Eighty-two years ago next month, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, by far his country’s greatest military figure, died because the Americans received advance notice of his flight plan. Yamamoto was on his way to an island in the Solomons in order to boost troop morale after Japan’s defeat at Guadalcanal. A radio operator carelessly sent out Yamamoto’s itinerary over an open channel. It was immediately intercepted by code-breakers at Pearl Harbor, decoded and translated. When Yamamoto’s plane was airborne, it was shot down near Bougainville by waiting U.S. Army Aircraft fighters and the admiral killed. His death was a psychological blow to Japan from which it never recovered.
Along come National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Secretaries of State and Defense Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Kremlin favorite, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the apex of the U.S. national security team, openly discussing detailed attack plans aimed at Yemen’s Houthis on Signal, a public commercial platform. Bad as that was, what is worse are their desperate attempts at downplaying one of the stupidest and most dangerous intelligence screw-ups in history.
Gabbard and Ratcliffe lied to both Senate and House committees about their mind-boggling recklessness. Hegseth denied the obvious and trashed the journalist that Waltz thoughtlessly included in the Signal chat. I should add that Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, by leaving the call and withholding some of the most super-sensitive information discussed, acted far more responsibly than the Trump appointees. Rubio meekly opined that it was a “big mistake.”
BIG MISTAKE!?!?
Hegseth, in his latest of an unending series of blunders as SecDef, actually itemized in detail the U.S. attack plans during the chat. Had the Iranians, Russians, Chinese or North Koreans been monitoring the platform, they could have warned the Houthis in advance and jeopardized the lives of American pilots.
Donald Trump, he of the mantra, “The buck stops anywhere but here with me,” claims he knew nothing about this unbelievable breach of secrecy and that it was no big deal. Instead of demanding that his collection of national insecurity failures fall on their swords, he calls this band of loyal fools “great people.”
During my career, I twice had Top Secret security clearances. Had I done anything remotely like what these pea-brains did, I would have found myself very quickly behind bars, charged with criminal conduct. In contrast these thoughtless buffoons will just go on doing their jobs as ineptly as possible. That any of them still have jobs is appalling and a deep insult to and disdain for the American people.
Needless to say, having clowns in charge of protecting our nation makes us supremely vulnerable to anyone who wants to do us harm, and especially puts our military in harm’s way. But what did you expect when Trump appointed abject mediocrities to their high posts?
Thus far, only one Republican member of Congress has dared make a peep about how bad this is. The rest of the Reichstag bootlickers are content to hide in their mouse holes and persist in their servility to all things Trump.
Of all the journalists these incompetents could have included in their public chat, Goldberg should have been one of the last ones on their list. Despite Hegseth’s shabby attempts to denigrate him, Goldberg is one of the finest journalists of our era and his magazine only continues to rise to the top of the heap, especially now that so many of the Washington Post’s crackerjack reporters and opinion writers have joined The Atlantic.
Among the questions raised by this intelligence disaster are the following:
If the situation had been reversed and it was Democrats on the chat, would Republicans just sit quietly and do nothing? Unlikely.
Other than the fact that she is a Trump doormat personified, how can Attorney General Pam Bondi claim that nothing classified was revealed during the chat, a blatant lie, and that the Justice Department sees no reason to investigate or prosecute?
Given such breathtaking incompetence, how many other times has something like this gone on that we don’t know about?
I understand that the public probably could care less about the particulars of this insane security breach. However, what it should be concerned with is the INCOMPETENCE of this administration which pervades everything it tries to do.
Sidenote. In what is destined to become a spreading brain drain, three highly-esteemed Yale professors, including world-renowned historian Timothy Snyder, are leaving the university and heading north to teach in Canada. Their beef is not with the university, but rather with having to reside and teach in an America gone down into the Trump inferno.
Dick Hermann
March 28, 2025
Along come National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Secretaries of State and Defense Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Kremlin favorite, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the apex of the U.S. national security team, openly discussing detailed attack plans aimed at Yemen’s Houthis on Signal, a public commercial platform. Bad as that was, what is worse are their desperate attempts at downplaying one of the stupidest and most dangerous intelligence screw-ups in history.
Gabbard and Ratcliffe lied to both Senate and House committees about their mind-boggling recklessness. Hegseth denied the obvious and trashed the journalist that Waltz thoughtlessly included in the Signal chat. I should add that Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, by leaving the call and withholding some of the most super-sensitive information discussed, acted far more responsibly than the Trump appointees. Rubio meekly opined that it was a “big mistake.”
BIG MISTAKE!?!?
Hegseth, in his latest of an unending series of blunders as SecDef, actually itemized in detail the U.S. attack plans during the chat. Had the Iranians, Russians, Chinese or North Koreans been monitoring the platform, they could have warned the Houthis in advance and jeopardized the lives of American pilots.
Donald Trump, he of the mantra, “The buck stops anywhere but here with me,” claims he knew nothing about this unbelievable breach of secrecy and that it was no big deal. Instead of demanding that his collection of national insecurity failures fall on their swords, he calls this band of loyal fools “great people.”
During my career, I twice had Top Secret security clearances. Had I done anything remotely like what these pea-brains did, I would have found myself very quickly behind bars, charged with criminal conduct. In contrast these thoughtless buffoons will just go on doing their jobs as ineptly as possible. That any of them still have jobs is appalling and a deep insult to and disdain for the American people.
Needless to say, having clowns in charge of protecting our nation makes us supremely vulnerable to anyone who wants to do us harm, and especially puts our military in harm’s way. But what did you expect when Trump appointed abject mediocrities to their high posts?
Thus far, only one Republican member of Congress has dared make a peep about how bad this is. The rest of the Reichstag bootlickers are content to hide in their mouse holes and persist in their servility to all things Trump.
Of all the journalists these incompetents could have included in their public chat, Goldberg should have been one of the last ones on their list. Despite Hegseth’s shabby attempts to denigrate him, Goldberg is one of the finest journalists of our era and his magazine only continues to rise to the top of the heap, especially now that so many of the Washington Post’s crackerjack reporters and opinion writers have joined The Atlantic.
Among the questions raised by this intelligence disaster are the following:
If the situation had been reversed and it was Democrats on the chat, would Republicans just sit quietly and do nothing? Unlikely.
Other than the fact that she is a Trump doormat personified, how can Attorney General Pam Bondi claim that nothing classified was revealed during the chat, a blatant lie, and that the Justice Department sees no reason to investigate or prosecute?
Given such breathtaking incompetence, how many other times has something like this gone on that we don’t know about?
I understand that the public probably could care less about the particulars of this insane security breach. However, what it should be concerned with is the INCOMPETENCE of this administration which pervades everything it tries to do.
Sidenote. In what is destined to become a spreading brain drain, three highly-esteemed Yale professors, including world-renowned historian Timothy Snyder, are leaving the university and heading north to teach in Canada. Their beef is not with the university, but rather with having to reside and teach in an America gone down into the Trump inferno.
Dick Hermann
March 28, 2025
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