Page 769 - Balloon News Today

Beijing has denounced the U.S. military's shooting down of a Chinese "spy balloon" on Saturday and said it reserves the right to "response." 

Maneuver high above mainland for 5 days. >> they seem not only to be unprepared but to even be waiting. where is the balloon going to go, what are they trying to do? thats not how you look at actions of an adversary. alex: joe wilson takes it a step further calling on the president and vice president to resign over the matter. senate majority leader chuck schumer, though, commended president bidens decision to take the balloon down over water while also condemning chinese president pi. democrati...

Informative on that message. for example, it is not the first time. my guess is the military has 18 different plans on how to handle this? but it wasnt like i said, oh my gosh, the balloon is over mom hit montana, what are we going to do? they knew exactly what they were going to do. they couldve given the american public a really good sense of confidence that they were in charge and knew exactly what was happening because they were in charge. >> i think there are folks who share your sentiment,...

What they need just by divering in -- hopefully a quick operation. >> and have you ever heard of a wreckage salvage operation like this one before? i mean, this is pretty unique. >> well, weve done lots of salvage operations. obviously, a balloon, weve done space shots out of cape canaveral where the payload was in a lot of pieces and we needed to recover those pieces for various agencies in the federal government. its a thing that they can do. it just takes time. when youre working out in the w...

Jon: you have said publicly that this proves to the chinese that they can walk over this president. >> well, look, if we cant defend ourselves against a balloon, all right, then how are we going to defend against taiwan which is a far more sophisticated and dangerous situation? so i think it sends another message to the world, it started with afghanistan, we left afghanistan, colossal blunder. that led to putin giving the green light to ukraine. and now, obviously, taiwans in the front sight of ...

Take off from the jet and we knew that was a missile, and you could see the explosion. gosh, it was almost like a moving cloud coming down. its scary. it is a different way of spying on us, lets put it that way. i the us navy is now recovering debris spread over seven miles in relatively shallow water. down to earth, the us shoots down a suspected spy balloon monitoring us military sites... this was how america woke up to the news on sunday morning. late yesterday, an air force fighter jet fired...

Two. this says a lot more about the inability of washington and congress and the white house to talk about relatively insignificant national security issues than it does about intelligence. look, if the chinese want to collect photos of america, you could get to google earth, you could get a chinese secret s satellite. and i would agree there are certain advantages a balloon would have. but, fareed, we twisted o ourselves around a bool on and a the secretary of state canceled a trip for a balloo...

Should we be -- i -- it makes me think there is a broader issue. we need to recognize that china is the second largest economy in the world. it is going to spy on it the way lots of other countries do. >> well i think what we need to recognize is that typically in the past, you go back 20, 30, 40, 50 years when the conversations in the white house, the politics stops at the shores. the conversation should not be about a potential threat to china. the fbi should be able to evaluate with that ball...

Considered it to be an intelligence-gathering balloon, and frankly, when the president made the decision to shoot it down. if he made the decision on wednesday to shoot it down, i think that should have been made public. it would have prevented some of the criticism that occurred later and the american people i think are entitled to know just exactly what our adversaries are up to. so i think greater transparency would have helped the white house as well. >> our reporting indicate that is the pe...

The fact that the president gave the orders on wednesday, they wanted to wait until he was in a safe area to take it down. that was when it was over water. four days later, what do you make of? >> quite the entertainment value. the most obvious thing that worked was the u.s. air force had 22, one of them fired. i had a tory hill in the cockpit of an f 20 to a few years back. its probably the preeminent aircraft in the world today even though its an old one. it has the capability of 1500 mile an ...