United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a slip of the tongue while addressing the American people from the White House when he stated that COVID-19 is a live military exercise.
“This is not about retribution,” Pompeo explained. “This matter is going forward — we are in a live exercise here to get this right.”
With a disgusted look on his face, President Trump replied: “You should have let us know.”
Military Exercise meaning (from Wikipedia): “A military exercise or war game is the employment of military resources in training for military operations, either exploring the effects of warfare or testing strategies without actual combat. This also serves the purpose of ensuring the combat readiness of garrisoned or deployable forces prior to deployment from a home base.”
THE COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT:
Pompeo’s statement might be misinterpreted when taken out of context.
It is important to focus on the broader context of Secretary of State Pompeo’s statement. The transcript is below. Pompeo was referring to China and China’s Communist Party. This is the transcript. (emphasis added). (GR Editor)
. Speaker 29: (01:06:57) .
Yeah, so we were alerted by some discussions that Dr. Redfield, the director of the CDC had with Chinese colleagues on January 3rd. It’s since been known that there may have been cases in December. Not that we were alerted in December.Speaker 28: (01:07:13) .
Mr. President, the other question I have for you, when-Donald Trump: (01:07:15) .
Excuse me, we’ll do that in a second. Let Mike-Sec. Pompeo: (01:07:18) .
May I just say one more thing. There’s been some discussion about China and what they knew and when they knew it, and I’ve been very critical. We need to know immediately the world is entitled to know. The Chinese government was the first to know of this risk to the world and that puts a special obligation to make sure that data, the data gets to our scientists, our professionals. This is not about retribution. This matters going forward.
We’re in a live exercise here. To get this right. We need to make sure that even today the datasets that are available to every country, including datasets that are available to the Chinese communist party are made available to the whole world.
It’s an imperative to keep people safe. We talk about the absence of datasets, not being able to make judgments about what to do.Sec. Pompeo: (01:08:02) .
This is absolutely, this transparency, this real-time information sharing isn’t about political games or retribution. It’s about keeping people safe.
And so when you see a delay in information flowing from the Chinese communist party to the technical people who we wanted to get into China immediately to assist in this, every moment of delay connected to being able to identify this risk vectors, creates risks to the people all around the world.
And so this is why it’s not about blaming someone for this. This is about moving forward to make sure that we continue to have the information we need to do our jobs.
