Trump’s Lying Band of Brothers
March 28, 2025
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
We know that Donald Trump is not fit to be sitting in the White House. He is a dangerously disordered president, and we have observed enough aberrant behavior to fill a psychiatric text book. We know from his exchanges with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that he has been quick to brandish his “bigger (nuclear) button” that has the unilateral power to kill us all. And now we know that he is surrounded by a national security team whose members are totally unfit to serve and are willing to lie to an American public and an American Congress that has yet to come to grips with the normalization of Trump’s “no rules” presidency.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already lied to the press about the nature of the group chat involving war plans, and on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe couldn’t recall any discussions of weaponry or targets, not even generic targets, in their testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. So don’t expect any accountability as the president and his national security team do their best to vilify an excellent journalist invited to the chat.
We can be thankful that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic and an outstanding journalist for decades, responded to a call on the messaging app Signal that involved every member of Trump’s national security team, including the vice-president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and leading intelligence and military officials. We are fortunate that Goldberg, sitting in his car on a Safeway parking lot, took a call that he initially believed to be bogus or simply part of a disinformation campaign.
Goldberg was invited by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who may have intended to invite U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer (JG), who had no more need to be in such a group chat than did the Atlantic’s JG. Typically, the trade representative would never be part of the Principal’s Committee. Conversely, Goldberg probably has a better idea of overall U.S. national security than Greer, who is obsessed with tougher export controls and sanctions against China, and little else.
Every government official with a high-level security clearance is inundated with warnings against using personal cell phones in discussing government matters. Nevertheless, one of the participants in the chat, special envoy Steve Witkoff, was on the call on his cell phone while in Moscow. Russian intelligence has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, and Witkoff’s outrageous use of his personal cell phone for any discussion, let alone a discussion of precise military information dealing with the use of force. The make-up of this particular group suggests that some or all of these members have been using Signal regularly for sensitive discussions. It is particularly odd that not one individual questioned the presence of a journalist on the chat!
There is no national security information more sensitive that the discussion of war plans, which requires the highest level of operations security. These discussions must be held in a sensitive and security facility that can be found at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, or throughout the intelligence community. If an individual cannot be present at such a facility, at the very least he or she must be in a SCIF (a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to prevent unauthorized physical or electronic access. The high-level members even travel with their own classified communication systems.
Electronic surveillance and penetration has a long history. When I was the intelligence advisor to the U.S. delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1971-1972, all professional matters were discussed in a SCIF that was flown to Vienna, Austria. When I was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1976, I had to keep my office shutters closed because the KGB was targeting embassy windows to gather the signals emanating from the IBM Selectric typewriters that were used in the day. In my 25 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, I was not permitted to bring a cell phone into the building because of the ease of foreign electronic penetration.
The group of misfits who occupy the highest national security positions that exist in Washington were simply too unwilling on a Saturday morning to travel to a SCIF. It is highly likely that these Signal chats have been a regular feature of this particular team for the past two months. We know that Donald Trump has no understanding or appreciation for intelligence security because of the case of the United States of America v. Donald Trump that filed 40 criminal counts related to his removal of sensitive classified materials from the White House to various insecure locations at Mar-A-Lago, including a bathroom, a ballroom, and a utility closet.
In the first months of his first term, Trump revealed a highly sensitive document—obtained from Israeli intelligence—to the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador. Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State, and led Mossad—Israel’s CIA—to withhold the sharing of sensitive information for a period of time. A U.S. official stated that Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.” It must be added that some of our best intelligence on foreign terrorism comes from foreign liaison sources, including intelligence sources that can be found in adversarial countries.
Finally, it must be noted that the participating members of the group chat, with the exception of Goldberg, were members of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, which is the senior interagency forum for consideration and decision making of the most sensitive national security issues. The NSC was created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policy. The intelligence services in Moscow and Beijing probably cannot believe their new form of access to such decision making. Unfortunately, nothing will stop Trump from concentrating on his revenge tour and his campaign against the rule of law, not even the mishandling of Washington’s most sensitive intelligence information.
The Real Outrage About the Yemen Signal Group Is That It Called for Attack on Civilian Home
Source: Rahul Shah. Pexels.
The American political landscape has been rattled by revelations that the Trump administration discussed plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen in a chat group containing a journalist from The Atlantic. Senior Trump administration officials are facing tough questions about their operational security, use of consumer technology, and even their emoji usage.
So far, however, there has been little focus on the specifics of the attack, much less discussion of the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strike was a civilian residence.
After revealing on Monday that its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been invited to the Signal chat group, The Atlantic published on Wednesday the actual messages in which top Trump administration officials laid out minute-by-minute operational details and specific weapons to be used in strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Atlantic opted to publish the chats — which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance — only after the White House tried to deny classified details were shared.
Before the “Houthi PC small group channel” Signal messages were released, Waltz announced that recent attacks had “taken out key Houthi leadership, including their head missileer.”
“We’ve hit their headquarters,” Waltz told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, prior to Goldberg’s revelations. “We’ve hit communications nodes, weapons factories, and even some of their over-the-water drone production facilities.”
“We had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”
In the group chat, however, Waltz indicated that in order to kill a Houthi official, the U.S. military destroyed a civilian home or apartment building.
“The first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” wrote Waltz on Signal.
