Summary
The Atlantic has published unredacted attack plans (non-paywall link) shared in a Signal group chat of senior Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg released the full texts after officials denied sharing war plans or classified information, arguing transparency was necessary amid accusations of dishonesty.
The leaked messages detailed U.S. military strikes targeting Houthis in Yemen.
It’s so wild that they are very demanding of touchpoints up front but totally clueless about everything throughout the chat…
We are currently clean on OPSEC
While actively leaking information lmao
They waited till he entered his girlfriends apartment building?.. seems on point for the military. How many people died? I think someone said 53? And was that guy the only target? So many deaths for one dickhead…
Isn’t that a war crime? No wonder so many people hate the US.
Good thing the US doesn’t recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, so there’s no risk of them having to face consequences for their war crimes.
They even have a law that makes it illegal to cooperate with the ICC in bringing US personnel to justice, and that allows the president to use any force necessary to prevent it from happening.
And their praying for the killers of so many innocent.
More risk to the US personnel or assets, and it would be a diplomatic and domestic incident if it came out that US troops or assets were operating in Yemen. It’s much safer to bomb them from a plane.
Also there’s the terror aspect where the US government presumably wants to cause chaos and fear explicitly to make continuing the blockade less appealing to both the Houthis and the people of Yemen.
So strange that no one is talking about this aspect of it.
Like I’m no war expert (obviously neither are they), but wouldn’t it cause far fewer causalities, and be far cheaper and easier, to just hide in the bushes and shoot the guy when he comes out? Since they know exactly where he is?
1 death vs 53, 1 bullet vs whatever TF it takes to level a building?
I think you meant attack expert, no war plan information was shared…
/s
You’re going to need a team of people, fly them in and out and make sure they get back home alive or it might hurt the president’s polls. It might be cheaper but it’s much riskier. Nobody in the US cares about those 52 other people so that doesn’t really matter to them.
I’m surprised they didn’t use drones.
Why kill one when you can kill a bunch. Rack it up to collateral damage then go have a beer at the bar. Maybe leak some more texts before your Telsa test drive.
See this as further proof they do not value human lives.
✊💣🔥
Not sure about legality, and not that the US military care, but confirming someone id, and that he is visiting a gf or family member, then bombing the house, sound like a war crime.
They will pay no penalties for this. Trump deserves to be hanged for treason but that hasn’t happened yet.
It’s okay when the US does it.
I’m sure USians would be perfectly normal and react calmly and rationally if a foreign power killed 50 innocent people while assassinating a target on US soil.
It is a crime and Israel is doing it too so Trump and the whole clown car just follows the lead. I am all for killing people who have done heinous shit but killing everybody in whole build just to get tom them is beyond fucked up.
Israel, Russia and now the US just joined the club!
We actually have munitions that don’t blow up too. We could literally have killed just him. This isn’t 20 years ago anymore.
This is becoming a theme stretching back multiple administrations. The people at the top either don’t understand IT acceptable use policies, cybersecurity controls, classification divisions of systems, records retention policies, etc; or they are intentionally ignoring them. And for bonus points, everyone at this level is an espionage target.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group_chat_leak
They’re ignoring them. Acceptable use policies are annoying and they’re too powerful to follow the rules.
It’s quantifiable and expected threat by a known entity, versus nebulous threat by a unknown entity.
The records will be scrutinized. The FoIA requests will happen. The hack of their private infrastructure might not ever happen, and even if does, the foreign actors are not necessarily going to leak the records back to the US constituents: the real perceived threat.
They’ll gladly risk operational security for less paper trail. Every. Fucking. Time.
So many people talking about the fact that this leaked, and not enough are talking about what leaked.
We have political leaders throwing up fire emoji’s over dropping a building on a terrorist, with no regard for the, what, dozens? of innocent lives that were lost in the crossfire.
If you have to kill someone, sure, that’s a moral position we can discuss. No one should ever be celebrating it, particularly when others died in the process. But hey, they’re not Americans, so they don’t count.
idk why anybody is surprised, seeing how the republicans operate this should be obvious as fuck
No one should be surprised. We’ve seen who these people are time and time again. But we shouldn’t be so desensitized to moral bankruptcy that we completely overlook such a disgusting disregard for human life.
idk what to tell you anymore, i don’t care about human life lmao.
