theoretically they could have conducted that operation off of alaska. by this time the president hadn t been briefed yet. that raises such an important question. the biden administration says that previous balloons have flown over the u.s. before, but the trump administration may not have been aware. how is that possible? the department of defense not have known and then not briefed the president at the time? so there are a lot of things that could have happened. we re playing a dpeguessing gam here, abby. the fact remains that sometimes we don t recognize these kinds of platforms for what they are. the fact that they re using a balloon as their surveillance platform, takes you back to the civil war, even before that, and we don t think of people often using those kinds of technologies in the modern age. so that might be a failure of imagination on our part and might also mean that we re not
done over the past eight weeks. how do they do it? i don t think they will be able to do it to be honest with you. i think their performance as just mentioned clearly shows that they really haven t applied the lessons learned. there has been some improvement in their performance. but the ability to conduct the type of military operations that would be necessary to get that land bridge up and running so to speak, they simply have not shown that they have the capability to pull that type of operation off. so u.s. cybersecurity experts are warned about russian hacking efforts for more than a decade. but now it seems russia is struggling from an unprecedented number of attacks by hack-ists and cyber criminals. according to the washington post, digital assailants have bluntered the personal financial data and defaced websites and
seems to be more certainty about it, and intelligence officials are rarely, if ever, going to tell us why they feel the certainty and it tends to be they have more specific information that might lead them to believe vladimir putin has made a decision. we are still hearing they are not 100% he has made a decision or not, and putin has been known to make a decision at the last minute and it s plausible he could turn the entire operation off, and again, that s not something we are hearing as much of in the last several days. more and more officials i am speaking with feel he has made the decision to invade. again, the missiles they are bringing and are preparing, that s one that i am hearing a lot about in the past couple of days, a lot of concern about them, but they are also moving the russian troops closer and closer toward the border and providing them with ammunition, and they are getting them ready
i think certainly things are in motion, but the question is whether it can all be pulled back and whether the president of russia is still able to call this operation off. i think that possibility must logically still exist, and therefore i think it s absolutely vital that we have a path of dialogue and reason. you know, you just cannot see how this makes sense for russia. imagine the invasion of ukraine, a country of 45 million people, second biggest country in europe geographically, apart from russia itself, an absolutely colossal place. you can t hold it down. it would be a protracted, violent, bloody insurgency with the loss of life for young russians, as well as for ukrainians. the family of a british man killed by a shark in australia have
say their plan is to evacuate a thousands people a day from that kabul airport. from what you have seen and the chaos, will that be possible? reporter: it s difficult to imagine how they could achieve a goal like that without some sort of cooperation from the taliban, oddly, and some kind of agreement the taliban will allow the very people who have been assisting the afghan government. we saw today utter chaos. i think it will be hard to pull that operation off. when they first announced the idea of bringing tens of thousands of people out of the country seeing farfetched even if the afghan government in control because of chaos befall operations like that. if you look at what s happening today which was hundreds of people trying to climb over walls, rush gates, do whatever they could just to get inside