“Excellent,” Vance replied.
The attack was another in a long-running war — by the U.S. and its proxies — against the Houthis. For years, the United States backed an atrocity-filled air campaign led by Saudi Arabia against the militant group. Just after entering office, President Joe Biden formally delisted the Houthis as a terrorist group. After the Houthis began attacking ships — including U.S. warships — in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden in retaliation for the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza, Biden reclassified them as terrorists and began launching attacks.
President Donald Trump began his own campaign of strikes targeting the Houthis earlier this month, after the Yemeni militants threatened to attack “Israeli” ships again over Israel’s blockade preventing aid entering the Gaza Strip. (The rebels have had an expansive definition of what constitutes an Israeli ship, targeting vessels of various nations.) Trump’s air campaign has already killed more than 50 people since March 15.
“Too often the news coverage of the Signal chat leak has lacked any real discussion of the actual act of war itself.”
“Too often the news coverage of the Signal chat leak has lacked any real discussion of the actual act of war itself — the fact that the U.S. is bombing people in Yemen,” Stephanie Savell, the director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, told The Intercept. “Fifty-three people have died in this latest wave of U.S. airstrikes, five of them children. These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of U.S. killing in Yemen, and the research shows that U.S. airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”
Over the last century, the U.S. military has shown a consistent disregard for civilian lives. It has repeatedly cast or misidentified ordinary people as enemies; failed to investigate civilian harm allegations; excused casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failed to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable. These long-standing practices sit in stark contrast to the U.S. government’s public campaigns to sell its wars as benign, its air campaigns as precise, its concern for civilians as overriding, and the deaths of innocent people as “tragic” anomalies.
Last year, The Intercept drew attention to a racist and dehumanizing “morale patch” on the uniform of Lt. Kyle Festa, a pilot involved in the Biden administration’s war on the Houthis. Festa’s patch featured crosshairs over likenesses of the Tusken Raiders, the fictional “sand people” who attacked Luke Skywalker in the 1977 movie “Star Wars.” The patch read “Houthi Hunting Club. Red Sea 2023-2024.”
The Pentagon did not answer questions about the Trump administration’s targeting of the Houthi official’s “girlfriend’s building” or reports of civilian casualties resulting from the March 15 attack prior to publication. “Please direct your questions to the NSC,” an unnamed spokesperson replied by email, using the acronym for the National Security Council.
The White House told The Intercept that press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the issues during a briefing on Wednesday. She did not mention civilian casualties and only referenced attacks on “Houthi terrorists.”
“At the very least this should prompt Americans to raise some serious, urgent questions about why and for what goals the U.S. military is killing Yemeni civilians,” said Savell.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.
Trump Officials’ Errant Signal Messages Reveal the Cynical and Shallow Motivations Behind Bombing of Civilians in Yemen
The high-level Trump administration Signal message thread on bombing Yemen on which someone on the staff of National Security Adviser Michael Waltz included The Atlantic‘s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg is what is impolitely called in the military a SNAFU (Situation Normal All F*cked Up). Yes, it is a security breach of gargantuan proportions. Yes, the whole exchange was illegal according to the US Official Records Act, according to which important government discussions and decisions must be documented in lasting media.
But the truly sad dimension of the SNAFU is not the revelation that the Trump Administration is the Gang that couldn’t Shoot Straight, in Jimmy Breslin’s phrase. We knew that.
It is that seasoned military personnel like Waltz, a former Special Operations colonel in Afghanistan, appear to have learned nothing from America’s longest failed military campaign, the absurdly named “war on terror.” It was more often a “war of terror,” which left hundreds of thousands dead and millions homeless.
As for the recent Trump bombing of Yemen, Jordan News reports,
“Peter Hawkins, UNICEF’s representative in Yemen, shared his observations from Hudaydah, stating: ‘I was in Hudaydah over the past three days. I passed through the western plains where people are in the streets and on the roadside, begging and looking for help. They have surrendered. I personally saw a heavily damaged building where three children were injured from yesterday’s bombing.’
“He further said, ‘Eight children were killed in the latest airstrikes in northern Yemen. These airstrikes have a direct impact on the people living in the areas surrounding the target zones. We also have staff members affected by this bombing. It is extremely shocking, and as I mentioned earlier, we have verified the deaths of 8 children in these airstrikes.’”
Hawkins has pointed out that Trump moves like cutting off USAID funds for Yemen and designating the Houthis a terrorist organization are like a “death sentence for thousands of children.”
So about those Signal messages:
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote in response Vice President JD Vance’s suggestion that bombing Yemen be put off a month to see what the situation with oil prices will be,
“VP: I understand your concerns ” and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what “nobody knows who the Houthis are” which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”
Hegseth is not saying that nobody knows who the Houthis are in the sense that they are an unknown quantity. He is saying that the Trump MAGA base does not know who the Houthis in Yemen are, and therefore it is a tough task to convince them to shed their isolationism and support this military action. Trump’s brand is that he claimed to have opposed the Iraq War and doesn’t want to spend American blood and treasure abroad. So, his base may ask, why is he bombing the bejesus out of Yemen, and what the hell is Yemen?
