Signal Chat: The Media Misses the Actual Scandals

Posted on April 1, 2025 By Rachel MacNair

by Rachel MacNair

A journalist is mistakenly invited and included in a group chat of top officials discussing a military strike in Yemen. Details of the operation that’s about to happen are given there, but the reporter doesn’t divulge them to anybody at that point. Indeed, it’s not until the strikes happen as detailed that he knows the texts were real and not a prank.

So the mainstream media and late-night comedians are discussing the illegality of using the Signal app for such a chat since it isn’t sufficiently secure for keeping secrets. They comment on the incompetence of having included the reporter. They wonder whether anyone should be fired over this.

As is their custom, they’re missing the real scandals here.

Scandal 1: People were Killed, Including Children

According to a Yemen Data Project report, from March 15-21 there were at least 53 civilians killed. At least four of them were children.

Anti-war demonstration of Yemeni children (1994)

Much of the discussion in the press is about how the information being leaked might potentially have put the pilots carrying out the strikes in danger. Far rarer is any discussion of the danger that actually happened to dozens of innocent bystanders.

Scandal 2: Callous and Gleeful

The term “collateral damage” has always been an outrageous euphemism, but at least it acknowledges that something undesirable happened. Not even noticing the “collateral damage” is way more callous.

There was a celebratory attitude about having hit the intended targets, totally oblivious to the nightmare caused to those killed and to their loved ones who must mourn them. Here’s a screenshot of emojis in response:

It’s one thing to make the case that military actions are a tragic necessity, that killing may be unavoidable for an important goal that will save other people’s lives. This is common in just war theory, but that’s not what’s happening here. Glee is not sorrow. For those who think it was justified, only sorrow is called for.

Scandal 3: Pointlessness

But it’s not justified under just war theory. It’s not good strategy for the stated goals, since it’s a strategy that’s been tried for years and never worked yet. There’s no good rationale for why that would change and suddenly work now. As is common for the war mentality, it’s out of touch with reality.

As Daniel McCarthy puts it in The Real Scandal of the Signal Leak | Compact:

Yet something else endangers the lives of America’s military personnel in a far more significant way—namely, sending them into another Middle East conflict in the first place . . .

What the Signal chat revealed is that Donald Trump is making the same mistakes as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush before him—egged on by his conventionally hawkish national security advisor, Michael Waltz, the figure most likely to have been responsible for Goldberg’s accidental inclusion in the conversation.

Scandal 4: Secrecy

It seems so very obvious to almost all media commentators that the scandal is that secrets weren’t kept. Yet we live in a democracy. There aren’t supposed to be secrets kept from the people, since the people are the ultimate decision-makers.

Secrecy doesn’t merely protect the people tasked with fighting a war. It also protects the war planners from public scrutiny. This is a recipe for disaster.

As Daniel McCarthy put it:

The scandal here isn’t what the government failed to keep secret, it’s the secrecy itself and the dangerously ill-conceived policies it serves . . .

What’s remarkable here is the concern with looking indecisive rather than with making a bad decision. Which should be the criterion of whether or not America goes to war? Secretary Hegseth ought to discuss that with the American people—and President Trump, too.

Main Scandal

The overarching, biggest scandal of all is one that we already knew before this specific one arose, and which we’re bound to have evidence for yet again. In two parts: