Why the Signal story misses the mark

“I think we are making a mistake,” wrote Vice President JD Vance in a Signal message on the morning of March 14.

Indeed they were; unfortunately, Vance had not yet realized what a monumental mistake it was.

In a now infamous accident, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group.”

The digital Principals Committee, which included at least nine officials and one unsuspecting reporter, discussed the specifics of an upcoming airstrike on Yemen.

Goldberg went on to write about the leak and, after pushback from the White House, released a mostly complete transcript of messages, but he missed an opportunity to raise larger concerns. After all, he had witnessed senior officials strategizing to commit a war crime in an unsecure, ephemeral forum.

The writer went easy on the administration; Goldberg’s fecklessness is only the most recent episode in a growing fad of fainthearted journalism failing to stand up against American imperial violence.

Still, in a March 26 press briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic an “anti-Trump hater” and a “propagandist.”

Pete Hegseth cited Goldberg’s reporting on “the suckers and losers hoax” – a reference to Trump’s alleged comment about American soldiers killed during World War I – as evidence that the career journalist exclusively “pedals garbage.”

The White House continues to attack Goldberg’s character and avoid accountability for the scandal itself.

For once in my lifetime, I am almost inclined to agree with Leavitt and Hegseth. Almost.

It is not Goldberg’s exposé that makes him a propagandist; it is his silence on the aspects of this story that really matter.

Over Signal, Hegseth contrived his team’s public messaging:

“Nobody knows who the Houthis are,” he wrote. “Which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

Hegseth’s strategy throws buzzwords at the problem, as if the team could manufacture consent for the attacks with a half-baked explanation.

An under-informed populace is less likely to object to the administration’s actions. The story is incomplete without geopolitical context which Goldberg gleefully glosses over.

Between midday on March 15 and the morning of March 16, the U.S. launched 47 air raids across Yemen, killing or seriously injuring around 150 civilians, most of whom were women and children.

Trump officials launched the strike without congressional approval, violating the 1973 War Powers Resolution.

Their target, Yemen’s Houthis, threatened on March 11 to resume attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea. The Houthis operate in response to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. They promised to keep up attacks as long as Israel and its allies maintain a blockade on aid going into occupied Palestine.

The International Court of Justice and the United Nations General Assembly have declared Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip wholly unlawful and beseeched states to “take concrete steps” to end the human rights violations. In this conflict, the Houthi are the only party meeting that demand.

Interfering with the ongoing violence in occupied Palestine is both a legal responsibility and a moral imperative.

In the leaked Signal chat, Trump officials celebrated the collapse of a residential building said to contain the Houthis’ “top missile guy.”

“Building collapsed” wrote Mike Waltz, followed closely by a series of emojis: a fist, an American flag and a flame. In a disgusting display of monstrous ego, the team celebrated the total demolition of a civilian building with innocent people inside.

The attacks detailed in these Signal messages fly in the face of international humanitarian law and amount to nothing more than a display of vicious vainglory and gleeful brutality.

This should be a bigger part of the story circulating in news media.

It is frankly unsurprising that Goldberg would shy away from condemning the U.S. strikes on Yemen. Though he is an enemy of Trump, he has a long track record of upholding imperialist agendas.

Goldberg dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 and joined the Israeli Defense Forces, serving during the First Palestinian Intifada as a guard in a detention center called Ktzi’ot. In his 2006 memoir, Goldberg paints a picture of extreme violence there, including a story in which he watched his “kind” and “gentle” friend bludgeon an imprisoned man nearly to death.

In the same chapter, the author boasts, “I never hit a Palestinian who wasn’t already hitting me,” and characterizes himself as the American voice of reason in a hot-blooded wilderness.

The young journalist went on to play a crucial role in selling the Iraq war, writing a series of articles for The New Yorker in which he proliferated hawkish conspiracy theories including the suggestion that Saddam Hussein had access to nuclear weaponry.

Goldberg has made a career of justifying and participating in the U.S.’s destabilization of foreign countries. Though he has criticized Benjamin Netanyahu, Goldberg has been directly complicit in violence carried out by his regime.

Certainly Trump and his staff must be relieved it was Goldberg in the chat, with his allegiances to American imperialism, and not someone who might have been more critical. Still, in many ways, the messages speak for themselves.

Regardless of who broke it, the story is a damning indictment of America’s inhumane, illegal and  feebly justified imperialist violence.

It has never been more essential that the press hold the inflated executive accountable. Goldberg, who took the opportunity to jeer the Trump administration’s idiocy rather than condemn its disturbing cruelty, does shoddy journalism and fails to accomplish this.