Thanks. You should post that article too, seems fuller and links to a Washington Post article with a little more detail as well. Frankly I'd largely forgotten about the whole balloon incident as the whole thing at the time was a confusing mess of misinformation and internal and external posturing from Washing and Beijing as well that made whatever publicly available truth that could be gleaned so warped that most of the nuance was lost in my mind and I just mentally filed it under "what the fuck?"

I would maintain though that you seem to trying to put together a "gotcha!" narrative about the US perspective on the matter using source material that doesn't really paint that picture. The shifting and changing story wrapped up in geopolitical intrigue has a whiff to it for sure but no one seems to be "admitting" anything in the any of what you linked. The weird thing about the idea that anyone is admitting something, is that all of the "admissions" are part of a set of claims that the US would want to promulgate and indeed are.

They are seeking maximum political advantage from this balloon incident, so they say it was a spy balloon, because they want China to appear to be doing wrong by spying, this necessarily means saying they somehow allowed a spy balloon that everybody could see with the naked eye and which was apparently very dangerous to national security to just drift unchecked in to their airspace and see all manner of sensitive things, so they say they tracked it from that start because they're too compotent to let something like this pass them by, oh and also it didn't really manage to spy on them because they "took steps" and therefore it didn't transmit any intelligence. The story seems iffy but to believe it would be to buy in to the official preferred narrative offered by Washington, not a bunch of leaked admissions they were hoping to keep on the down-low

The idea of it drifting accidentally from an originally more limited but still surveillance related mission is an interesting twist to the story, I guess either because it's what really seems to have happened or maybe because it provides a kind of a safety valve for them to ratchet up tensions whilst still kind of not directly accusing Beijing in case things start to get a little too hot in the diplomatic realm and they need to cool things down. This helps them get out of a tangle but still paint China as incompetent spies who accidentally sent the balloon on a more obvious course where it would be seen and intercepted, but who essentially didn't mean to be quite so bold and had only more limited intentions.

@yogthos @steltek pffft…the ballon did not “transmit” any information. It absolutely did try to collect information. Stop telling lies.