White House aide Louis Caldera loses job over
Manhattan flyover fiasco involving Air Force One
White House Handout
The $329K publicity photo of Air Force One flying over the Statue of Liberty that sparked the flyover controversy.
WASHINGTON-The White House aide who authorized the controversial Air Force One photo-op flight last week around the Statue of Liberty is out of a job.
President Obama has accepted the resignation of Louis Caldera, the director of the White House Military Office, the Daily News learned Friday. (Do any of us really believe that he did this all on his own and that nobody else in power knew about it?)
A secretary of the Army in the Clinton administration, Caldera took the fall for the public relations fiasco arising from the April 27 flyover, which was designed to replace a publicity photo of Air Force One flying past Mount Rushmore with a similar shot of Obama's 747 jumbo jet over the Statue of Liberty.
The photo session cost taxpayers $329,000.
Caldera's office insisted the flyover was a "classified" mission and should not be disclosed to the public, ensuring that thousands of New Yorkers would be blindsided by an event eerily reminiscent of the 9/11 terror attacks against the Twin Towers.
Federal officials notified Mayor Bloomberg's office and NYPD officials in advance, but Bloomberg was not informed, infuriating the mayor.
Caldera shoulders the blame in deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina's review into how the decision was made to go ahead with the photo mission.
"The FAA warned the Military Office that the media needed to be advised of the flight. There were red flags," said an administration source.
Many White House officials were angry at Caldera over the stunt. "This (incident) was just plain stupid," one Obama aide said.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates apologized for the flyover in a letter Tuesday to Sen. John McCain, who posted the memo on his Senate Web site Friday.
"I am concerned that this highly public and visible mission did not include an appropriate public affairs plan nor adequate review and approval by senior Air Force and DOD [Department of Defense] officials," Gates said in the letter.
"We deeply regret the anxiety and alarm that resulted from this mission," he added
BY: KENNETH R. BAZINET
Updated Friday, May 8th 2009, 5:51 PM
Daily News photo illustration (Getty/News)We doctored this shot of Mayor Bloomberg marching in a St. Patrick's Day parade so the sleek blue-and-white jet seemingly heads to the mayor's outstretched hand.
Daily News photo illustration (Getty/News)A second mock-up captures Air Force One inside a whirling Hula Hoop on a beautiful day in Central Park.
Daily News photo illustration (Getty/News)And in a third image, the same plane can be seen zooming by as a giraffe sticks its neck out to greet admirers at the Bronx Zoo.
PhotoShop Winner...
20 minutes and a cost of $0.00, if our government would have asked me, I would have done it for one tenth of what they paid, Submitted April 30, 2009 - Dally News Your New York
No comments:
Post a Comment