Hegseth is actually just a talking head from the Fox stable of fatuous prevaricators, and is the least qualified secretary of defense in American history. That is why his comments are on public messaging. He is advising that the Trump team blame Biden for the Houthis’ continued operations against commercial vessels in the Red Sea, which they conduct in order to protest the Israeli genocide against the civilians of Gaza. And he thinks that although no one in MAGA cares about Yemen, the Houthis, or the Red Sea, they may be gotten on board if the Houthis can be configured as a cat’s paw of Iran.
Hegseth himself, of course, has no idea whether the Houthis have a command line to Tehran. (They don’t.) He is inadvertently revealing that the tag line of “Iran-backed” that is routinely applied to the Houthis is US government propaganda, undertaken for public relations purposes. Iran does, of course, give the Houthis some money and armaments, but the Houthis would be there even if Iran did not exist — they are a native Yemeni movement of the Zaydi branch of Shiism, which is not connected to the Twelver Shiism of Iran. And the Houthis aren’t hitting ships in the Red Sea because Iran tells them to. Iran, which is close to China, may not even want Red Sea trade disrupted for Beijing. The Houthis lead a coalition of tribes, many of which are Sunni Muslims, and they need unifying issues with a pan-Islamic appeal. The genocide in Gaza fills that bill, since all Yemenis are upset about it. In fact, throughout the world, only sociopaths are not upset about the atrocities conducted by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As for Biden, he also bombed Yemen, and tried to put together a coalition of naval powers to patrol the Red Sea. But local states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia could not afford to look to their publics as though they were policing the Red Sea to allow Israel to go on massacring the Palestinian civlians of Gaza with impunity, and the Biden team couldn’t bring them aboard. Besides which, naval escorts of container ships can’t stop drone and missile attacks on them, anyway.
So Hegseth’s attempt to blame Biden for the resurgence of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea is, again, just propaganda. The Houthis survived seven years of US-backed Saudi and UAE bombing campaigns. Guerrilla movements are hard to defeat from the air. Biden’s and the British government’s bombing raids never stood a chance of affecting Houthi behavior.
Then Hegseth weighed in again, later in the discussion:
“Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first “or Gaza cease fire falls apart ” and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”-operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”
In this message, Hegseth makes the odious argument that Yemeni civilians must die under US bombardment or else the Trump administration will look as though it is dithering.
As for Israel taking action first, I couldn’t follow his reasoning there. The Israelis have already bombed Yemen. They may do so again. Why should that consideration cause the Trump administration to rush to carry out its own bombing raids?
Hegseth’s fear that the ceasefire in Gaza might fall apart shows that he is not paying attention. It was because the Israeli government blockaded food and other aid to Gaza and then began again bombing civilian apartment buildings in Gaza that the Houthis began targeting Red Sea commercial traffic again.
Hegseth admits that Trump is not bombing Yemen to defeat the Houthis. He says that the considerations are freedom of navigation and the reestablishment of deterrence.
Again, Biden also bombed Yemen, but bombing guerrilla groups does not establish deterrence, or Vietnam wouldn’t be in the hands of the Communists and Afghanistan wouldn’t be in the hands of the Taliban.
Hegseth is making this argument because JD Vance had written, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”
Vance later added, “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
The vice president’s point is that Trump administration bombing of Yemen to protect Red Sea shipping primarily benefits Europe and US interests here are minor. He thinks that bombing the Houthis and patrolling the Red Sea is a European responsibility, not an American one.
It is interesting that Vance does not bring up Israel as a consideration. Surely the main reason Trump is bombing Yemen is to enable Netanyahu to continue his genocide unimpeded, not to ensure freedom of navigation, which the US does not actually believe in or it would not arbitrarily confiscate Iranian oil tankers.
So, yes, doing military planning by Signal is illegal, and yes emailing sensitive security and military documents to a journalist who used to serve in the Israeli military as a prison guard is a major breach of national security.
But the shame of these email messages is that they do not show an understanding of the limits of air power in guerrilla war, they misunderstand what actions might constitute real deterrence, and they show that for the Trump team the entire exercise is a mere performance for the public. Vance comes across as the smartest of them, since he realizes that the MAGA base doesn’t likely want this performance, anyway, and that the attempt at one-upman-ship with Biden on Red Sea policy could backfire in the Red States because it just looks like more Bidenism.
Juan Cole
Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context, and he has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. His books include Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires; The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East; Engaging the Muslim World; and Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.
In his article about being invited by U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to a Signal chat with the U.S. secretaries of state, defense and treasury, the U.S. vice president and the directors of national intelligence and the C.I.A., Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg writes that Waltz set at least some of the text messages in the chat to disappear.
Goldberg wrote:
“Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.”
Had the discussion of war plans in Yemen by the principle Trump national security officials been conducted on a secure government channel, such as the National Security Agency runs as part of the Pentagon, a record would have presumably been kept in accordance with the law.
But Signal offered a way to make that record disappear unless someone on the chat made screenshots of it. Goldberg took screenshots of the chat between 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14 and 5.18pm Saturday, some 33 hours later.
Goldberg implies classified information was discussed, which he has not disclosed to the public. “The Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” he writes.
This conflicts with the testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and C.I.A. Director John Radcliffe who told the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday that no classified information was involved. [On Wednesday, The Atlantic published the full transcripts of the Signal chat including military details of the attack.]
