Page 755 - Balloon News Today

Republican Senator Tom Cotton said the president was reluctant ‘to take any action that would be viewed as provocative … towards the Chinese communists’.

The president met with xi jinping in-person. that was a tense meeting. there continues to be concerns about, especially in the wake of the ukraine war, how china might view taiwan. that remains an open consideration for the u.s., china. president biden has been vocal that the u.s. would back taiwan, militarily. there are so many levels to this balloon episode that play out domestically, and internationally. ali? >> thank you so much for not just your great reporting but, as always, your analysis...

Ocean to alaska, across alaska, across canada and then when they finally decided to do something, it still took them four more days, this really is probing our defenses in a way even if there was no surveillance onboard. theyve gotten a great deal of information as to how sluggish the biden administration is in their response. so if you decide to shoot it could be a week later, you probably could have made that decision a lot quicker when it was over a deserted part of either alaska or before it...

Decline. that is what they believe to be the case, that is what theyre working on. we have to determine whether were going to allow the world to head in that direction or not. theres all sorts of things we need to do, how were postured militarily in the indo-pacific, all the way to what kind of companies do we allow to operate in the united states and spy on us because weve invited them in. theyre in our infrastructure, telecommunications infrastructure because theyre buying land, buying farmlan...

In the general vicinity of alaska is not a rarity. theyve seen these spy balloons on more than five continents up to this point. what was different about this, when it was first spotted on january 28th, it actually left the u.s. territory, went into canada and then came back into the continental united states on january 31st. thats the moment where it became clear that this was different. that alarmed people. thats the moment when the pentagon, national security counsel picked into high agree. o...

Was shot down in about 47 feet of water. thats actually great news for us, in that we should be able to recover it rather quickly. im not talking about 48 hours, but in a matter of a week or so. and i do think because it went down over water versus land, it served as a bit of a cushion for our landing, and that really could be an intelligence boon for us. because now we have a payload out of this, and we can maybe see perhaps what chinas intelligence capabilities were against us. and that actual...

Streaking towards the balloon. then, a second trail, this time from a sidewinder missile, about to bring its journey to an abrupt end. suddenly, we saw something take off from the jet and we knew it was a missile and you could see the explosion. didnt hear anything but saw the explosion of the balloon. gosh, it was almost like it was a moving cloud coming down. then the smoke was gone and then it started slowly going down towards the ocean. explosion. whoa! did you hear that? a few moments after...

Balloon, that they view as completely fallacious and they are saying so loudly, but being criticized because of the duration of how long this went on. this is a balloon that traversed the entire continental united states. you have the chair of the senate arms committee, roger wicker saying this "allowing a spy balloon from the communist party of china to travel across the entire continental united states before contesting its presence is a disastrous projection of weakness by the white house. th...

Sensitive information and transmit it back to the chinese government? >> the u.s. has stated that steps were taken to prevent any problems in terms of intelligence collection. remember, we are talking about a country that has a space program. so i dont know all the ins and outs of what this balloon was doing or what its capabilities were. i do know when the president gave the order to have this handled, the military gauged the different risks and the different benefits of different approaches. m...

Skeptic. let me go there for a second and certainly not to veer off into the land of speculation but as an international security expert, if youre thinking unconventional, unusual, a new game, might there be something more insidious at play? >> listen, its probably not anything they put on the balloon and that was going to get captured. instead maybe what they were doing was using satellites and other intelligence to see how we reacted and when we detected them and what counter measures we took ...