Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told CBS News today that the so-called Chinese spy balloon that flew over the U.S. seven months ago wasn’t spying at all.
Earlier this year America's military defenses were put on notice against a Chinese balloon believed to be on an espionage mission. Gen. Mark Milley talks about what we've learned from an examination of the balloon's wreckage.
“The intelligence community, their assessment – and it's a high-confidence assessment – [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon,” Milley said, confirming China’s assertion that the balloon was blown off course.
U.S. handwringing over the balloon brought China ties to a new low, and exposed the warmongering lust of the neocon 🤡 show steering Washington’s foreign policy.
It’s amazing to be that anyone credulously believed that China was trying to secretly spy on the US using such a comically large balloon. It would be hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that the media frenzy surrounding it echos the claims that Iraq had WMDs. The US press didn’t question the military’s narrative then and it isn’t questioning it now.
Now, seven months later, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells "CBS News Sunday Morning" the balloon wasn't spying.
The balloon floated over Alaska and Canada, and then down over the lower 48, to Billings, Montana, where photographer Chase Doak, who had studied photojournalism in college, recorded it from his driveway.
As a U-2 spy plane tracked the 200-foot balloon, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called off a crucial trip to China.
On February 3 he called China's decision to fly a surveillance balloon over the Continental United States "both unacceptable and irresponsible."
After the Navy raised the wreckage from the bottom of the Atlantic, technical experts discovered the balloon's sensors had never been activated while over the Continental United States.
On May 21, President Biden remarked, "This silly balloon that was carrying two freight cars' worth of spying equipment was flying over the United States, and it got shot down, and everything changed in terms of talking to one another."
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Milley replied, "I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn't transmit any intelligence back to China."
China (poorly) performed an act of espionage and lemmygrad thinks the US government overreacted. I'm shocked.
I'm sorry if you can't read the stories you post, understand what they say or can't be slanted to fit your justification for bad behavior.
The additional thing I found hilarious about the whole escapade was China not being able to use the self-destruct function. It's almost like the balloon had all signals capabilities jammed from the moment it started drifting into US airspace... Weird.