Hegseth Sends Top Secret Attack Plans to Journalist - By Mistake

RINO. Duh.

 

Houthis were firing missiles the next day. Documented.

 

Well yeah its well documented you cant just "bomb harder" to solve problems, from Nixon in Vietnam to Israel in Gaza.

 

1) If it happened during any President’s term I’d expect repercussions.
2) I hated the Clinton email thing. She should have been charged.But she did pay a steep price - likely cost her the election and ended her political career. All I’d like do see is reciprocal action. And she admitted to the fact, unlike the plethora of lies from most GOP and attacks on the Atlantic editor. Too much to ask for honesty from this group despite the obvious provided proof. Deny and delay. Reprehensible and treasonous.
3) Cussing doesn’t make your point. It reveals you’re very emotional and perhaps not as rational as you could be.

 

Apologies for the delay. I wanted to know more about this before responding. There are lots of aspects to this worthy of comment.

First, is the direct question you asked: what could the Houthis have done if they had access to every piece of information in that chain? There are two forms of risk in cases like these, risk to force and risk to mission. I think what you are asking about is risk to force, or what could the Houthis have done to endanger either the strike package or the ships at sea. Much has been made in Congress this morning on this point and will continue to be. My answer, however, is the risk to force was negligible given the capabilities and limitations of the Houthis, even if they had had information that was not in the chain, such as the specific targets, intended routes of flight, and location of the carrier strike group. I saw one Congressman this morning ask pointed questions about the Houthis' surface-to-air missiles, with the Congressman showing the Director of the NSA (an Air Force 4-star general) pictures of an SA-3 and SA-6. This was embarrassing for two reasons. First, because those weapons systems, even if updated and well maintained, present no serious threat during a dedicated strike mission for reasons that we won't get into (you will need to hit the "I believe it" button on that one). Second, because the general had a brain fart and could not immediately identify the SA-6 in the photograph. Still, as with all things, the risk was not zero, so it's a fair challenge to make in the political landscape, and the Republicans would be doing precisely the same thing if the roles were reversed. The other part of the equation, risk to mission, is a bit higher. Could the Houthis have dropped what they were doing, displaced, and made sure our strikes hit nothing of value? Absolutely. Given how perishable the information was when it was texted, however, I still would assess the risk as being very low, even if an enemy agent had been reading the messages in real time. What I can't be certain of is whether leaking intentionally (in a manner that would not create unacceptable risk to mission) was not at least part of the intent here, but more on that below.

The main issue here, however, is the use of Signal to be passing information of this nature so openly. When I was last overseas 2021 to 2022, my brigade headquarters used Signal all of the time to communicate sensitive information in an indirect way, but we did so with brevity codes understood only by people read in. And the purpose was usually to get someone to return the classified area for a detailed briefing. The use of Signal by that group for these purposes is so confusing that I'm left confused as to what they were really trying to do (and it might be as simple as incompetence coupled with arrogance, which is what it looks like). For a metaphor, I'm staying in the Fresno area these days, and there are irrigation canals all over the place. Everyone knows that water is not potable, so if one day I were to come across a group of microbiologists and physicians drinking straight out of it, I would stop and say, "What are you doing?" If they looked at me nonplussed and said, "We're just having a drink," then I would say, "No, seriously, what are you doing?" Because it's so obviously dumb and they should obviously know better that the only explanation is that they have some other intent I can't perceive. A spillage like this is not uncommon when you're dealing with senior people who have never served in the military or intelligence but have been put in positions of responsibility for political reasons. For instance, I'm aware of Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy under Obama, doing something dumb publicly with classified material as well as a couple of members of the Biden Administration with respect to Ukraine in the first year of the war. Most of you are not aware of that, and that's a good thing. It just got cleaned up. But almost everyone in this Signal group is a veteran, and they all know better. Further, after this came out a couple of days ago, the only right thing to do was to mea culpa and persuade Goldberg not to release any more of the chain. Instead, they scoffed that the material was "not war plans" and "not classified" (which is technically accurate but not wholly true), guaranteeing Goldberg would release the rest of it. Now (apart from being stupid; always a possibility) why would you do that unless that's exactly what you wanted to have happen? For the moment, then, I do wonder if there is more going here than appears.