Why would Waltz want to use a platform like Signal that allows this high-level chat to disappear? One possible answer is to ask who was not present on the chat: President Donald Trump. If the NSA had run the call, Trump would have access to the chat transcript.
(Also missing from the Signal meeting was the head of the NSA, who would likely have objected to the NSA not facilitating it. With the exception of the individual chat participants, who could have also made screenshots, the government does not have possession of the transcript.)
Asked about the Signal chat on Tuesday, Trump plausibly professed to have known nothing about it.
With Trump absent and no record of the conversation being kept, his top security officials could speak more freely, such as Vice President J.D. Vance, who openly opposed Trump’s desire to bomb the Houthis in Yemen, the subject of the chat. According to Goldberg’s reporting, Vance wrote on Signal:
“I think we are making a mistake. … 3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”
Goldberg then writes:
“The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. ‘I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.’”
There are many more questions than answers at this point about this incident, and we may never get many answers. That leaves mostly speculation.
If no record was being kept of what was clearly a strictly off-the-record (if not classified) conversation, why would Waltz have invited Goldberg to participate? What role might he have wanted Goldberg to play? Or was it just a massive screw up by Waltz to invite him?
Goldberg wrote:
“I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.”
According to D.C. journalist Max Blumenthal, Waltz had been a source for Goldberg, who he described as one of the “Beltway media’s top access journalists.” During the run up to the 2003 Gulf War, Goldberg was used by Dick Cheney “to draw a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein,” Blumenthal said. It was a link that didn’t exist. But after planting the story, Cheney then cited Goldberg’s report in The New Yorker as proof.
In his Atlantic article on Tuesday, Goldberg, who is anti-Trump, writes about Waltz:
“I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically.”
Staunchly Pro-Israel
In his youth, Goldberg was an admirer of the Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, some of whose followers are members of the current Israeli government. Living in Israel, Goldberg joined the Israeli Defense Forces, where he became a prison guard monitoring Palestinian prisoners. The Jewish Chronicle says:
“Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked in the campus Hillel kitchen before moving to Israel. He served in the Israel Defence Forces during the First Intifada as a prison guard at Ktzi’ot Prison – an experience he later documented in his 2006 book Prisoners: A Muslim & a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. ”
Bombing Yemen for Israel
The U.S. attacks on the Houthis, which began on March 15, are clearly to the advantage of Israel, but Vance pointed out that the U.S. has virtually no interests in Yemen and little shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthis have only targeted ships bound for Israel to hinder Israel’s murderous assaults on Gaza.
Trump has warned Iran that they could be next if they continue supporting the Houthis on counter attacks against the U.S. in the area. Getting the U.S. to go to war against Iran has been a longstanding, even obsessive goal of Netanyahu’s.
Israeli intelligence would clearly have had an intense interest in this encrypted chat on Signal, which it may have been able to penetrate. Or maybe not.
“Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of ‘national defense’ information,” Goldberg wrote. This is the thinking of a person aligned with the state. It is not normally how a reporter given access to sensitive material thinks.
Ultimately there is only one person who can explain why Goldberg was invited to the chat and that is Waltz. On Wednesday, The Atlantic reported: “Waltz, who invited Goldberg into the Signal chat, said yesterday that he was investigating “how the heck he got into this room.”
On Fox News Wednesday, Waltz said: “I can tell you for 100% I don’t know this guy [Goldberg]. I know him from his horrible reputation and he really is a bottom scum of journalists and I know him in the sense that he hates the president, and I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone and we are going to figure out how this happened.”
Goldberg wrote him to ask why he was invited. This is the answer he got:
“Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. ‘This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,’ Hughes wrote. ‘The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.’”
In fact, this entire episode might just have been blown way out of proportion. No harm came to U.S. troops. But harm came to 53 Yemeni civilians, killed by American bombs aiming to stop the only people trying to halt the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
That is the part of the story that has truly disappeared.
Cathy Vogan contributed to this article.
What Would Daniel Ellsberg Have Done? Thoughts On The Waltz-Goldberg Yemen War Signal Leak
Photograph Source: Gotfryd, Bernard – Public Domain
Imagine you pick up your phone one day and discover you have been included in a group chat that features text messages exchanged between the White House’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz; the vice-president of the United States, J.D. Vance; the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe; the secretary of state, Marco A. Rubio (“MAR”); the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth (referred to below by others as “Pete”); the director of national intelligence or DNI, Tulsi Gabbard (“TG”); and several other high-ranking members of the Trump administration.
Imagine at some point your screen features these “principals” of the U.S. national security state engaging in the following exchange of texts:
Michael Waltz: VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job. (1:48 p.m.)
Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed. (2:00 p.m.)
JD Vance: Excellent (2:01 p.m.)
John Ratcliffe: A good start (2:36 p.m.)
Michael Waltz:
(4:58 p.m.)
MAR: Good Job Pete and your team!! (5:14 p.m.)[1]
The men texting in the above passage are talking about a missile attack by the U.S. military on a civilian residential building (“his girlfriend’s building”), which their intelligence has told them was being visited by a military official of Ansarallah (“their top missile guy”). Ansarallah has been the de facto government since 2012 of the most populous areas of Yemen, the western territories surrounding the capital, Sanaa. It has yet to receive international recognition as such. The paramilitary political organization is most often referred to in the US and Western media as “the Iranian-backed Houthis.”
