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Notes -
'Many things are happening, so many things are happening at once that sometimes I have no idea what's going on.'
This is likely an apocryphal quote misattributed to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in March 2025 via the memetic slop factory. It's one of the factory's better creations and it captures my feeling this afternoon.
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, publishes the above account regarding his participation in a special kind of Signal group chat 15 days ago. In this chat strikes against the Houthis were planned, out in the open, with Jeffrey privy to it all. According to the account he gives in the article, Jeffrey was invited by national security advisor Michael Waltz. According to Jeffrey, he was confused, skeptical, and suspicious of this chat.
Seriously, you should read the whole thing.
This group chat led to another group chat-- "Houthi PC small group". If true, I am sure Jeffrey's concerns about entrapment and imprisonment grew as he was, allegedly, joined by the Secretary of Defense, Vice President Vance, Tulsi Gabbard. In total, "18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials" as they discussed, coordinated, and monitored strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen-- and presumably some other things.
Nonetheless, as Jeffrey fretted over his strange-getting-stranger position in a Signal chat group among, allegedly, the highest officials in US public office, these individuals were discussing what to do about the Houthi problem. Jeffrey identifies JD Vance's chat avatar as a cautious, moderating voice on the 14th of March:
Jeffrey Goldberg, in addition to relaying the above and other interactions that went on in the chat he was in, also posted screenshots as receipts-- just in case you thought he was crazy.
In Jeffrey Goldberg's words: "I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive."
After the chat, bombs get dropped, Jeffrey confirms the timeline matches what he saw planned, and the chat goes wild.
Some things to talk about as mentioned in the article:
Journalisms. Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff. On the other hand, if true, this is what journalists are for. If Jeffrey had simply left the chat and reported it as such there's no story. I'm not sure how much I buy the "I'm just a lowly journalist who couldn't believe his eyes if this is real or not" shtick, but also can't really fault the guy for staying in the chat. After all, he was invited.
Security and legal concerns. If the Trump admin is conducting official business on an open-source platform that is supposed to scrub its history this seems probably illegal. It is possible these messages are documented some other way, but it's possible they are not. Just as it is possible Signal is a totally secure, encrypted messaging program, but it's possible it is not.
Goldberg highlights the dialogue that focuses on concerns of US-Euro relations. Wish I could read the full discussions. It seems fine to give Europe a carrot of engaging Houthis -- helping to secure their trade in the Suez -- in addition to the stick as they move to rearm. I don't think the American public has much love for Houthi rebels, though escalating involvement is a concern. I think this supports the idea that this administration is closely wedded to the news cycle rather than strategy or vision. Consideration of what this does for Europe should be second to deterring disruption to global trade-- which should have been priority from the beginning. We are missing lots of context.
What if Elon Musk was gas lighting and trolling journalists with the power and resources of the United States Government behind him?
The level of ineptitude in OPSEC failure for this article to be real is staggering. It blows my mind. Which, as Jeffrey also suspected, makes one wonder if it wasn't intentional. Maybe Jeffrey was invited to one chat to be leveraged for something else, then accidentally invited to the Houthi PC chat. He might have been supposed to be in all those chats to leak it all. Comparisons to Crooked Hillary and her e-mail server abound.
To end, VP Vance reportedly typing “a prayer for victory” after a course of action was decided upon. Followed by two of our nation's best adding "prayer emoji" reactions. All of it is a bit on the nose for Clown World Simulation theory. Exciting times!
It seems like this was obviously “leaked” on purpose. Nothing they’re saying here is in any way secretive and it sounds like regime taking points, not planning.
Were the journalist to report things not described in the article as he learned of them -- times, dates, places, and targets before the action was carried out -- do you think it would have been no big deal? I would consider it a very big deal, a major breach of OPSEC, and probably treasonous. These do not seem like the kinds of things you tell journalists prior to a military strike.
It would be unwise to tell journalists these details even with an explicit understanding not to report on these details until after the plan is carried out. Which doesn't seem to have occurred here. It would be extra reckless to only have a tacit understanding with a journalist as to what or when he can report on the things he learned of. Which, by his account, doesn't appear to have occurred either. This was a journalist accidentally learning things he should not have known and, wisely, not reporting them. These are the kinds of things that, if the enemy learns of them, can get men killed.
The journalist says he has these, but what are they, specifically?
“We could probably hit them with a $big_cock_american_missile as earlier as tomorrow morning given that the USS American president is off the coast of goatherdistan” is specific timeframes, weapons packages, etc. and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.
Call me skeptical.
It's ridiculous to expect a journalist to publish specific military plans that would probably get him jailed for publishing. The fact that he didn't publish them isn't evidence that he didn't see them.
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Even if there wasn't anything classified on its own (despite the reporting certainly suggesting there is), a lot of information can still be sensitive if you gather it in one place because it can allow foreign agents to build up and intuit the classified info from context. Known as classification by compilation Likewise insight into how they make plans and act on them can be useful tools for our enemies.
The more little bits of information you can gather and the more context you can put them in the more dangerous a piece of information becomes, even if on its own it might be public knowledge.
And you'd be surprised how many seemingly unimportant details get tracked by journalists and foreign agents, pizza deliveries going up during big news (people were staying later than normal or celebrating or whatever else was a trend noticed back in the 90s. All because it's just one tiny little hint helping to build up context.
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What do you mean? None of this was publicly available until today. It's only available now, because a journalist reported it. In my opinion, a journalist should have never been in a position to report this story or any details they did not report on. I do not find solace that the journalist either chose not to, or was unable to, report precise mission details to the public. If I was an adversarial journalist writing a story about this administration in these circumstances, then I would also not print mission details.
A contribution to the successful mission was the journalist, who should not have been there, didn't go to Twitter and scream from the rooftops that JDAMs were falling on Target 3 in Aden from 15,000 feet at 12:00PM local time. This was good for the journalist, because the journalist would be in jail most likely. I would not expect detailed flight plans or powerpoint mission briefings were shared by the Secretary of Defense in a big group chat, but it seems very reasonable to me that targets, times, weapons were shared with these individuals, and it seems reasonable to me that these are things you do not want to go public. Since journalists have a job to make things go public officials should be careful what they share with them. It does not seem like they were particularly careful in this instance.
For myself, "we probably could not have been hurt that bad from our colossal fuck up" is about as comforting as "well nothing bad happened so it's fine." Procedures are created to minimize colossal fuck ups and bad happenings. Next in line is "well the enemy is small and weak and can't harm us anyway." I think this is a stupid, dangerous mindset to humor when doing something as serious as warfare, and there are many historical examples of this mindset contributing to defeat.
But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:
That's how they started out. But the article later says people (including SECDEF) are posting clearly sensitive info, including the exact time of the strike. Which is a known hazard of trying to discuss unclassified parts of classified things in an unclassified environment, which is why in general that's discouraged (though political appointees in particular probably do it all the time).
Well today we had congressional testimony where they claim there was nothing secretive shared, and that signal was approved for the type of use they were doing.
So maybe everybody is lying. Certainly everybody involved here has an incentive to lie.
As others have pointed out, several of the people in the chat (including the SECDEF) are the original classification authorities for the informations shared, so in some sense if they say it isn't classified it isn't, even if it's the sort of thing that would typically be classified. But that's a technicality; it may make it legal (as far as classified information goes) but it doesn't make it not-stupid. As for using Signal, my understanding is that's a violation of the Federal Records Act (because it doesn't keep records), but I'm not familiar enough to say there isn't a loophole.
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