You all ruined it for me by being so fucking stupid. Like i’m sorry, but how is a satirist supposed to live in a climate where everybody is just fucking stupid. The answer, inevitably, is benevolent disregard for human life, because clearly nobody cares about it enough to do anything about it.
It’s like the confirmation of Brett Kavenau when he threw a hissy fit about how he “likes beer”…
That in and of itself should have disqualified him. If someone isn’t capable of being even-keeled and not throwing a temper tantrum, then they shouldn’t hold the highest judicial office in the land…
That would have disqualified him from almost any normal job interview.
The dude cried and vowed retribution against one of the two parties in the US…and was still confirmed to the highest court in the country. Fucking wild.
Since when do American leaders care about “collateral damage” ?
The largest terrorist organisation in the world.
Most countries in America do care
Since when do Americans im general? They sure were all united when they were leveling my country
Americans do not all support wars.
Zero comfort while I stand in the rubble of my former home
When you claim to be a democracy, and you have two group, both see killing Palestinian and brown people is okay, and your 2/3 of the population still vote for them, your statement objectively false.
Are you suggesting that if a person votes for a given candidate then it means the person agrees with everything the candidate does?
Ah yes, blame the victims, that’s sure to solve the problem. I suppose I should also blame the people who live in the building that was dropped for boarding with a terrorist? I mean they can just choose to be somewhere else, right?
Fuck off.
So what should they vote for no one and stay home?
plus they were probably brown, not white, so it double-y doesn’t count.
“If we discussed dropping a building on a terrorist we should also discuss bombing weddings, so let’s stick to using proper communication channels and following proper protocol for records”
We have political leaders throwing up fire emoji’s over dropping a building on a terrorist, with no regard for the, what, dozens? of innocent lives that were lost in the crossfire.
As someone who was around for “We’ll put a boot in yer ass, it’s the American way” this does not surprise me in the slightest.
They are so incredibly dishonorable it’s appalling.
These dumbfucks have no empathy. They will tell you empathy is weakness. In reality empathy is a social defense mechanism. If we all have empathy for each other it limits the harm we do. What they’re missing is not having it isn’t some kind of advantage, historically we are the most savage to those without empathy. It causes the mob to turn their empathy off and give in to their worst impulses. They think they’ll be the first ones in history to avoid that fate. They won’t.
Look at what JD “couch fucker” Vance wrote. Regarding potentially delaying the strike. He didn’t give any shits about the benefits or risks to lives, only the optics (oil prices going up), politics and his hatred for helping Europe.
Sure, clearing the shipping lanes is “good” but it’s more helpful to Europe “gross” so that’s a tick “con” colum.
Their “worst case scenarios” were all “it could look bad”.
Sic semper tyrannis
If you have to kill someone, sure, that’s a moral position we can discuss. No one should ever be celebrating it, particularly when others died in the process
I can think of a few deaths worth celebrating
There are only a few handful for whom I’d pull the trigger myself, but quite a multitude more that I would celebrate their passing with glee.
I just think, especially when we’re pulling the trigger ourselves, we should be sad, maybe disappointed, that it’s come to that. Bad people are still people, and while I believe they throw away their right to life when they start indescriminately revoking it from others, I don’t ever want to find myself happy to take life. I’ll be happy later, in the better world that’s been created.
We’re talking about the same guys funded by the guy who says the ideal society is Mordor. This doesn’t surprise anyone. Everyone is expendable for the company’s machine, they wouldn’t mind targeting innocent people, let alone causing civilian casualties when targeting real terrorists.
the guy who says the ideal society is Mordor
I’m sorry, who with the what now?
Peter Thiel.
We have political leaders throwing up fire emoji’s over dropping a building on a terrorist, with no regard for the, what, dozens? of innocent lives that were lost in the crossfire.
Correction: They dropped a building on a “terrorist” (read: brown person the US doesn’t like).
There is a reason to attack him. I don’t agree with the whole situation but shooting at cargo ships and American warships is going to get a response. I just expect the world’s most technological military to do a better job of not attacking innocent people in getting to him.
I don’t agree with the whole situation but shooting at cargo ships and American warships is going to get a response
It’s going to get a response, but that response is as immoral as the status quo it’s trying to protect.
It’s immoral on it’s face because of how they’re doing it is my point. There’s certainly a political philosophy discussion to be had about the underlying international system and American system, but there’s none to be had about throwing extra explosions around to “intimidate” a third country.
but there’s none to be had about throwing extra explosions around to “intimidate” a third country.