The destruction of the “girlfriend’s building” was one of many U.S. strikes carried out in Yemen on March 15, which are estimated to have killed 50-100 civilians.
Most of you reading the above transcript will view it as an exchange of words (and juvenile emojis) among a team of psychopaths celebrating the witting, pre-planned killing of an unspecified number of unknown civilians, a killing that the speakers themselves ordered or sanctioned as an acceptable consequence of hitting the targeted “missile guy.”
Many Americans may be surprised to learn that under the aegis of counter-terrorism, the U.S. has been carrying out military strikes in Yemen every year since 2009, including a cumulative estimate of about 300 drone strikes through 2023, as well as bombings with missiles and from planes. These actions caused a roughly estimated death-toll of 1,600 people from 2009 to 2023, 94% of them civilians, according to a study by New America.[2] This strand of the “war on terror” is accounted separately from the essential U.S. role in the Saudi Arabian-led ground war in Yemen from 2015-2023, to which we will return below.
ON JOURNALISTIC ETHICS
Leading politicians of the Democratic opposition, and the U.S. corporate media covering the Signal text leak, have not condemned or showed concern about the sudden surprise acts of war that involve civilian murder and that are illegal under international law. Because military action in Yemen has not been declared or authorized by a vote of the Congress, the operations also represent an unconstitutional use of the military.
Rather, the opponents and critics of Trump consider it a scandal and a kind of national emergency that the exchange was accidentally leaked to an unauthorized participant, in a clumsy and incompetent fashion. This was a breach of high-level communications security by Trump’s war junta during a military operation. Some are treating it as if it is the worst thing the Trump regime has so far been caught doing. Apparently, the Trump opponents would have preferred not to have heard anything about the “girlfriend’s building.”
The White House has confirmed the authenticity of the leaked text messages. An annotated presentation of several days worth of the chat transcript in the New York Times, to take one example, analyzes the passage quoted above by characterizing the rubbled building and the unknown number of bodies buried in it as “a victory” and a “successful outcome of the mission,” but considers this achievement to have been marred by “the embarrassing and problematic way the deliberations about it were revealed” to the public, i.e. by the accidental leak.
This is an indication that the group knew what their boss ultimately wanted — a victory. In response to the leak, Mr. Trump and White House officials have focused on the successful outcome of the mission to deflect from the embarrassing and problematic way the deliberations about it were revealed.[3]
The past week has taught us a lesson in contemporary journalistic ethics. According to the opposition party and most of the legacy corporate media, the hero of the story is Jeffrey Goldberg, a good and honorable journalist who was surprised to find he had been accidentally included in the chat among the administration’s war leaders via the Signal text service.
What do Goldberg’s actions teach us? When receiving an accidental leak of high-level information, what should a journalist do? Should he
1) close the leak before he learns anything more?
2) alert the world about the security breach?
3) report about it in a way that centers the leak, the incompetence of the leakers, and the “national security” dangers of the leak?
4) and treat the deadly and illegal act of war itself like a minor side matter?
Goldberg’s answer to all four questions is yes. These were the steps the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine took in real life, when, as he reports, he was accidentally included in the chat starting on March 13. At that point the officials were still discussing the plans for the US bombing of targets in Yemen. On March 15, the bombs actually fell. Soon after, Goldberg exited the chat. This week, he published his first two stories about the leak, which conformed to the above four steps. And that’s the story as covered in the U.S. press so far.
Some big controversial media stories of this kind are designed and released as propaganda operations by one or another government group with an interest that may not be obvious. It cannot be ignored that Goldberg was an important journalistic adjunct to at least one such government-run propaganda campaign, the infamous and world-changing “Iraqi WMD” hoax of 2002-2003, as will be discussed below. But it is also often the case that such stories converge organically, out of incidental parts in ways that were not designed as psychological operations, but still look like they could have been. Both the former and the latter make readers think things like, “You can’t make this shit up,” or, “If this was a Hollywood script it would be rejected, it’s too on-the-nose.”
What are we really seeing unfold? No definitive answer can be given here or now, but let us consider three possibilities, three scenarios for what may really be unfolding.
SCENARIO #1: SIGNALGATE
In the first scenario, the Waltz-Goldberg Signal leak is the accident it appears to be, just as the vast majority of observers believe it to be, and as I also do.
The story is that Waltz, tasked by Hegseth with setting up a chat channel meant only for the civilian big wheels of Trump’s war junta to discuss the Yemen attack, accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg. We must therefore presume Goldberg was on the list of Waltz’s Signal contacts. In a studio interview on Foxnews, Waltz not only denied this but characterized Goldberg as scum from the bottom of a pond. He insinuated that somehow, Goldberg had infiltrated Waltz’s phone.
Contrary to the impression one gets from headlines, the transcript as released by Goldberg does not indicate the chat was operationally necessary to the planning or ordering of the attack on Yemen. Waltz initiates the chat among all of the intended participants (plus the accidental extra man) on March 13 at 4:28 p.m. The first move is to assemble what he calls a “tiger team.” Each of the principals is asked to appoint a single responsible member of their staff who will represent their department at a real-life meeting space, the actual command center for the operation. Each of the chat participants does so, including Ratcliffe, who names some member of his staff at CIA as his “tiger team” proxy. Many “National Security Democrats” are treating this as an unforgivable act, perhaps the greatest crime of all and surely impeachable, apparently because no CIA person must ever be mentioned by their real name on an insecure chat, not even if they are the director’s own staff. (Goldberg redacted the name, so it has not actually been publicized.)
