This is a little bizarre, but after Bush’s trip to Iraq, folks from his staff kept telling this story about how a British Airways jet spotted Air Force One inbound to Baghdad, and the BA pilot radioed over, “Did I just see Air Force One?” The story is that the pilot of AF1 hesitated, then said “Gulfstream 5,” and the BA pilot said “Oh,” but in a way that made it clear he knew it was AF1 but wasn’t going to spoil the secret. The story is that the whole plane was super-tense and they were on the verge of calling off the whole thing, but Bush and the Secret Service decided they could go forward.
Well, after that story made the rounds, BA started saying that they couldn’t find any pilot that had done that. In fact, they said, they didn’t even really have planes in the area (two in the entire Mideast, neither of which saw AF1). Now the White House says the conversation was actually between a BA pilot and an ATC person. But BA hasn’t been able to verify that, either (and wouldn’t you think the ATC person would come forward?).
Is this whole thing a big-ass lie that the White House told to make the whole trip seem cooler and more daring than it really was?
If it’s a lie, it has to be the dumbest and most pointless lie in history. This is the kind of fluff story that the media inevitably follows up on to get the word from the BA pilot himself.
As numbskulled as I think many of Bush’s handlers are, I find it hard to believe they’d be this silly.
With commercial aircraft required to keep the separation that they do, there’s no way any BA pilot could discern that the aircraft he sees off in the distance is Air Force One. Moreover, he’d be advised of all traffic in the area, and he’d hear AF1 talking to ATC too…unless the prez was flying under double secret identification and was purposefully providing ATC with a false callsign. I find that hard to believe though.
I’m sure one of the staffers saw another plane or something and it got passed around like a game of Telephone. Tthe breathless silliness on the front page of CNN was the result.
Then again, Bush used that “trifecta” joke for months, when it was actually something Gore said.
Bush’s PR staff admitted this was a bogus story this morning. But tried to respin it again as a conversation between the BA plane and ground control. Which of course BA again denied immediately. Don’t these asses ever learn.
Seriously, you gotta work the details out with your cover before you talk to the press. Approach the British, ask for a little help, then lie. You don’t lie and completely forget the other steps.
You would think with all the shit Bush has probably done in his youth, he would have worked out how to come up with a decent lie. Maybe his Dad just brought in the CIA for that.[/i]
