The Air Force One Incident & How it Relates to Torture

Obama Willing to put Population in Jeopardy for Ego Flight

As a pilot, I can tell you flying is all about safety.  And the first and foremost rule of safety is “get as much altitude as quickly as you can” because altitude is what gives you the time to deal with an emergency.  The higher you are, the longer you have before you hit the ground, and therefore the longer you have to find a solution to any emergency.  Even a few seconds of additional time can make a life-saving difference.  That’s why planes ascend so rapidly after takeoff.  They could take a nice leisurely stroll up to 30,000 feet, but it’s much safer to ascend as quickly as possible.  Every hundred feet they gain in altitude gives them another vital few seconds to respond to an emergency.  

I say that to make a point about Obama’s Ego Flight of Air Force One in which the plane was flown at very low altitudes over Manhattan for what the White House says was a photo op.  

Large jets are never allowed to fly the route Air Force One flew on that day and certainly not at that low altitude.  There is so much risk in letting an aircraft that size fly that low over the most densely populated area of the country that it is simply not allowed.  Because of the huge risks involved, we know approvals had to be gotten from a large number of people within the US government.  We also know there would have been strong resistance to the idea from the Air Force and the FAA.  The pilots would never voluntarily choose to attempt a risky mission like this.  

Because of the high level of risk involved, these approvals NEVER would have been issued on the word of some low-level staffer at the White House.  It is so unsafe that it is certain that such approvals would not have been given on the word of even a senior level White House staffer.  For something like this to have occurred, the word could have only come from the President himself.  Yet Obama claims, unbelievably, that he didn’t know anything about it.  (I seem to remember them saying recently he didn’t know anything about the Tea Parties either, then the other night, he was talking about the tea parties at a town hall meeting).

So, you really have to wonder how his thinking went on this.  Here are the things he had to consider and justify in order to approve the flight:

• it’s an extremely risky flight
• it’s unsafe to fly a plane as large as Air Force One at such a low altitude over the most densely populated city in the country
• it’s insane to do this without notifying the public because they will be frightened and alarmed seeing this after what happened on 9/11
• we can’t notify the public because that would give potential terrorists an opportunity to shoot the plane down

The only possible rationales he could have concocted to overcome these objections are extremely callous and reckless.  They would have been:

• Yes, it’s risky, but it’ll be worth it if we can get that photo – it’ll be quite the feather in my cap that I was the president who authorized the flight for the Air Force One/Statue of Liberty Photo!
• Yes, it’s unsafe, but come on it’s flown by professionals – there’s no way anything can go wrong.  
• I wish we could notify the public… I know it will frighten them but at least it will just be momentary, it will only last for a few seconds then it will be over.  They’ll just have to swallow it.  No one will suffer any actual harm.

This thinking shows a callous disregard – strangely for the people who were among his biggest supporters – New Yorkers.  It also shows a recklessness, not welcomed in a president, in dealing with issues of risk and safety.  

But it also bears on his banning of so-called “torture” at Guantanamo.  The “torture” memos detailing our interrogation techniques at Guantanamo have now been released, and after reading them I found that they show our form of “torture” amounted to nothing more than trying to scare people.  Obama has effectively concluded that “scaring” people is torture.  So by knowing this flight of Air Force One would scare the living daylights out of people, you could say he gave his permission to torture New Yorkers!  

And this may sound silly to some, but I think it raises revealing and disturbing questions about his willingness to inflict pain and torture on his own, but not to do so in an attempt to stop those who wish to murder us.  This is a theme we’ve seen several times now.  In Europe he complained about America’s bad behavior (i.e. inflicted “torture” on America by accusing us of wrongdoing while abroad).  In South America, he sat idly by while dictator after dictator bashed America and he rose up to say nothing in our defense.  By doing so he extended a certain support to the dictators that he wasn’t even willing to extend to his own countrymen.  We’re starting to see the signs of a president who doens’t seem prepared to look out for his own countrymen.

Tags: Security

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under All, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.