Hegseth informs the group that the attack is about to be ordered by the president. This prompts some debate among participants about the timing, but no decisions are reached via the chat. Rather, they share their impressions. Vance’s are the most extended. He presents himself as upset, not with the action itself, but with the fact that the US is covering the costs of it when it should be paid for by the “Europeans,” whose vital interests the attack will supposedly serve. (He and Waltz later discuss what percentage of the Red Sea traffic is “European” as opposed to “American” and figure out it’s all kind of mixed up because of globalization.)
When the attack unfolds on March 15, Hegseth and Waltz relay updates to the rest about the strikes, mostly after the bombs drop. In a couple of cases, they announce that missiles or planes have just been launched. Participants in the chat engage in several rounds of verbal back-slapping and God-thanking, as we saw also adding emojis of fists, flames, and flags, as well as praying hands, swelled biceps, and more flags.
Following on Goldberg’s original March 24 report, US corporate media and the “anti-Trump” opposition condemned the alleged breach of military communications security. They called for cabinet heads on figurative pikes. Again, they did not dwell on the morality, legality, politics, or military and international consequences of the acts of war, let alone on the civilian casualties or the lack of a Congressional authorization.
Certainly no one in the higher circles of televised politics thought to make the point that all this was happening because Ansarallah had imposed a blockade on sea traffic through the Red Sea headed for Israel (not Europe!) as a response to Israel’s breaking of the ceasefire in Gaza. Or that the American retaliation was therefore done in support of Israel’s resumption of the genocide against the Palestinian people.
Instead, those riding the scandal in the US media have emphasized that it is all about the sloppy use of Signal, the accidental leak of national security information by officials who are supposed to know better, and, again, greatest sin of all, the possible appearance of the name of a CIA staff member in unpublished print. They dusted off the “-gate” suffix used to spectacularize political scandals, and branded the whole mess as “Signalgate.”
SCENARIO #2: THE INSIDE JOKE
I have run across social-media speculation that the leak could have been intentionally arranged by one or more of the characters in the chat-group itself, for example as a way of sharing their concerns about the US bearing the costs of the war (in dollars, not in human lives), or in order to broadcast their ideology about the freeloading Europeans. Another possible motive might have been opposite to that idea: the leak as a means to put pressure on one or more of the participants, for example Vance for expressing reservations about Trump’s attack order.
As the administration’s embarrassments multiply, the odds of this scenario look increasingly remote, but it cannot be ruled out altogether. Intended or not, the leak should serve to demonstrate the absolute impunity of all of the bastards involved in the chat. That display of their power may be motive enough.
Perhaps Waltz or one or two others may have to be sent packing, as the first resignation in the kind of merry-go-round of political appointments and firings that Trump made a sport of during his first presidency. There is little doubt this “scandal” will raise up much of that good old Shakespearean “sound and fury.” It has potential to give the Democrats hours of hearing time, but little chance of causing negative legal or political consequences for the chatterers and leakers. Nowadays that seems always to be the case with anything given a “-gate” suffix. In the end, it signifies nothing.
SCENARIO #3: THE WATCHERS
The least likely scenario, in my view, is that this could have been a move orchestrated by an outside party, e.g. at a place like NSA or other institutions where operators have the means to mess around with comms via Signal and most any other platform, commercial or otherwise. Recall that at times Signal has been favored by the CIA in press pronouncements as a preferred means of “secure” communications for foreign dissidents and their own agents in the field. Can we assume the Agency’s advice is always given in good faith, or should we suspect that Signal is equipped with backdoors for surveillance, malware, and exploits?
If this was an act of sabotage, a hidden message, or a psychological operation of some kind by elements inside the government but outside the Hegseth-Waltz chat group and the Trump cabinet circle, Goldberg would no longer be the accidental recipient of the leak. He would have been chosen as such (presumably without knowing it himself). Returning to the second scenario, if this was an intentional leak by someone inside the chat group, again the choice of Goldberg would no longer be an accident. But even if the leak was strictly an accident by Waltz, as confirmed by the White House and as seems likeliest, it’s probably not a random matter that Goldberg was on a short list of those most likely to accidentally receive such a leak.
LOTTERY WINNER: JEFFREY GOLDBERG AND THE WMD
As a young man, the “good and honorable journalist” in our story, a US citizen, did a volunteer stint with the Israeli Defense Forces at a desert concentration camp, guarding Palestinian prisoners. We know this because he published an article about the experience, and his feelings, soon after.