There is, and not having that discussion does nothing but help the imperial core maintain their facade of moral legitimacy even as they murder innocent people all over the world.
One of did a prayer and maybe even a thought
if this were any other regime, they’d be facing jail time for using a non-approved messaging app. But this is the year of the trumptard, so they will face no consequences.
So yesterday they lied to congress more often than they told the truth? So many “I don’t recall” when in fact they could pull it up on their phone and know? Traitors to American families every one of them
Lying about sleeping with an intern - impeachment
Lying about sharing classified information on an insecure group chat - “he’s just a widdle guy 😢”
Especially bad when the whole “reason” for that impeachment was about investment fraud or something and only became about sex with intern after they couldn’t prove anything else.
Whitewater real estate scandal. Kenneth Starr was investigating him for that and when they couldn’t find anything actionable, they switched to the perjury and sex.
I’m not a fan of a President using their power to have an intern blow them (I don’t think there’s meaningful consent there), but it doesn’t compare to raping multiple women, peeping on teenage girls at Miss Teen America, and making comments about how you’d fuck your daughter if that was an option. The aristocrats!
Stop taking away women’s agency with this “meaningful consent” bullshit.
At the time I was in the Air Force, and a bunch of us were discussing this. Well over half the women at the table has the attitude of “Are you kidding? Of course, blowing the most powerful man in the world is hot as hell”.
Monica was obviously into it and an adult.
“Sure my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship,” Lewinsky wrote in 2014. “Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.”
Lewinsky says she now sees that her relationship with Clinton was full of “inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege.”
“Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern,” she wrote. “I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.”
@andros_rex@lemmy.world didn’t take away Lewinski’s agency.
“Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.”
And that’s what seals the deal for me. If Clinton gave a shit about Lewinsky, he would have at least tried to protect her somewhat in the fallout. He had fun, she had consequences.
People on the left treated her like shit - I guess it is further evidence that Bill Maher has always been awful. She got played on manipulated on both sides. Her reputation was trashed and she had a hard time finding work after - it destroyed her career and future.
This was a boss that took advantage of his power and authority to get a couple loads out, and then disposed of the person once they became our nation’s designated bearer of the scarlet letter.
I had sex with men who were much older than me when I was in my early twenties. The difference was that they weren’t my boss.
Dan Savage I think had something about “campground rules” too - if you are going to have sexual relations with a legal consenting adult you are significantly older than, it’s on you to use your greater experience to leave that partner better than you found them.
Are you a woman? How the fuck do you meaningfully say no to sex with the President?
Go fuck yourself with that “taking away women’s agency” bullshit. Bosses don’t get to sleep with employees. Teachers don’t get to sleep with students.
Monica got treated like shit for decade. That’s not “hot as hell” unless you’re a creepy misogynist that gets off on women being public humiliated.
I fucking hate this shit so much.
So you don’t recall a lot, huh? So clearly you’re not fit for your position, good luck finding a new job tho.
I am in lots of group chats and don’t read every one of them to completion. So not all members of the chat knowing or remembering what happened is to be expected.
Yeah, but the second something juicy happens, we all scroll back and get caught up pretty quickly.
You are in group chats at this level? Because, I’m sure as fuck is not. And if I was, I’d read every message.
Whiskeyleaks going absolutely ham over here lmfao
Whiskey leaks is a hilar6name for this snafu. God I hate this timeline so much.
I was expecting truly stupendous levels of stupidity, and my expectations continue to be blown the fuck away on a more or less daily basis.
Whatever… Exactly zero consequences…
Nonono this time they really got him. He’s truly fucked now. He’s getting slammed over this. America every day for 8 years now.
A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was “completely appropriate” to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.
The news outlet these fucktards accidentally leaked their detailed operational plan and timeline to…
… is still excersizing better OPSEC than the actual head of the CIA.
EDIT:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_2sODSpJo2A
Watch this clip of Mark Kelly with some pretty on point questions for Gabbard and Ratcliffe, listen to their responses, and go read through the full text chat.
Watch more of the hearings.
I think there’s a pretty decent case Tulsi actually fucked up enough in her testimony that she actually did a perjury, Ratcliffe however, was both a bit more conciliatory and ever so slightly more honest, and also a bit better at just giving ‘I don’t recall’ answers.
