As promised by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, the White House released the single photo of the April 27th New York City flyover by SAM 28000 of the United States Air Force 89th Airlift Wing, one of the aircraft the world recognizes as Air Force One.  Here is the image for your scrutiny:

Although the photograph appears genuine (the tail number matches, as does the paint configuration, and the general quality of light is consistent with what we saw from video and other photos taken on the day of April 27th) photo ops do not typically follow a “One shot, let’s go home” routine.  And there is still the question of the switching stories put out by the White House that it was a photo op and the Air Force that it was a “training mission”.

Then – in one of the clumsiest one-two punches in the brief history of the Obama administration’s handling of public relations – White House Military Office Chief Louis Caldera, the man who has taken the blame for ordering the flyover, also tendered his resignation Friday afternoon.

Now the White House expects the public and the media to stuff a sock in it and go home.  In my opinion, this story is beginning to follow the now-familiar pattern of Team Obama.  Slipping a single image to the media instead of being forthcoming with the reams of correspondence and other documents that accompany a military mission which would resolve once and for all questions about who was on the plane and who was the originator of the mission does meet the administration’s own standard for transparency.  In fact, it exposes the ‘do as we say, not as we do’ modus operandi of the new regime in the White House. 

The response to challenges to Barack Obama’s citizenship was to supply a copy of what was alleged to be Obama’s birth certificate to an untrained individual working for a web site of dubious credibility for inspection, claim the case closed, and then proceed to spend nearly a million dollars defending a case to avoid producing the document to a court for official determination of its validity. 

The response to questions about Barack Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, a self-confessed domestic terrorist affiliated with a radical Marxist-Leninist group (see Weathermen) that conducted bombings and sought to foment civil  unrest, was to simply claim that the two had a casual relationship and didn’t know each other that well.  When, during the 2008 presidential campaign, details surfaced about the more than casual crossing of their paths when Obama led the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an education foundation created by Bill Ayers, during a period when Ayers was still making public statements that his radicalism in the 1960s was no mistake at all, the campaign talk a ‘don’t ask, or we’ll spike you’ attitude with any daredevils left in the media who hadn’t succumbed to Obamania.

What may flummox President Obama now is that the ‘decoy, duck, and cover’ strategy used so efficiently before was only possible because there were no channels through which Obama could be required to give up documentation he did not voluntarily wish to disclose.  Now that every one of his actions has a paper trail that can be accessed through a simple Freedom of Information Act request, those wonderful rusty wheels of bureaucracy can be used to slowly produce whatever details the White House may not want the public to know about the flight over New York City on April 27th.

As I wrote yesterday, Unequal Time filed its request with the 89th Airlift Wing of the United States Air Force (the unit which operates the planes that are known as Air Force One when transporting the President of the United States) for a number of specific documents and items relating to the mission.

As of today, an official representative of the USAF 844th Communications Group confirmed that our request had been received and was being processed as a part of the general effort to comply with all media requests.  The person with whom we spoke seemed to be under a great deal of stress, but was able to say that the documents were compiled and would be released after they had been given a look-over, possibly as soon as Monday.

Unequal Time will update its readers as events unfold.

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