Going on to become a writer at The Atlantic, Goldberg distinguished himself as a major perpetrator of the 2002 “Iraqi WMD” propaganda hoax. “WMD” stood for a vast, multi-track complex of lies, rumors, strategic leaks, and ungrounded speculations carried out by several U.S. and allied intelligence services with the cooperation of a number of friendly big-name journalists and outlets, including George Gilder of the New Yorker, and Judith Miller at the New York Times under managing editor Bill Keller. Orchestrated under the vice-president Dick Cheney and unfolding in the trauma after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the WMD campaign was designed to frighten Americans into believing that the ruling regime in Iraq possessed stockpiles of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” and was liable soon to use these against American or Western targets. Among other prevarications, Goldberg’s articles provided mostly anonymously-sourced insider information about a secret alliance between the Iraqi secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the alleged perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, the Islamic fundamentalist jihadi network known as Al-Qaeda. There were no such connections and the Iraqi regime had always been a sworn enemy of the jihadis.
All of the stories about the “WMD” were ultimately debunked and falsified. Many of them were shown to be false as soon as they were published, but mainly in the international press, among international organizations, and at a few US alternative outlets. In the United States itself, the corporate media–at the time far more dominant in holding public perceptions than they are today–remained loyal to the Bush regime’s mythology of a “global war on terror” and its presentation of Iraq as a threat to the United States. Journalists who strayed from the administration line in a “time of war” were squelched or fired, like Phil Donahue, whose news program was canceled for its antiwar position despite having the highest ratings on its network. The likes of the Times and the Atlantic kept disseminating the falsehoods uncritically up until a few months after the Bush regime launched its unprovoked aggressive invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
In the months that followed the deceptions completely unravelled and within a year even President Bush was making jokes about not finding any “WMDs.” By then Iraq was occupied by US-led “coalition” troops and the destruction of Iraqi society and killing of hundreds of thousands of people were well underway. Investigations into the WMD hoax followed and were illuminating and useful, but no one was ever held accountable for the operation. In American mythology, the blatant fabrications have mainly gone down as well-meaning mistakes, honest accidents.
Goldberg’s career did not suffer from the WMD episode or any of the rest of this. The only journalist discredited by their assistance to the hoax was Miller; for most of the rest, it was a career booster. Goldberg was ascended to the job of Atlantic editor-in-chief. He has remained a reliable producer of propaganda that happens to serve US and Israeli military-intel needs. His privileged access to White House sources included President Obama, who granted Goldberg a long interview on foreign policy matters after the end of his second term. This, to underline the point one more time, is why it would make sense that Goldberg was on a White House national security adviser’s list of Signal contacts in the first place. Perhaps Goldberg’s inclusion in the Signal Chat of Perfidy was merely a matter of clumsy thumbs on Waltz’s part.
Again, I lean heavily to accepting the official scenario, as admitted by the White House and as it is being “investigated” or condemned by the Democrats and the corporate media, free of context or nuance or doubt. In our ideologically bifurcated media, whether we mean the legacy corporate media or the social corporate media, we are daily presented with a limited set of spectacles. For each one, all players are expected to choose one of two stances. All opinions are either Red or Blue. All statements can be assessed as anti-fascist or pro-Trump, and there is nothing in between. This is usually attributed to some kind of popular “polarization” from below, but I do tend to see it mostly as a top-down game. The pressure is for all of us to put out or adopt a limited number of prefabricated tropes and narratives every day. This is like a weather condition. It exerts enough pressure that semi-random elements also converge to produce unlikely stories in ways that seem planned and convenient. Nevertheless, whose thumbs really effected the inclusion of Goldberg in the chat is legitimately unknowable.
WHAT WOULD DANIEL ELLSBERG HAVE DONE?
Young people, return with me to a time, in the late 1960s, when Xerox was both a company and a verb. The Pentagon Papers were literally typed on paper. If you wanted to make your own copies, you needed to “xerox” them. Even the best copy machines were very slow.
The papers were a Pentagon-commissioned secret history for insiders, running thousands of pages, about the US involvement in the Indochina wars since 1945. Through many volumes the papers demonstrated, without any doubt, that the government had for decades lied continuously to the American public about the real reasons for the US involvement and ever-escalating military actions in Vietnam. Given the mounting casualties in the late 1960s (meaning the American ones, although they were outnumbered by the Vietnamese dead by a ratio of at least 20:1), given the increasing opposition to the war among Americans, and given the threat and part-reality of mutiny by US soldiers, the papers were a mountain of dynamite waiting to explode.
A top consultant to the Pentagon who had quietly come to understand that the United States was engaged in great and unforgivable crimes, Daniel Ellsberg had access to the papers. He sat on these for many months, using the time to make copies of the entire work, with help from students and activists, including Noam Chomsky—a security breach! Then he began releasing the papers to the press and politicians, starting with the New York Times, which published the material willingly and covered what it showed, rather than focusing exclusively on how it got released. They were hit with an injunction to cease further publication. Ellsberg was ready, having arranged for a series of other papers to continue publishing. As each was hit with an injunction, the next one would publish. He remained in hiding, eluded the authorities, and kept feeding the material to willing papers, until enough of it was published to make the point: the government had been lying about the “Vietnam War.” The papers were entered into the Congressional record in full through the intervention of Senator Mike Gravel (R-Alaska). Finally, Ellsberg turned himself in. The extremely serious criminal case against him was thrown out of court due to prejudicial actions by the Nixon administration.
The result of the 1971 exposure of the Pentagon papers was to intensify an already massive domestic and international pressure that led, finally, to the end of the criminal US invasions of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, which had killed an estimated minimum of two million people living in those countries and devastated the lives of many millions more, down to this day. Indirectly, the hunt for Ellsberg also prompted the Nixon White House to adopt ill-advised strategies to prevent further leaks. This generated the only “-gate” scandal that ever had consequences: that of Watergate.
