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.
