Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Why Won’t Obama Release WTC Fly By Photos?

The NY Post reports - - -

The $328,835 snapshots of an Air Force One backup plane buzzing lower Manhattan last week will not be shown to the public, the White House said yesterday.

"We have no plans to release them," an aide to President Obama told The Post, refusing to comment further.

The entire Post story's here.


James Taranto at WSJ's Best of the Web reacts with "You Can't See These, They're Publicity Photos!"

Taranto tongue in cheek concludes:

Apparently the Obama administration's policy is to release photos only when doing so might pose a danger to national security.
Why won't President Obama release them?

I doubt it's fear of more bad publicity on top of the bad publicity the story's already generated because refusing to release the photos is likely going to generate more questioning and bad publicity then a release would.

Why is Obama, who promised us transparency, hunkering down?

There's got to be a reason.

H/t - Instapundit

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could be because they spent $328,835.00 (plus all those lost hours when people evacuated buildings) and got really BAD pictures. That would be pretty embarrasing.

Anonymous said...

Why isn't the press--and especially the NY press--CLAMORING to find out what happened?

(They wouldn't have let the Bush white house, or even the Reagan white house, just toss something like this down a memory hole.)

Anonymous said...

IMO, the reason is that it was NOT actually a photo-op ....(too many publications detailing how pics are not made/taken from formation that was flown).
This was a 'perk' for someone - flying in an AirForce One plane.

WHO was in that plane?

Anonymous said...

Could it be that no pictures were taken?

DukieInKansas

Anonymous said...

Supposedely, the White House is reconsidering the decision about not releasing the photos.
cks

Anonymous said...

Blogger Spook86 at "In from the Cold" claims that the F-16s were from the Alabama ANG, and that at least one of them had the distinctive red tail markings of the WWII Tuskegee Airmen. Others have linked this to an upcoming George Lucas movie on the Tuskegee Airmen, Lucas being a big Obama supporter.

That said, if one of the F-16s was a B-model (which I've flown in), then a photographer could have been in the rear seat. But why use F-16s from Alabama? (And why use F-16s at all for that matter?)

Plus if the crews were all Air Force, why keep it secret from the public, especially if you knew beforehand that the flyby might scare people on the ground?

And finally, since the pics were reportedly PR shots, how come they're suddenly classified? This is after all the same Obama who relesed the so-called torture memos and is making public more prisoner abuse pictures a la Abu Ghraib.

Mike Williams

Anonymous said...

Michelle Malkin is hot on this one and has filed official FOIA requests to get the passenger manifest.

You can count on there being somebody on that plane that PBO doesn't want you to know about.