Biden’s Hot Air About Spy Balloons It turns out the blimp was transmitting information to Beijing in real time.
Remember when a Chinese spy balloon flew across the entire continental United States? The Administration is hoping the public has forgotten about the February fiasco, so it’s all the more important to note that the Biden narrative about this spectacle is losing altitude as more details emerge.
Press reports on Monday suggest that the Chinese spy balloon that entered U.S. air space near Alaska on Jan. 28 was able to collect intelligence on American military sites. The balloon was spotted flying in Montana, home to intercontinental ballistic-missile fields. U.S. officials told NBC News that the Beijing blimp could fly in figure-eight pirouettes, lingering over areas of interest. The balloon could pick up electronic signals and transmit information to Beijing in real-time, NBC reports.
This is a Sidewinder missile through the White House-Pentagon talking points at the time, namely that the balloon didn’t present a big intelligence risk and couldn’t suck up better information than Chinese satellites in low-earth orbit. Americans were supposed to believe that China would go through the trouble of building a global balloon flotilla, spotted all over Europe and Asia, for no spying benefit.
The Administration repeated this claim all over town. The Pentagon told reporters on Feb. 2 “that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added” over satellites. After President Biden ordered the balloon shot down off the U.S. East Coast, defense officials said on Feb. 4 that the action “further neutralized any intelligence value it could have produced, preventing it from returning” to Beijing.
The balloon carried a payload the size of a regional jet and the news leaks suggest it was capable of self-destructing on command. In other words, America may have been relying on the judgment of the Chinese Communist Party to avoid damage or loss of life on the ground while the balloon was flying over the U.S.
The Biden Team also played up their decision to wait to shoot down the balloon. It wasn’t American hesitation or weakness, they implied, but a chess move to study the Chinese balloon program. The U.S. military “took all necessary steps” to protect against the balloon’s “collection of sensitive information,” and the balloon’s trip was “of intelligence value” to the U.S., the Pentagon said on Feb. 4.
“We tracked it closely, we analyzed its capabilities, and we learned more about how it operates,” President Biden said on Feb. 16. “And because we knew its path, we were able to protect sensitive sites against collection.” This is the same rhetorical jiu jitsu that tried to spin the chaotic U.S. surrender in Afghanistan as a triumph of logistics.
Recall that the Administration went public about the balloon only after civilians in Montana had spotted it. Our guess is that it kept quiet until then because it wanted to keep Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned trip to China on course. Once the balloon story broke, Mr. Blinken canceled the trip, and U.S.-China relations have worsened since.
The latest stories make Mr. Biden’s decision to wait to shoot down the balloon look worse, and Congress has an obligation to figure out what American assets may have been compromised by the flyover. Lawmakers have been trying to ferret out a timeline of decisions, to little illumination. The Biden Team has also gone dark on the three “unidentified objects” the U.S. military shot down shortly after the balloon, perhaps because they overreacted and shot down hobby aircraft.
The Biden Administration may insist that the intelligence Beijing gleaned wasn’t that valuable, but voters can fairly conclude the President isn’t leveling with them. This has become a pattern with Team Biden, and it’s undermining the bipartisan support the President needs to conduct foreign policy in an increasingly dangerous world.
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