Fox News
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Following the takedown of a Chinese surveillance balloon and other objects from the airspace over the U.S., many Americans are asking questions.
As we try to understand the nature of the flying objects and how they threaten our national security, China is throwing out accusations of its own.
China is claiming that the U.S. illegally flew “high-altitude balloons into its airspace more than ten times” over the past year.
The White House unequivocally denies the accusation made by the Chinese Foreign Minister without citing any evidence to back his claim.
The White House called the accusation “false” and the “latest example of China scrambling to do damage control.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin did not offer any supporting evidence when he made the claim nor did he say how China dealt with the situation.
“It is also common for U.S. balloons to illegally enter the airspace of other countries,” Wang said at a daily briefing.
“Since last year, U.S. high-altitude balloons have illegally flown over China’s airspace more than 10 times without the approval of relevant Chinese authorities.”
Wang inserted that the U.S. should “first reflect on itself and change course, rather than smear and instigate a confrontation.”
National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson debunked his claim, tweeting, “Any claim that the US government operates surveillance balloons over the PRC is false.
“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection, that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the U.S. and over 40 countries across 5 continents,” she continued.
“This is the latest example of China scrambling to do damage control,” Watson added. “It has repeatedly and wrongly claimed the surveillance balloon it sent over the U.S. was a weather balloon and has failed to offer any credible explanations for its intrusion into our airspace, airspace of others.”
It appears that both the U.S. and China are accusing each other of the same violations with China going a little further.
Wang accused the U.S. of being even more aggressive by “frequently sending warships and planes to carry out close-range reconnaissance against China.”
He asserts that it happened 657 times last year and 64 times in January of this year in the South China Sea.
“For the longest time, the US has abused its own technological advantages to carry out large-scale and indiscriminate wiretapping and theft of secrets from all over the world, including from its allies,” Wang said.
He also added that the US is “without a doubt the world’s largest surveillance habitual offender and surveillance empire.”
What is the truth here? It seems very strange that the U.S. has shot down three more unidentified objects following the Chinese surveillance balloon.
Melissa Dalton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs said, “In light of the People’s Republic of China balloon that we took down last Saturday, we have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we detected over the past week.”
Are we to conclude that objects of this type are pretty common but we just haven’t been close enough attention?
Officials from the Defense Department said that the recent objects while not being a “kinetic military threat” could be considered a safety concern for civilian flights because of the altitude at which they were flying.
