Over the weekend a Chinese spy balloon, which prowled American skies and surveilled sensitive U.S. military sites for a week, was finally shot down over the Atlantic ocean.
Biden has been roundly criticized by Republicans for failing to shoot the ballon down when it was over the ocean near islands in Alaska, but now former Democratic CIA Director Leon Panetta is also blasting Biden for failing to take it down earlier.
“I hope in the future we make clear to China, that this kind of incident cannot happen again, and it will not happen again. And in the future, if we see that kind of balloon, we are going to, if they don’t take action to prevent that balloon from entering our air space, that we will indeed shoot it down much earlier than we did this time around,” Panetta told CNN over the weekend. “If we were aware of the balloon, I think we should have taken steps to prevent it from entering our air space and I’m not sure that we should have allowed it to simply crossover the country, crossover what were obviously sensitive military sites…I don’t see the logic of that.”
According to reports, U.S. officials did in fact see the balloon coming and it was allowed to enter the continental U.S.
