Bombing Yemen: Signalgate Deserves to Be a Major Scandal
Signalgate has taken over the airwaves, TV news, radio shows, computer screens, newsfeeds, social media and more. That’s not surprising—it was a huge breach of the most basic rules of the intelligence community: You don’t talk about targets with anyone who doesn’t need to know; you don’t spill the times and plans for coming attacks, and you don’t talk about military stuff at all on commercial messaging services in an informal chat-group with a bunch of government principals—and invite a well-known journalist to join in. And you never hold official government meetings on a comms system that deletes the record in four weeks, so the National Archives, where the record of every meeting is supposed to end up, never knows it exists.
So yeah, the violation of intelligence rules was a really big deal. One or two heads might roll—or maybe it’ll soon be overtaken by an even bigger incompetence scandal.
But the biggest threat—that has already resulted in real lives lost—is being ignored. And that is the threat to the lives of Yemeni people—who, how many, how many were children, we still don’t know—being killed by US bombs across the poorest nation in the Arab world.