THE NEVER-ENDING WAR IN YEMEN AND THE UNSPEAKABLE
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the start of Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, an intervention intended to topple Ansarallah or evict them from Sanaa. It began in 2015, forty years after the American client state in South Vietnam fell to the People’s Republic of Vietnam. From the beginning, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf-state allies were backed fully by the United States military. The U.S. provided arms, logistics, intelligence and American-flown refueling planes that provided in-flight refueling for Saudi air force jets, without which the aggression could never have been conducted. The U.S. continued its aforementioned counter-terror campaign of direct U.S. drone and missile strikes on Yemeni targets alleged to be terrorist, in which 96% of the casualties were civilians.
Unlike Indochina, barely any Americans knew this was going on, because very few American military personnel have been required in the theater, and US casualties have not been reported. Eight years later, by 2023, the United Nations estimated that the war and especially the naval blockade on Yemen had cost a minimum of 430,000 Yemeni lives and placed the majority of the 27 million people living there in conditions of hunger and malnutrition. The UN described Yemen as the site of the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, an undesirable status that has since passed to the territories of Gaza and Sudan.
Saudi Arabia saw several of its incursions into Yemen turned back disastrously by Ansarallah, and was subjected to missile attacks on its oil infrastructure. China stepped in to sponsor negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, representing its allies in Ansarallah, and brokered a deal that ended the war in 2023. This came as a major shock to the US, as the Chinese role and the prospect of a continuing rapprochement between the antagonists of Iran and Saudi Arabia were both considered to be among the many signs of a receding U.S. global hegemony.
The possibility of a better era for the long-suffering Yemeni people has itself receded since October 7, 2023 and the start of the Israeli assaults in Gaza. In response, claiming an international obligation to act to end genocide, Ansarallah has blockaded Red Sea transit routes to the Israeli port of Eilat, which has gone bankrupt. This in turn has prompted missile attacks in Yemen by Israel (as well as surprising missiles strikes in Tel Aviv by Ansarallah in response). Western and US fleets and assets were dispatched to bomb Yemen, apparently without effects on its capacity to maintain a blockade on Red Sea shipping to Israel. With the end of the Gaza ceasefire, the blockade and the retaliatory U.S. attacks on Yemen now resume, always with civilians as the main casualties, and in the unspoken but indisputable cause of continuing to protect the Israeli attempt to uproot Palestine altogether. Had the ceasefire in Gaza held, Ansarallah would not be blocking Red Sea traffic.
To sum up, the U.S. acts of war in Yemen and their function in supporting the Israeli genocide in Palestine are the headline stories that the focus on the morally bankrupt electronic slapstick of “Signalgate” obscures. Of course, if the transcripts had not leaked, the strikes on Yemen would have barely been remarked upon in the American media, and would have already passed into “old news.” And in case we still needed it, the text transcripts secured by Goldberg and confirmed as genuine by the White House do provide yet more insight into the exceptional mental illness and sociopathy of the present U.S. regime “principals.”
Where today are the whistleblowers and high-state turncoats like Ellsberg, or journalists like Julian Assange, those who unlike Goldberg and his ilk will not reinforce but challenge the permanent warfare state and the American empire? Given our present conditions, is it even possible? What could Ellsberg have done?
As a final note, this article has not been written in support or in opposition of Ansarallah as the government of Yemen, legitimate or otherwise, or as any kind of exploration of Yemeni history or the issues confronting the Yemeni people, on which I am no expert. Your author remains a provincial American, relying on a provincial and time-tested wisdom: We have no business over there, and the more people we kill, directly and indirectly, the worse we make everything, there and everywhere else. Including here. The wars come home, they always do.
New mail: Write to Nicholas Levis at nel2025cp[at]nicholasevangelos[dot]net.
NOTES
[1] The full transcript of the March 13-15 Signal chats obtained by Jeffrey Goldberg is available at “Annotated Text From Leaked Signal Group Chat With Top Trump Officials,” New York Times, March 25, with annotations by Julian Barnes et al., at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/us/signal-group-chat-text-annotations.html.
Goldberg released the full chat transcript, with one redaction, in his second article on the leak in The Atlantic, “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal,” at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegseth-goldberg/682176.
However, as of this writing that article is paywalled, forcing reliance on secondary coverage from around the web, including from Daniel Arkin of NBC News, “The Atlantic publishes full Signal chat messages showing military plans about U.S. strikes in Yemen,” March 26, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/atlantic-publishes-full-signal-chat-messages-showing-military-plans-us-rcna198148.
Among the few US articles that have so far given due emphasis to the human costs and acts of war that might not have barely even been reported if not for the Waltz-Goldberg leak, see Nick Turse in The Intercept, “The Real Outrage About the Yemen Signal Group Is That It Called for Attack on Civilian Home,” March 26, at https://theintercept.com/2025/03/26/signal-chat-yemen-strike.
[2] New America, “America’s Counterterrorism Wars: The War in Yemen,” through February 2023, report at https://www.newamerica.org/future-security/reports/americas-counterterrorism-wars/the-war-in-yemen/.
[3] Times, ibid.
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