Posted on 04/28/2009 9:23:47 PM PDT by GVnana
FAA Memo: Feds Knew NYC Flyover Would Cause Panic
Threatened Federal Sanctions Against NYPD, Secret Service, FBI & Mayor's Office If Secret Ever Got Out
Furious Obama Apologizes: "It Will Never Happen Again"
CBS News Interactive: Sept. 11 And Since Reporting Marcia Kramer NEW YORK (CBS) ―
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at wcbstv.com ...
No, in NY—Union Square.
Obama looks more and more like a coke headed drunk who caught a buzz and wanted to cruise the hood in his pimped out jet. At hangover central the next day he has to deal with the panic he stirred up on top of a bad head. No wonder he is angry.
arrogant, selfish, narcissistical, retards.
You beat me to it by seven and a half hours.
You’re misinterpeting a lot of things here. Nobody said anything about the FAA “clearing military flights for air worthiness”. The FAA absolutely needs to be told and was told about these flights because the FAA is in charge of managing the incredibly crowded airspace around NYC, but they were probably not clear on just how close to buildings the planes would be flying.
And nobody said anything about President Obama being “kept out of the loop” for any reason, and certainly not because the flight was “so highly classified”. You can be sure that President Bush (or possibly Clinton, whoever was President at the time) had no clue about the details or timing of the AF1 flight that took the pictures of AF1 flying over Mount Rushmore — the picture that the new Statute of Liberty picture was intended to replace. In the normal course of events, publicity photos of Presidential hardware is trivia that the President doesn’t need or want to know about, so of course he wouldn’t have known about this one, other than perhaps to have approved the general idea of a photo of AF1 with the Stature of Liberty in the background to replace the Mount Rushmore photo (which was some sort of official publicity photo of AF1).
If some White House PR dude suggests to the President that the AF1-Rushmore photo be replaced with an AF1-Statue of Liberty, the normal repsonse from any President would be “Yeah, sure Joe, that sounds like a nice idea, go ahead and do it.” The President is not going to assume that the US Air Force requires supervision to accomplish this task — he probably wouldn’t even trouble himself to consider whether the photo would be shot directly or Photoshopped, much less how close to the Statue of Liberty the plane might fly if the photo was taken directly. It’s not his job. He has discovered the hard way, that one or more people in charge of things like military flights and AF1 are nowhere near as competent as he might have assumed (and remember, there’s no evidence that anyone directly involved with executing this “mission” is an Obama appointee — senior military personnel don’t change with administrations, and President Obama has even retained President Bush’s Secretary of Defense). Louis Caldera presumably made the same assumptions when he approved the photo-taking flights — again, he was almost certainly approving it in a very general way, reasonably assuming that the people who’ve been operating AF1 and fighter jets for many years, would continue to do so in a sane and rational manner.
What’s pretty clear is that there were communication failures at various levels, including within the NYC government. The people in Mayor Blooomberg’s administration who got the notification and didn’t bother to mention it to the Mayor, assumed that the flights were to be carried out in a way that wouldn’t cause any public alarm beyond a handful of people calling 911 for reassurance when they saw a jumbo jet being tailed by a fighter jet somewhere off in the distance. They very reasonably didn’t imagine that the planned flights were going to go unreasonably close to buildings in a way that was guaranteed to cause mass panic — they assumed the US military knows what the he!! it’s doing and wouldn’t do something colossally stupid. Somewhere up in the military, presumably somebody had planned the flight in detail, but then somewhere between that person and the person directly notifying the FAA, local governments, etc, there was a miscommunication about the specifics of the flight and thus about the need to either suubstantially modify it or do a large-scale advance public announcement about it. Again, there’s no evidence that any Obama appointees were involved in this chain of miscommunication. We won’t help avert future incidents like this, by pointing fingers at the wrong people.
What a way to avoid saying what everyone knows...I WAS AIR FORCE ONE fercryinoutloud!
All in the OBVIOUS attempt to avoid the TOTUS association.
Pathetic!
George Orwell would be proud of this media.
note; yes. yes I know that unless the TOTUS in on board it isn't technically “air force one”. But come off it...ask any person to name that plane when they see a photo of it and they'll call it that too. So before the technicality nannies get all over my case, I thought I'd throw that note in.
That’s why I don’t buy this “photo op” cover...we could have easily paid a pro photoshopper $10,000 to doctor up some really good photos of the presidential plane with iconic scenery in the background, come out ahead financially, and not caused a panic.
There’s more to it than what they’re letting on. My theory is that they wanted to see how the public would react, as a sort of study. Why else would they have chosen to do so when people were just getting to work? They wanted it to feel just like it did 7 1/2 years ago...
sounds like a legalistic liberal church.
Besides that...
Search through Proverbs.
There are many nuggets of truth that will support your desire for wisdom and speaking the truth.
...or find a grace filled conservative church.
But whatever you do, do NOT give then free rent inside your head.
I'm pretty sure Bush ordered the stunt on Jan 19th, just to set Obama up for embarrassment!
Who else but a SADIST
(who employed "gallows humor" on 60 Minutes in front of millions of newly-impoverished Americans)
allows a pilot to slowly fly a 747 at a *dangerously* low altitude over the NY skyline?
*Video of Keith Olbermann, using the words "dangerously low"
When he said “the White House has it right” he was responding to the post that stated “they think they’re playing many of us for fools.”
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This sentence is where the warning flag pops up. We MUST stop the total control of our lives by the centerlized government in Washington D.C.
Apologize to horses everywhere NOW. She is Aunt Ester from Sanford and son.
Hey, there's an idea. Perhaps the Obama administration should consider nationalizing the media, to ensure unbiased, truthful reporting.
. . . Is a sarcasm tag needed here?
If Obama is surprised this happened, the only explanation is a HIJACKED AF-ONE! Too bad the MSM has drank all the kool-aid. Maybe we should email the UK news and ask them to get to the bottom of this or Canada...
Not at all. That's why I'd like to see the FAA memo. CBS has a history with memos. ;)
Does anyone know if the memo is online somewhere?
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