N.Y. Flyover Photo Released; White House Aide, Caldera, Fired Over Incident
Isn’t it convenient how this story breaks late Friday afternoon when people don’t care about news and just want to go home and relax for the weekend or partake in happy hour with friends?
A White House aide has lost his job for his role in Air Force One’s photo-op flyover over New York City. A White House official says Obama has accepted the resignation of military office director Louis Caldera. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Caldera’s departure ahead of a full report on the flight.
Caldera, a former Army secretary, took responsibility for the Air Force flyover that sparked panic in New York on April 27.
The White House conducted a review of the flight near the Statue of Liberty. The full review was set to be released Friday afternoon.
I guess Michelle Malkin’s prediction was correct after all! The White House has been exonerated, somebody else in the administration takes the fall, and this all unravels at the very end of the week… It’s as if this was written for film!
I would like to know who was on board and the real chain of command for taking Air Force One out for a spin. It is my understanding that the president has to approve of any and all usage of Air Force One!
Here’s the released photo:
(Photoshopped or Not? – you be the judge)
White House Flip Flop – Releasing ‘A’ Photo From N.Y. Flyover
They only obtained one photo for all of that? I thought they were in the air for a decent amount of time the other day. This definitely does not suffice as transparency or disclosure, nor does it resolve the questions being raised as to why there is so much secrecy and why this occurred in the first place!
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday that an internal report will probably be completed this week.
“We’ll release its findings and release a photo,” he said.
That was after Gibbs indicated Tuesday that the White House would not release any images.
Various people including Michelle Malkin and others have filed complaints under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), requesting the full disclosure of all photos taken that day.
Michelle Malkin makes (in my opinion) and accurate prediction:
More: Gibbs says its “review” of the incident will be concluded this week.
Bold prediction: Like all of Obama’s self-initiated reviews, this one will exonerate the White House of any wrongdoing or taxpayer malfeasance.
*Note the CIA “torture” photos are ok to release, Air Force One pictures, not so much. Hmmm… I wonder if Obama has a Kodak gallery account?
Here’s the photo that I have chosen for the flyover. I wonder which one the White House will choose.
Obama Refuses to Release Pictures of Air Force One Flying Through New York
So instead – I have put together a compilation of photo-ops from the day’s events.
I also would like to add that this is some of the transparency we can continue to expect from the Obama administration. “It’s a new day, it’s a new dawn and I’m feeling goooooood.”
“We have no plans to release them,” an aide to President Obama told The Post, refusing to comment further.
The sole purpose of the secret photo-op, which sent thousands of New Yorkers running for cover, was to take new publicity shots of the presidential jet over the city.
“The photos . . . are classified — that’s ridiculous,” Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., said.
New Yorkers said they could not understand how a president who shares intimate snapshots from the White House could justify classifying these.
“So we’re not gonna see the fruits of this cruel joke?” said Frank Antonelli, 39, one of the Wall Street traders spooked by last week’s flyover.
“I’m not surprised. Obama . . . wouldn’t further all the bad publicity by putting out those pictures.”
Memo: Feds Knew NYC Flyover Would Scare New Yorkers; Cost to Taxpayers $380K
I recently learned that the little jaunt around NYC yesterday cost the taxpayers approximately $330K and I also found the following from CBS News:
An F-16 fighter jet trails a larger military aircraft over Lower Manhattan Monday, April 27, 2009, conducting a photo shoot that panicked thousands of New Yorkers who believed the city was in jeopardy for another terrorist attack.
Dozens of people evacuated outside 17 State Street after military jets were seen escorting a 747 in Manhattan on April 27, 2009.
A furious President Barack Obama ordered an internal review of Monday’s low-flying photo op over the Statue of Liberty.
CBS 2 HD has discovered the feds will have plenty to question.
Federal officials knew that sending two fighter jets and Air Force One to buzz ground zero and Lady Liberty might set off nightmarish fears of a 9/11 replay, but they still ordered the photo-op kept secret from the public.
In a memo obtained by CBS 2 HD the Federal Aviation Administration’s James Johnston said the agency was aware of “the possibility of public concern regarding DOD (Department of Defense) aircraft flying at low altitudes” in an around New York City. But they demanded total secrecy from the NYPD, the Secret Service, the FBI and even the mayor’s office and threatened federal sanctions if the secret got out.
This doesn’t make sense — clearly we’re still only getting garbled bits and pieces of the story. The FAA isn’t in the business of giving a crap about secrecy of DoD flights — it simply follows orders re DoD flights. Only the DoD would issue a directive requiring secrecy re a planned flight. The “they” referred to in the above paragraph therefore isn’t the FAA — if any party “demanded total secrecy” it would have been DoD (and possibly also the Secret Service, which may be involved in any use of either of the Air Force One planes). The notion that anyone in the FAA “demanded total secrecy . . . from the Secret Service” re an AF1 flight is too ludicrous for words. Anything that emanated from the FAA to that effect was just a DoD directive being passed along.
And the headline is simply false, at least based on what follows. “Possibility of public concern” is a long, long way from mass panic and building evacuations on the scale of the New York Mercantile Exchange and other large financial businesses. “Possibility of public concern” applies every time a fighter jet passes over the city at an altitude that can be detected by a paranoid citizen with a pair of binoculars. It’s perfectly reasonable not to announce such things to the public, and to instruct 911 operators to reassure callers that it’s “an authorized military flight”.
There are many things that random nervous people call 911 over, that don’t warrant advance public announcements. There’s no evidence (yet, at least) that anyone involved in planning this flight and related communications had a clue that it would result in mass panic and full evacuations of large buildings by sensible people. And THAT is what we should be really worried about. Because either the people planning the flight are incredibly clueless (and thus shouldn’t have authority over any aircraft bigger than a remote-controlled toy model airplane), or there was a serious breakdown in communications between the people involved in planning and the people involved in executing an unusual training mission involving an Air Force One craft and escorting F-16s (and that’s a pretty scary concept too, given that these would be the same people planning and executing “real” missions involving Air Force One & POTUS and escorting fighter jets).
Although it appears that those involved did not realize that there could possibly be a mass panic shows just how self-centered and disconnected the new Administration is. There is no way that one of the Air Force One planes was used without the consent of someone in the Obama administration and possibly even himself. It doesn’t add up that it was his plane and he has one of, if not the, highest security clearances in the land.
