(Washington) Republicans criticized Democratic President Joe Biden on Sunday for his handling, according to them, of the Chinese balloon incident, shot down the day before by the American army after flying over the United States for several days, and whose remains were now to be recovered during operations at sea.
“Having the president shoot him over the Atlantic is a bit like tackling the quarterback after the game is over,” Republican elected official Mike Turner, president of the House Intelligence Committee. The balloon “should never have been able to enter the United States, and complete its mission”, he added.
“Why did it take so long to reveal it to the Americans? “Asked him on CNN Republican Senator Marco Rubio, Vice Chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee. He described the incident as “unprecedented”, and considered that the ball was used by China to demonstrate that it had “the capacity to do this”, without the United States being able to “do anything against it”.
Mr. Biden said he had given the order on Wednesday to shoot down “as soon as possible” the balloon, which entered American airspace for the first time on January 28 above Alaska, then a second at the level of the idaho, in the northwestern United States, on January 31, which is Tuesday.
But the general public only learned of its existence on Thursday, when it was over Montana. The Pentagon explained that it wanted to wait for the balloon to fly over the sea to shoot it down, in order to avoid any damage to the ground during the fallout of debris.
The area over which they extend, after the operation off the coast of South Carolina, is more than 11 kilometers, underlined Sunday morning on CNN the American Secretary of Transport, Pete Buttigieg. The case “was handled appropriately”, by “weighing the different risks”, he defended.
The entry of this Chinese balloon into American airspace, which the Pentagon claims is a spy balloon, has fueled tensions between Washington and Beijing, and caused the last-minute cancellation of a visit by the head of American diplomacy, Antony Blinken, to China.
Beijing, which maintains that it was a civilian aircraft, accused the United States of having “overreacted” by using force, and said it “reserves the right” to retaliate.