CBS in New York reports that the Pentagon knew its photo-op flyover above Manhattan would raise “public concern” and frighten New Yorkers but pulled off the stunt anyway. “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,” reports Marcia Kramer WCBS TV.

	Obama attempts to dodge questions on the Manhattan fly-over and then offers a weak promise.

In a memo obtained by the television station, “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 and 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.”

“Did it show an insensitivity to the psychic wounds New York City has after 9/11? Absolutely. No questions about it. It was quite insensitive,” NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

Obama was out of the loop and forced to engage in damage control. “It was a mistake. It will never happen again,” he said. Obama has ordered an internal review of Monday’s low-flying photo op over the Statue of Liberty.

Obama’s sheepish apology reveals that he serves as little more than window dressing for the real power in Washington — the shadow government and the national security state in control of the Pentagon. Obama is an employee in the service of Wall Street and the international bankers.

In 1947, Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the National Security Council and the CIA. Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner fleshed out the CIA at the behest of the Georgetown Set and the Nazi lover William Averell Harriman. As the Trilateral Commission admits, the national security state set up an apparatus designed to govern “the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers” (see Holly Sklar, Reagan, Trilateralism and the Neoliberals: Containment and intervention in the 1980s). It was precisely this cabal that president Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech to the nation in 1961 (he called it the “military-industrial complex,” although it may be more accurately described as the bankster-military complex).

[efoods]As Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, noted in 1933, prior to the creation of the national security state, the bankers have ruled the roost for some time. “I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism,” Butler wrote. “I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”

The Pentagon and its bankster controllers are usually careful not to blow their cover in such tawdry and sensational ways, preferring to do their dirty work behind the scenes and not before the glaring lights of the corporate media, which often operates as a mindless machine sucking up all manner of sensationalism – from the Octomom to political corruption – even if it on occasion betrays the efforts of its corporate and bankster masters. So over the top and obviously cavalier was the Pentagon’s shameless fly-over conjuring up images and emotions linked to the false flag attack of September 11, 2001, the corporate media was obliged to focus on it and drum up negative publicity subsequently heaped on Obama. It is his job to take the blame for things completely out of his control.

Of course, the fly-over was merely a blip on the corporate media radar screen. It will go away in short order, as did all the momentary hoopla over the torture memos and the dim possibility of prosecuting the Bush administration for its numerous and monumental crimes against humanity. Obama has directed his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina, to “conduct a review into how the decision was made to conduct the flight,” according to the fumbling Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary, “to understand why the decision was made and to ensure that it never happens again.”

Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, will probably take the heat, maybe even lose his job, but the perpetrators of the fly-over at the Pentagon will not suffer any repercussion. For the Pentagon and its bankster owners, not only is the Statue of Liberty a prop in its ongoing propaganda campaign, but so are the American people who are considered nothing more than plebs to be squeezed, manipulated, and when required slaughtered in large number.

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