I have been in fucking EVE Online corporations with better OPSEC than these guys.
This would be hilarious if I didn’t fucking live here.
Oh yeah absolutely.
I never partook in any of that myself, but yeah I’ve watched/listened to some hours of youtube videos doing their best to recount some of the more insane history of subterfuge, sabotage, getting rival clan members installed as spies, as CEOs and masters of coin in their enemy’s corps, draining all their funds and liquidating an entire clan after a 3 year long deep undercover op with the spies regularly being on voicechats of some kind, and then just doing the deed and ghosting everyone …
…fucking bonkers shit for a video game clans… but yeah, many of those kinds of stories show people with better understanding of spycraft and opsec than… the literal, actual, current heads of the CIA, DoD, etc.
absolute clown world.
i’m not even educated in opsec or sysadmin work and i have better fucking security lmao.
Exactly.
Gabbard tried to be more clever than she actually is.
Man, I miss old school Chappelle… Ever since he brought Elon Musk on stage I’ve just been hoping he’d go the fuck away.
Same. Half Baked is one of my favourite stoner movies, this shit has been so disappointing.
When is the last time that a non-poor has ever gotten tried and convicted for perjury?
It is the silent threat to keep poor people honest in court while allowing rich people and lawyers to lie their hearts out and use it for publicity because “they wouldn’t lie under oath”
https://daily.jstor.org/why-is-perjury-so-rarely-prosecuted/
I don’t understand. If they don’t recall why can’t they just open up their personal phone and check?
… So, the angle they are going with now is that this was a very serious offensive and nefarious act perpetrated against Mike Waltz, the guy who created the group chat.
M Waltz is saying that well hey maybe this piece of shit Goldberg guy (the journalist) hacked his way into the chat? Maybe it was an inside job, or an outside cyberattack, and somebody swapped out Goldberg’s phone number with another one of my contacts, so that when I tried to add a legit person who should have been in that group chat, it tricked me and added Goldberg!
… Yeah. These idiots are unfortunately in charge of investigating themselves, and at least Mike Waltz seems to be saying ‘no it is utterly impossible that I accidentally added the wrong guy to the chat, I was clearly the victim of some kind of hack!’
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hJ2gxzPEzjU
Yes, Mike Waltz ‘takes full responsibility’… by positing an inconsistent mess of possible cyberattacks/manipulation techniques that could have been used against him, absolutely no way he fat fingered a contact add, nope.
Did they leave out some high ranking general with the same name? In their frantic CYA narrative isn’t there some key person missing from the chat, and if so why not name them?
I mean, you nailed it right there, if it was that, then they could just say who had the similar name.
… but that isn’,t possible when everyone involved is a sentient piece of ratshit molded into the form of a human, that has absolutely no ability to ever admit any fault or take responsibility for anything, ever.
These people are all completely unqualified, sociopathic opportunists with moral fiber composed of fucking anti matter, they’d instantly explode if they ever attempted to flex those moral muscles and develop any actual principles.
I have, entirely seriously, known multiple meth/fentanyl addicts (in the process of detoxing) with better moral character, sense of responsibility for their actions, honesty, loyalty, and principles they strive to live by.
Turns out that the current administration was just a bunch of DUI hires.
Lmao Waltz saying he is going to try and figure out “how the heck he got into this room” and then the first text screenshot literally says “Michael Waltz added you to the group” is so goddamn hilarious to me.
Oh wow, proof it also has disappearing messages enabled.
I don’t know the legality of the messages being able to disappear, but the fact it’s enabled is a clear cut violation of the law.
For any other administration, this would be a catastrophe. For the Trump administration, it’s Thursday.
Eh, they could have had a service forwarding the messages to a database running on one of the group’s member’s devices.
Don’t worry, given their apparent compliance to threat-model, it’s most likely stored somewhere on an adversarial database. Compliance by idiocy.
Yeah sure thing. The guy who has already been caught mishandling classified documents… The guy who literally ate the notes from a meeting he had with Putin so nobody would see them.
Right.
Holy crap that’s insane I had to look it up and yes apparently that happened. wtf there’s so much news I can’t keep up
And that’s from last term when things were more chaotic, with less focused effort towards dismantling everything.
Lol. That would be uncharacteristic at this point. They need to show us the servers before I believe that
They can’t. The server is in the basement of a friend’s house (not a government employee) because they got a really good deal on it!
