 U.S. officials now say Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S. accidentally. The Washington Post has a weird new article out citing multiple anonymous U.S. officials saying that the Chinese spy balloon we've been hearing about for the last two weeks was never intended for a surveillance mission over the United States at all. The article is titled U.S. Tracked China Spy Balloon from Launch on Hainan Island along unusual path and throughout it alternates between the objective journalistic terms suspected spy balloon and suspected Chinese surveillance balloon and the U.S. government's terms spy balloon and airborne surveillance device. There is at this time no publicly available evidence that the balloon which was famously shot down on February 4th was in fact an instrument of Chinese espionage. The Chinese government has said that the balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that got blown off course and the Pentagon's own assessment is that a Chinese spy balloon would not create a significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low earth orbit. What makes the article so weird is that it actually contains claims which substantiate Beijing's assertion that this was in fact a balloon that got blown off course. Yet it keeps repeating the unevidenced claim that it was a spy balloon. Here's an excerpt. Quote, by the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace last month U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China's south coast. U.S. monitors watched as the balloon settled into a flight path that would appear to have taken it over the U.S. territory of Guam but somewhere along that easterly route the craft took an unexpected northern turn according to several U.S. officials who said that analysts are now examining the possibility that China didn't intend to penetrate the American heartland with their airborne surveillance device. The balloon floated over Alaska's Aleutian islands thousands of miles away from Guam then drifted over Canada where it encountered strong winds that appeared to have pushed the balloon into the continental United States the officials said speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence. End quote. The article really reads like someone trying to reconcile two contradictory narratives claiming that although China didn't intend to send the balloon over the United States it decided to seize the opportunity to surveil U.S. nuclear sites while it was there anyway. It's crossing into U.S. airspace was a violation of sovereignty and it's hovering over sensitive nuclear sites in Montana was no accident officials said raising the possibility that even if the balloon were inadvertently blown over the U.S. mainland Beijing apparently decided to seize the opportunity to try to gather intelligence right the articles authors Ellen Nakashima Shane Harris and Jason Samnow. Intelligence analysts are unsure whether the apparent deviation was intentional or accidental but are confident it was intended for surveillance most likely over U.S. military installations in the Pacific they write. No mention is made of the two weeks of hysterical shrieking from the Western political media class about China's outrageously brazen intrusion into U.S. airspace or the claims from conservative China hawks that it proves Biden has failed to make Beijing sufficiently afraid of American might. No mention is made of the rhetoric from warmongers like House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher who claimed the balloon is evidence that China is a threat to American sovereignty and is a threat to the Midwest in places like those that I live in and no mention is made of the White House's recent admission that the three unidentified objects that U.S. warplanes shot down over the weekend were most likely benign balloons. The intelligence community is considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose the National Security Council's John Kirby told the press on Tuesday. So it's entirely possible that the American political media class has been spending the month of February furiously demanding more militarism and more Cold War escalations over four harmless balloons. It's entirely possible that the world's mightiest air force just spent two weeks waging kinetic aerial warfare on random pieces of junk in the sky and that this is being used to manufacture consent for more aggressions against China. In a recent article titled media spy balloon obsession a gift to China Hawks. Fair.org documents the ways the Western media have been committing journalistic malpractice with their obedient regurgitation of U.S. government slogans about a Chinese spy balloon despite a complete lack of evidence for this claim quote. Despite this uncertainty U.S. media overwhelmingly interpreted the Pentagon's conjecture as fact. The New York Times reported that the United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon only to call the device the spy balloon without a tribute of language within the same article. Similar evolution happened at CNBC where the description shifted from suspected Chinese spy balloon to simply Chinese spy balloon. The Guardian once bothered to place spy balloon in quotation marks but soon abandoned that punctuation. Given that media had no proof of either explanation it might stand to reason that outlets would give each possibility spy balloon versus weather balloon equal attention. Yet media were far more interested in lending credence to the U.S.'s official narrative than to that of China end quote. And of course getting lost in all this is the obvious fact that it's no big deal for major governments to spy on each other they all do so constantly and the U.S. does it more than anyone else. To suddenly treat increasingly flimsy claims about Chinese spy balloons as some kind of incendiary existential threat is ridiculous. As commentator Matthew Petty recently observed on Substack the U.S. has historically been so insistent on its right to fly surveillance aircraft over foreign countries that it has repeatedly come close to war with nations who've shot down its spy planes. During the Cuban Missile Crisis then Attorney General Robert Kennedy issued a red-line threat to the Soviet ambassador that if the Cuban military didn't stop shooting U.S. spy planes the United States would launch an invasion of Cuba. Just in 2018 the U.S. came close to the brink of war with Iran when its military shot down a U.S. surveillance drone and was only averted because Trump was talked out of it by TV pundit Tucker Carlson. If the U.S. insists on its right to conduct aerial surveillance on foreign nations it's a bit silly for it to throw a tantrum when foreign nations return the favor. It would be even sillier to throw a tantrum over a surveillance mission its own intelligence says was accidental. It would be even sillier for the news media of the Western world to assist it in doing so. Sometimes I think American media should abandon its whole free press charade and just switch to publishing the news straight out of the Pentagon. This is definitely one of those times.