If you don’t laugh, you cry, so I’ve been having a few guffaws lately over what has inevitably been dubbed “Signalgate,” and what it shows about the confederacy of dunces who are running the show in Washington, D.C.
I’m sure you’ve heard about it: a prominent journalist was included in the group chat discussion on a platform called Signal about U.S. government plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen. The chat included the secretary of defence, the vice-president, the national security director, the national intelligence director, the president's chief of staff, and the secretary of state, and not one of them appears to have asked at any point who the person with the initials “JG” who was also in the chat was.
Turns out it was Jeffrey Goldberg, a long-time, well-respected political journalist who is editor-in-chief of the Atlantic. Such was the nature of the information he was seeing — including details about what the target was, what aircraft would be used in the bombing, and the date and time — that he thought it was a set-up, an elaborate “sting” to trick him, but it all went off as discussed.
Now, I had always thought (silly me!) that when top government officials anywhere discuss, you know, bombing another country that it takes place with everyone together in a secure room so there's no possibility of leaks, or over locked-down channels where everyone is vetted to within an inch of their life. Nope! It was done over Signal, which is encrypted, yes, but which government officials have been warned not to use for secure discussions. In fact, as recently as March 18 — less than a week before the story broke — the Pentagon issued a warning to its employees not to use Signal for “non-public” unclassified information, as it was vulnerable to hacking.
It also allows users to delete messages, which is what was to have happened to the chat in question. By setting the messages to be deleted, the participants ensured (or tried to ensure) that there wouldn't be a paper trail. As per the Independent, “The Signal app is popular with journalists and people looking for a degree of security in their communications, but it is not an approved channel for government communications, and using it could circumvent record-keeping laws because it allows for messages to be deleted after a time period rather than archived as required by law.” It does make one wonder what else is being discussed through channels like Signal and then set to be deleted, instead of archived as per actual laws.
When the whole thing blew up (the revelation about the chat, not the bombs in Yemen, which killed dozens of people — including women and children — and injured more), the White House had two choices: admit the error, take the blame, apologize, and promise to do better, or deflect, deny, blame Goldberg, and lie. No prizes for guessing which route they took.
I’m not sure what’s been the most head-shaking statement from any of those involved in the days since. I think it’s a toss-up between suggesting that Goldberg somehow apparated himself into the chat, as if by magic, or the hair-splitting about what exactly to call what was discussed in order to make things look not quite so amateur hour in Washington. The White House tried arguing that it wasn’t actually classified material, then said the secretary of defence could declassify something (true, but there’s a process to follow in order to do that, and he didn’t do it), then switched to saying it wasn’t technically a “war plan,” it was a “plan of attack,” which is . . . better, somehow? I guess?
The whole thing is a blunder and security breach of epic proportions, and I can only imagine the shrieks of outrage from the right if anything even remotely similar had happened under Biden, say, or Obama. For the current administration, however, it's very much “Move along, folks, nothing to see here.” Makes one wonder what else we're not seeing.