Buttery males?
Surely the server is in the magalago bathroom with the stolen classified documents?
And how likely do you think that is? Given the clown show that has gotten them to this point.
It wouldn’t have required any of the main player’s active effort. The supporting security establishment could have set up such a system.
Again, how likely do you think that is?
I’d give it a 20-30% likelihood. We shouldn’t rule it out.
you would think they would then be using a government hosted platform, instead of signal, but i guess that makes too much sense.
Oh, yeah, these guys sat in front of the Senate yesterday and flatly lied about all of it. At the end, one of the Democrats said that it wouldn’t be long before they had the transcripts, which would be compared to their testimony, analyzed for discrepancies, and legal options considered.
The MAGA Nazis aren’t really worried, they know there is no possible way that HitlerPig, Big Booby Bondi, or the Nazi legislature will do anything about it, and even if they did, HitlerPig would just pardon them, but at least it’s one more egregious national security lapse/lie that the Dems can beat them with forever.
IF the Dems ever show the guts to fight back.
If they get pardoned, they can no longer plead the 5th, so that should be fun!
But the judges won’t jail them for ignoring them anyways.
This is some real old white guy, how did this get here i am not good with computer energy lmfao
Same vibe as that flat-earther in Behind the curve who ran this laser experiment that ended up proving the curvature of the earth and, upon seeing the evidence, went like “Huh, how about that, guess we gotta analyze the data some more to see what’s going on.”
Grandpa googles “google” to get to Google
The other thing I noticed up there is that it says “MAR added MAR”. Not sure if those are two people with the same Signal/Contact name/intials, or how that happened (as a Signal user, best guess is group link but that is also would be in the log at the top)
The Atlantic putting a paywall on this when they got the texts for free from a government handout is peak America…
Good journalism is very expensive to produce. You got to pay for it somehow.
Exactly why I used to subscribe to the Washington Post until Bezos wiped his ass with it. I’ll have to look into subscribing to The Atlantic now.
Yeah I’m considering dumping NYT too. I heard Reuters was a better ‘investment’. Please someone tell me if that’s wrong. I don’t want to support Billionaires.
PBS and NPR are pretty decent places to put your subscription moneys
Hopefully they survive this administration.
Wired “has been killing it” during the ongoing soft coup, to quote my journalist wife, and we’ve replaced our WaPo subscription with that. We can never dump NYT just because of the recipes.
I have been The Atlantic subscriber for about 5 years now. I think it has pretty great writers on staff. Their physical subscription is pretty cheap too.
This was a gift given to the Atlantic, though. I guess you gotta milk it for what it’s worth.
I’m not disagreeing in a general sense, but it’s funny to make that argument here when this info basically fell into the journalist’s lap. Very little actual journalism went into making this story possible
But think of how much money is going to be needed for the security detail this guy is gonna need for the foreseeable future. Or the costs of retaining legal representation to help him navigate through what is guaranteed to be an endless sea of investigations, frivilous lawsuits, etc. that the Trump administration is guaranteed to launch until something sticks.
I wouldn’t be getting on any planes any time in the near future if I were him either.
This story may have fallen into his lap, but it sure as hell wasn’t free.
JG got the texts for free but he’s probably gonna need someone watching his 6 now. And I’m pretty sure a lawyer is billing for helping them figure out how to publish the details and still avoid getting trapped into anything illegal, like naming the CIA agent.
Nah, the guilty parties already told congress nothing the texts did not contain classified material, so releasing them should be fine. It’s not like this administration would suddenly change its mind now, surely.
Turn JS off to “bypass” it
OP linked an archive link, and updated the post to have it.
But I clicked it before and had the same reaction as if I opened a box labeled “dead dove”.
Government official work => no copyright?
My favorite quote is the one where he says it could leak lol
“…If this leaks we look indecisive”
Try incompetent beyond reason. This clown world is funny if people weren’t dying.
Also this:
Pete Hegseth, after broadly describing the big picture situation/rationale for the strike, that same block of text you pulled the ‘we look indecisive’ from:
But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC.
… I don’t even know what to say.
He said he would do all he can.
We know what his best is now.
Don’t you just love all these merit based hires.
Of course… the main thing is how they look not what good they do. It’s unforgiveable
That thumbnail makes Trump look like Gary Busey with his mouth closed. Although, I’m sure that would be an insult to Gary.
