Sending Kirby to the White House press briefing room to field questions Monday represents a tentative step toward more transparency.
Robert Gibbs, who served as White House press secretary during the Obama administration, said in an interview that Biden’s administration should be over-communicating around the shootdowns, particularly as a lack of information can allow disinformation and misinformation to grow.
“They’re the ones that have to drive the narrative on this and I don’t think it’s helpful having different parts of the governmental apparatus knowing different levels of things and reporting that publicly,” he said. “That hurts their case that they’re the ones that have the information and are communicating it with the public.”
In the meantime, the White House is facing criticism from both sides of the aisle, as lawmakers attempt to work out what exactly happened.
“What’s gone on in the last two weeks or so, 10 days, has been nothing short of craziness,” Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, mere hours before the fourth object was shot down over Lake Huron.
His Republican colleague from Montana Sen. Steve Daines agreed in a tweet on Sunday, calling the “lack of communication” from the White House “unacceptable.” In the face of White House reticence, the public is forced to rely “on leaks, speculation and worst of all disinformation from foreign governments.”
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., shared his own concerns about insufficient transparency from the Biden White House in an interview Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
While he said it might be difficult to have immediate answers because of the remote areas where some of the objects were shot down, as they required grueling retrieval missions, Himes said it is troubling to see “massive speculation about alien invasions and additional Chinese or Russian action” bubbling up in the information vacuum.
“Maybe it’s because I’m in politics, and so I spend a lot of time talking to folks in grocery stores and town hall meetings,” he added. “You know, in an absence of information, people will fill that gap with anxiety and other stuff. So, I wish the administration was a little quicker to tell us everything that they do know.”
It is even unclear whether there are more objects in the air than previously known or if there are entirely new items appearing in American airspace. Has that information changed the requirements for shooting objects from American skies? That also remains unknown.
“I think the mistake here is not adequately characterizing what happens when an unknown vehicle heads toward American territory,” Bolton said. “You should assume if it’s unidentified and doesn’t respond to communications, that you assume it’s potentially dangerous.”
Two U.S. defense officials previously told NBC News that the military is using a wider range of radar data to monitor North American airspace since the Chinese spy balloon was spotted and they’re taking deeper looks at a larger number of objects that they might have filtered out in the past.
What is known for certain is that, with missiles firing over the U.S. and Canada, the significance of the moment is difficult to ignore.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, who heads NORAD and U.S. North Command, noted his belief that “this is the first time within United States or American airspace that NORAD or United States Northern Command has taken kinetic action against an airborne object.”
Officials have attempted to scuttle the view that the objects were a severe threat to Americans. The most recent object shot down over Lake Huron was not considered a military threat, but a Pentagon statement said it could have had surveillance capabilities.
The only thing that was strictly emphasized about the three unidentified objects, according to one defense official, was that there was “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”
Alex Seitz-Wald contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
