The bizarre secret behind China's spy balloon
www.cbsnews.com
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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1886024

“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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    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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