What else would you expect the General to say. He's not likely to admit that the highest priority goes to the evacuation of US nationals, orphans waiting to go to adoptive families, and politicians who want to do photo opportunities. To say that the ATCs don't know what is on a flight is a poor excuse, especially when his initial reaction was to start to blame the non existent Haitian government. The US military has had the airfield under their control for 7 days now and the obvious requirement would be to prioritize these flights based on the aid/equipment so as to generate a landing slot time via electronic communications from their operations room, prior to the ATC, without having to ask such questions to the pilot circling above. Do you really think that 5 flights from the NGO 'Doctors without Borders' which have been turned away from landing haven't communicated what aid they are carrying to the US military authorities running the airfield. Its either incompetence or something else has a higher priority. Perhaps the AT controller should have turned around the Secretary of State and the ex President (low aid priority) as the ATC would have known what these aircraft were carrying in favour of absolutely anything else especially when the ATC turned around one of the MSF flights about 2-3 days ago.

As the NGOs on the ground had indicated many days ago, they were concerned/uneasy that the Haiti mission has been Militarized. Civilian NGO operations in military chains of command get short shrift, so I'm not really surprised at what the military regards a high priority. They regard their own operations as having the highest priority.

It quite hard to carry boxes of medicine/rations/water with M4s swigging around soldiers and Marines necks.