Chinese balloon flying
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
I guess you have no clue what "DP" means? I've helpfully bolded it for you. That means I'm a Different Poster than the one you're clutching your pearls about (who is correct, btw). I'm so embarrassed for you. But do continue to call people "pig" and "dolt" when you don't like their opinions. It's very mature. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
DP. No one is denying that! The dispute comes from idiots saying "Trump knew" about it - not even the military knew about these balloons until AFTER the fact. No one briefed Trump about them because they didn't know about them. Amazing how many times this has to be explained. |
Anonymous
Many of us agree with you that Trump and his administration were clueless. |
Anonymous
Listen, I don't care what you think of me or my posts or how I use internet shorthand. The only embarrassment here is you, whether you're a NP, OP, or DP. If you have a substantive argument, you would have made it. You don't b/c the facts are there: Trump's team missed the prior incursions altogether. That's far worse, by any standard, than identifying it, tracking it, learning from what it is, shooting it down, and taking the evidence. More was learned this week from the Biden team than anything Trump's did. Those are facts, dolt. |
Anonymous
And I'm saying the two are not related. The two accusations are not even remotely the same thing. I'm sorry you're not able to comprehend that. That's a you problem. But, given your conspiracy theories about "manufactured reports" I"m not surprised. Just pulling that sort of speculation out of your a$$ doesn't make it so. There is also PLENTY out there to indicate that no one on Trump's team even KNEW about the prior balloons. That's from the Pentagon. Did they make that up too? |
Anonymous
Well said! |
Anonymous
+1. If people are faulting Biden for not shooting down the balloon over land, they should be faulting Trump for not even knowing there was a balloon over his land. |
Anonymous
|
Your lot is so Trump deranged and filled with such hatred that you seem to miss the alleged memo not made until 2022 that they went back and found evidence they say they missed. How this is a failure of his people and not the intelligence community and not trump or his admin.
Your hate is so great that you cannot objectively think it is highly suspect that this “report” was made public just as a Chinese balloon was reported and seen by tons of people. Isn’t it odd there are no dates this allegedly happened? Only over Texas, Florida and Hawaii. No one can independently verify using historical unclassified winds aloft data to verify this story. Your hate and your name calling refuse to believe several people denying it ever happened or was reported to them. This alleged report and story is a dog that don’t hunt. And even it were true, it was a failure of intelligence and their capabilities and not Trump, but your hate and o session with someone out of office for over a year clouds your world view and convinces you you are right. |
Anonymous
I do not follow your logic and babbling about how this is all about how we hate Trump. Not sure why you give Trump a pass for being uninformed. Good managers, including good commanders in chief, have staff who know what matters and when it needs to be raised. The buck stops with Trump. The fact that Trump was clueless about a ballon the size of three buses floating over US airspace indicates that he wasn’t on top of national security issues. |
Anonymous
|
This thread is getting stupid.
Can we please stick to THIS balloon? The one we know for a fact, existed? |
Anonymous
Anonymous
|
Anonymous
|
Historian Heather Cox Richardson newsletter February 8 (sorry receive via email so can’t just provide a link). HCR always provides relevant history around major news events - and does so again when discussing Chinese spy balloon .
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> At a press conference today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that U.S. intelligence has determined that the spy balloon was part of a larger Chinese surveillance program operating around the world. On Monday, the U.S. shared the information it gleaned from the wreckage of the balloon with around 150 people from about 40 embassies. China has launched “dozens” of such surveillance balloons since 2018. New information has made U.S. intelligence able to revisit previous objects that were classified as “unknown” and recognize them as part of this balloon program. The news about the balloon illustrated the difference between the slow, hard work of governance and the easy hit of sound bites. From the beginning of his administration, President Joe Biden emphasized that he intended to focus on cybertechnology as a central element of national security. That focus meant that in May 2021, just four months after he took office, he issued an executive order on “improving the nation’s cybersecurity.” According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, that focus meant that the U.S. “enhanced our surveillance of our territorial airspace, we enhanced our capacity to be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect.” The Chinese apparently sent at least three of these balloons into U.S. airspace when Trump was president, but we didn’t know it until the Biden administration tightened security. Sullivan said that the surveillance improvements enabled the U.S. to “go back and look at the historical patterns” and uncover “multiple instances” during the Trump administration when similar things had happened. During the balloon saga, Republicans complained that Biden didn’t shoot the balloon down earlier than he did, but defense officials said that they were collecting intelligence from the device (of course they were!) and that they made certain the Chinese could not get information from it. Republicans have insisted that the balloon shows Chinese disdain for the U.S., while President Joe Biden told reporters Monday that the balloon did not change the developing patterns between the U.S. and China. “We’ve made it clear to China what we’re going to do,” he said. “They understand our position. We’re not going to back off. We did the right thing. And there’s not a question of weakening or strengthening. It’s just the reality.” For their part, Chinese authorities appear embarrassed by the exposure of the program and by the cancellation of Blinken’s planned visit. They downplayed the balloon as an “isolated incident,” and officials expressed “regrets that the airship strayed into the United States by mistake.” Part of what Biden was referring to when he said China knew “what we’re going to do” is that on January 28, the Biden administration inked a deal with Japan and the Netherlands to limit exports of semiconductor technologies to China. The two countries have signed on to the U.S. sanctions the Biden administration put into place last October against exports of that technology from the U.S. to China. Last week, the U.S. stopped sales of essential components to Chinese technology giant Huawei. This shutdown of technological innovation has upset Chinese authorities, concerned about what it will mean for Chinese industry. “We hope the relevant countries will do the right thing and work together to uphold the multilateral trade regime and safeguard the stability of the global industrial and supply chains,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said earlier this month. “This will also serve to protect their own long-term interests.” Now, suddenly eager to confront the balloon, the Republican House has come up with 17 new bills to counter China. Meanwhile, the recent report of the Australian Lowy Institute, which for the last five years has annually ranked the power of 26 Asian countries, assessed that China’s isolation because of Covid has set it back, permitting the U.S. to retain its position as the key player in Asia. But, the report said, the idea of a multipolar region, which is what the U.S. under Biden is backing, seems so distant as to be unattainable. Finally, it assesses that Russia “risks growing irrelevance.” The 2022 invasion of Ukraine has sapped Russia in dramatic ways. Both the Senate and the House will receive classified briefings on the balloon and Chinese intelligence this week. Last night, during President Biden’s State of the Union address, House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) complained by tweet that Biden hadn’t mentioned China in the first hour of his speech, suggesting that the president wasn’t taking the issue seriously enough. Today, when CNN’s Manu Raju asked McCarthy if he was okay with New York representative George Santos—the serial liar who is currently under threat of an ethics investigation over where his campaign money came from—attending that classified briefing, McCarthy said, “Yes.” All this is to say that actual governance is about a lot more than reacting to a balloon. |
Anonymous
Well, if you want to take that tact, then Biden didn't know about this until Jan 31 and when briefed told the military to take it out, which they did once it cleared US ground space. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/politics/chinese-spy-balloon-timeline-lack-urgent-action/index.html So if you want to fault anyone, fault the military staffer who saw the balloon, notified their superiors, but didn't put it on a high alert/urgent status. |