Some other aspects of note: I see people challenging the decision to strike a target that was the known home of a "girlfriend" of a Houthi leader who would be visiting. Personally, I don't care about that. I would have made that call, too. That's war. For one, the girlfriend almost certainly knew who she was involved with. For another, the Houthis have shown zero restraint in targeting civilian merchant vessels. The only thing I question about it was whether the public needed to know about that, and because of this spillage the public does know. I also see faux outrage over the emojis that Waltz posted after the strike was ruled successful. Again, I don't care. I hope none of the target footage from when I was a gunship pilot in Iraq in the early 2000s goes public. You might likewise think the words that came out of my mouth after a good hit were not particularly professional under the circumstances. I don't begrudge people getting excited over righteous kills. But, again, the public doesn't need to be seeing that.

 

The most generous reason I could come up with for using a Signal group chat was for the Principals to have a way to tell each other to get a T-SCIF set up so they could check their high side email because there was an update they need to see.

 

It's even simpler than that. Every one of these people has a uniformed aide-de-camp with the highest clearance. "Something big just happened, Tim. Run on over to the closest SCIF, get the Reader's Digest version, and brief me as soon as you can. I'm going to stay here and keep my schedule."

 

Trump administration is run like a comedy skit. What other threads and group chats do yall think these clowns have on signal

 

I was assuming that it would be for something they wanted a Principal to Principal response on.

 

Sure, but you can respond to the message in an unclassified way: "Just got briefed by Tim. Excellent work. Never have so many owed so much to so few!"

 

Just noticed the settings in the group chat were for the messages to disappear after 1 week. If this was supposed to be some kind of lackadaisical secret conversation that seems like an excessively long time to keep it from disappearing.

 

Well, they are dumb and incompetent.

 

Well, let's not go painting Goldberg as a heroic whistleblower, either. He could have handled this situation much differently, but he chose the path that would best serve himself. He could have dropped himself from the chat the moment he realized he shouldn't have been there. He could have discretely informed Waltz (implied to be a regular source of his) that, hey, I think you added me to that chain by accident and some of what I read maybe shouldn't be on Signal. The instances I referred to above with Secretary Mabus et al were handled like that, so it's not without precedent. Instead, Goldberg chose to sit quietly in a chat he knew he shouldn't have been privy to, record the discussion, and release it to the public. Now as a journalist he had no legal obligation to do other than what he did, and I'm not saying otherwise. But national security wasn't his priority. Getting a story and embarrassing the Administration was his priority, and we shouldn't pretend it wasn't. And, yeah, I got that he did not ask to be added to that chat, but I see it a little like a person who's doing work in a bedroom closet when a couple comes into the room, hot and heavy, engaging in adult activities. Now the first person did not ask to bear witness to sexy time, and the couple had an obligation to look around a strange room if they were expecting privacy. Still, the person in the closet has a choice to make: identify and excuse himself before it gets too embarrassing; or sit quietly and watch for his own pleasure, maybe even record it for posterity. Legally, those might be two different scenarios. Ethically, I would say they are about the same.

 

I'd argue that the more correct analogy would be that the couple having sex wandered into a porn studio with a big sign up identifying the room, signed paperwork consenting to recording, and then were stunned when they were recorded. He wasn't just a random bystander. His actual job is to provide information to the public about the functioning of government. There is a reason that a former Congressman and the current NSA had his number in Signal (he was likely a source to something at some point on something that needed secrecy).

 

Guy is a journalist who fell upon (or more accurately was invited into) a crazy national security leak. No, that is not the same as peeping into a bedroom. What a ridiculous comparison.

For all he knew they were going to talk about corruption or illegal activities. I’d go so far as he had a duty as a journalist to see what happened in this chat. Not sure how anyone can say he “handled it badly” until they started misrepresenting things and even calling him a liar.

 

Let's be very clear. I did not say "peeping into a bedroom," an activity that is wrong in almost any circumstance. My metaphor had clearly innocent circumstances for being in that bedroom and a choice to make once it was apparent said person was in awkward circumstances not of his choosing. I understand it's not a perfect metaphor. There are no perfect metaphors. I correctly point out that his priority was not national security but rather personal/professional/political gain. And that's fine. It just doesn't make him a hero either.

 

I directly stated that.