andrea? and of course we can see peter on weekend today tomorrow. of course with kristen welker. joining me ohio republican congressman mike turner, chair of the house intelligence committee leading the house delegation in munich. mr. chairman, thank you very much. thank you for having me. you know the intelligence better than anybody other than you members of the gang of eight. there s no question it was a spy balloon. the criticism has been that the president didn t have it shot down sooner and that we were tracking it all the way from hynan province across the pacific. then the aleutians, into canada, into the u.s. the white house is saying we ve got a lot of intelligence by doing that and being able it retrieve the debris, which is that retrieval is now completed off south carolina. what do you say to that? andrea, whenever you let a
currency and great concern at the white house. the senator joins me now. senator tester, good to have you with us. great to be here. thank. neil: you were concerned about how far this went and it was a concern more about china and doing what they did. now if you think about it, that warning was well-placed. china is still acting weirdly, criticizing our downing of that balloon. high level officials refusing to meet with their u.s. counter parts. and threatening return sanctions against our sanctions against some of their technology companies. what do you think? what i think is what the chinese communist party did was unacceptable. the truth is and i said this before, i would have shot it down over the aleutians. there was an assessment made and it ended up getting shot down over south carolina. the bottom line is this. they invaded our airspace. our airspace.
commander-in-chief. he should have taken that shot over the aleutians. you can t invade the sovereign airspace of the united states of america. these are sophisticated balloons. this shows our weakness. this has a parallel of the afghanistan debacle. when the world sees america looking weak on the world stage, it empowers our adversaries and that is a huge risk to the world. martha: i want to play this for you from the chinese foreign ministry. he says the u.s. is trigger happy. watch. we do not need to point out, however, that the u.s. downing of the unmansed air ship is a trigger happy over reaction. what do you make of what s going on with the u.s. and china at the top levels with regard to
operations like this are human endeavors, there s always going to be a tad hesitation, you want to gather as much information as you can, the one thing you cannot reclaim is time, so you go back to the balloon, first appeared on the radar, by the north american air defense command, out of colorado springs, when it was over the aleutians, so the discussion begins, what do we need to do? what do we think this is? and that object, that balloon was maneuverable, so it is continuing to move. and by the time you make some decisions, get a little bit more clarity, it is already over the united states, and that opened up some other challenges that needed to be addressed, and in this case, obviously, there was more preparation, folks who were leaning forward, this he had already worked through some they had already worked through some of those challenges before, so there was reflection, there was understanding, there were after-action reviews, so the joint staff, the joint staff and the penta
capability of steering or maneuvering, it s just riding on the wind as kirby said. could it be this was put up before we detected the last one? we just don t know, john. and look at the direction from which it s coming in. the chinese balloon over the last week came in through the aleutians, so in western/southwestern alaska. described it came in from the northeast, from the arctic ocean. so i imagine following a jet stream. it could be from another country, it could be a peaceful scientific weather balloon, who knows. but again, clearly we have tightened up our procedures in dod and the administration regarding our ability to detect these things, report them and quickly make decisions about unidentified objects entering our air space, that s a good thing. sandra: mr. secretary, there was a question in the briefing room that was an important one by a reporter asking have we called china?