards BP by forcing its competitors to play under the same new restrictive rules created in response to BP's errors.

So the response to the failure of the current regulatory bureaucracy to control BP is to ... create even more regulations and bureaucracy, and to toss everyone into the same basket with BP. Making the system more complex, with even more opportunities for industry lobbyists to curry favor, hardly is an improvement.

The fallout for every American is higher energy prices. The government actions restrict supply and increase the cost of production, at a time when the price of gasoline at the pump is over $3 a gallon and heading toward $4.

Instead of increasing Washington's power over everyone, target the biggest culprit and hold it singularly responsible for this debacle so as to discourage anyone else from making the same mistakes.

REPRINTED FROM THE PANAMA CITY NEWS HERALD.