Image by Alex Shuper.
“Signalgate” is how some are christening Trump officials’ unintended disclosure of plans for bombing Yemen via a Signal group chat on March 15. Since Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg broke the story, outraged critics have demanded a return to “the ethic of accountability that our nation holds sacred.”
The analogy to Watergate is fitting, but not in the way they intend. Congressional furor over Nixon’s misbehavior fixated on the pettiest of his crimes. The articles of impeachment in 1974 failed to mention his role in a war of aggression that killed between two and four million people.
With Signalgate, it’s the Yemeni victims who go unmentioned, uncounted, unidentified. The real questions are left unasked: Why have Yemen’s Houthi rebels, the ostensible targets of the US bombing, attacked Israel and fired on ships in the Red Sea since October 2023? Under what conditions would they agree to stop? And, whatever one thinks of the Houthis, does the US government have any legal or moral right to attack Yemen, especially given its own enabling role in the deaths of several hundred thousand Yemenis – most of them children under age five – since 2015?
The answers to these questions are indisputable but inconvenient for the US-Israeli agenda. The Houthis began firing into Israeli territory on October 19, 2023. By that time hundreds of legal and human rights experts had already warned of a “potential genocide in Gaza.” The Houthis’ objective was straightforward and openly stated, on October 31 and many times since: they were acting in solidarity with Gaza and would continue “until the Israeli aggression stops.” The US president could have stopped that aggression with a snap of his fingers at any point.
Yet for respectable commentators at places like The Atlantic, the Houthis are nothing more than “an Iran-backed terrorist organization” driven by a crazed hatred of Jews, Israel, and America. It follows that the only solution is to eliminate them. We can debate how best to achieve the goal, and how to avoid breaches in secrecy that might undermine that effort, but the goal and its underlying assumptions are not up for debate.
On the legality of the US bombing, there has never been any question. The UN Charter unequivocally prohibits the “threat or use of force” for non-defensive purposes or without the UN Security Council’s authorization. Since this bedrock principle of international law would impose unacceptable restraints on US freedoms, it’s been consistently ignored in practice and rarely mentioned by an obliging news media.
A Politico story on “the potential legal fallout” of Signalgate discusses “the laws that may have been broken.” Naturally this doesn’t refer to the UN Charter or other international laws. Instead, the author suggests that the disclosure may have “violated the Espionage Act” of 1917.
Obviously prosecution of Trump officials under the Espionage Act is unlikely. The Act has always been reserved for critics of US foreign policy. It was passed in 1917 to silence and eliminate people who dared to criticize the industrialized slaughter of seventeen million people. As President Woodrow Wilson announced, domestic resistance to the war “must be crushed out.” Similarly, the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act is now being used to crush criticism of US-Israeli genocide by immigrants like Mahmoud Khalil.
In this century the Espionage Act has been wielded against government whistleblowers and journalists who expose US government crimes. This recent history, and the Act’s earlier history, go unmentioned by the Democrats who are now reaffirming the Espionage Act as a legitimate law.
Nor is moral criticism apparent in the debate over Signalgate. Top Democrats have responded by calling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his colleagues “unqualified,” “amateurish,” “incompetent,” and “utterly unprofessional.” Their “behavior shocks the conscience” – but only because it left the secret bombing plans “vulnerable to interception by foreign adversaries.” Had that happened, “American lives could have been lost” during the illegal bombing of Yemen. Yemeni and Palestinian lives are obviously trivialities.
Liberal pundits have struck the same notes. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank steers readers’ attention to the use of emojis in the Signal thread. While “the reaction” to Signalgate “has properly focused on the astonishing security breach,” Milbank doesn’t want readers to miss the revelation that “the United States is being run by a bunch of clownish amateurs.”
Liberal analysts are also indignant about the “collective shrug” from Republicans in Congress. They note that the same people who have pilloried Democrats for lesser indiscretions are now silent about Signalgate. Republican hypocrisy is obvious but hardly deserving of headlines. In a minimally honest and ethical media sphere, the lead story would be the collective shrug by both Republicans and Democrats as they fund genocidal violence month after month.
“Let us not overlook vital things because of the bulk of trifles confronting us,” Emma Goldman once said. For the nation’s foreign policy elite, the vital things aren’t so much overlooked as universally agreed upon and thus not requiring discussion. There is heated debate only over the trifles.
Critics who disagree with the vital things can be legitimately silenced or physically eliminated. Goldman learned that lesson herself when she was arrested and deported for her opposition to World War I, under the same Espionage Act that some liberals are now invoking.
Yet the critics of Goldman’s era were never fully silenced. It’s largely thanks to their courage that US society has the free speech protections that we do. Similarly, the few constraints on imperial violence that currently exist in law and in practice are the legacy of past resistance, most of which met with state repression. Mahmoud Khalil’s fight today is every bit as important as Emma Goldman’s.
