The blame game is heating up today in the wake of a presidential panel's early release of key findings about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The commission released a chapter last night of a report that provides some new details about missteps that led to the spill and squarely blames the disaster on a "failure of management" by the three companies involved in the project -- BP PLC, Halliburton Co. and Transocean Ltd. The full report is due out next week.

"Whatever irreducible uncertainty may persist regarding the precise contribution to the blowout of each of several potentially immediate causes, no such uncertainty exists about the blowout's root causes," the chapter says. "The blowout was not the product of a series of aberrational decisions made by rogue industry or government officials that could not have been anticipated or expected to occur again."

It adds: "Rather, the root causes are systemic and, absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur."

Despite overarching concerns about industry management, the chapter specifically calls out the three companies for a series of actions that contributed to the disaster and questions communication between BP and Halliburton on some decisions. The chapter also highlights a 2009 incident on board another Transocean drilling rig, calling the incident an "eerily similar near-miss."

"The basic facts of both incidents are the same. Had the rig crew been adequately informed of the prior event and trained on its lessons, events at Macondo may have unfolded very differently," the chapter says.

But the companies aren't taking the commission's findings lightly. Halliburton and Transocean are both chalking up their involvement in the disaster as being under the direction of BP.

"Consistent with industry standards, the procedures being conducted in the final hours were crafted and directed by BP engineers and approved in advance by federal regulators," a Transocean spokesman said in an e-mailed statement.

Halliburton's response: "Halliburton acted at the direction of BP, as acknowledged in several places in the National Commission report."

But BP is playing up the fact that the commission's findings conclude the accident "was the result of multiple causes, involving multiple companies."

The companies are carefully treading around the blame issue as culpability in the disaster, fines, liability for cleanup costs and future offshore operating status are all yet to be determined.

William Reilly, former U.S. EPA administrator under President George H.W. Bush and co-chairman of the panel, said the findings point to a "systemwide problem."

"My observation of the oil industry indicates that there are several companies with exemplary safety and environment records. So a key question posed from the outset by this tragedy is, do we have a single company, BP, that blundered with fatal consequences, or a more pervasive problem of a complacent industry?" Reilly said. "Given the documented failings of both Transocean and Halliburton, both of which serve the offshore industry in virtually every ocean, I reluctantly conclude we have a systemwide problem."

But the industry has been quick to defend itself.

Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, said the "human failures that led to Macondo can and will be corrected."

And while the American Petroleum Institute has not yet released a formal statement, the trade group's president and CEO, Jack Gerard, said earlier this week at an event in Washington that "the general public today believes it was an isolated incident."

"When you look at the experience of the industry, we've been in the Gulf for over 65 years and have drilled over 42,000 wells. This clearly was a rare incident," Gerard said.

Environmentalists offered a different take.

"Reality shows us that oil disasters are tragically common," Miles Grant, a spokesman for the National Wildlife Federation, wrote in an e-mail to reporters this morning. "The Deepwater Horizon wasn't even the only oil rig explosion in the Gulf last year -- another blast in September injured a worker and sent a plume of thick black smoke into the sky."

Click here to read the chapter.