“This is blatantly illegal and dangerous beyond belief. Our national security is in the hands of complete amateurs. What other highly sensitive national security conversations are happening over group chat? Any other random people accidentally added to those, too?” — Senator Elizabeth Warren
Hate to step outside the Unity Chorus here, but I’m in favor of the idiots running my country sharing their plans with the public and therefore with journalists. I only wish they could pick better journalists.
I’m not good at conveniently forgetting at all the right moments that the distant mass slaughters are for “democracy.” The key to actual democracy is the absence of secrets. I’m not upset that the Keystone Trumpers told a reporter their secret war plans. I’m upset that they have secrets, and more upset that they have war plans, and deeply disturbed that the latter criminal outrage is assumed by all to justify the former.
“National security” my assignment desk!
There are still people in the U.S. Congress young enough to remember both why they walked into a room and that long ago age when presidents mass-murdering people in Yemen without a Congressional blessing was deemed a slight to moderate outrage.
In fact, war is a crime, a disgusting immoral act. It’s kept secret because it’s awful and hated and might be roundly condemned otherwise. It’s a violation of the UN Charter and numerous other treaties, and — if you pretend it’s not a war but just some murders — of many more laws, not to mention the U.S. Constitution which the U.S. Congress hasn’t taken a good look at since 1941.
Instead of seeing war for what it is, Congress Members and the corporate media take it to be a justification for secrecy — and surveillance, and deportations, and oppression of free speech, and incarceration without charge or trial, and the “efficiency” of defunding schools and healthcare and the taxation of oligarchs.
Even Congress Members who might object to a particular war are still outraged that a reporter might learn which goofy emojis the jackasses launching it text to each other. It’s more important to maintain an aura of sacred anti-democratic dictatorial license around warmaking than to put a stop to it.
This is certainly the approach of Jeffrey Goldberg, the war and genocide supporter who was told that there was about to be a mass killing and ran to fix a bowl of popcorn rather than going public immediately to try to stop it. When Katharine Gun went public with secrets she knew prior to a war, Dan Ellsberg pointed to that as the most useful form of whistleblowing. Goldberg instead let the killing happen, made sure he didn’t get in the way, and removed himself from access to any more information so that he wouldn’t risk having the ability to prevent any additional killing. It’s as if Columbia University were embodied in a single person.
And additional killing there will likely be. The Trump Troop is pushing for a war on Iran, among other apocalyptic plans, and declaring that Iran must abolish its nuclear energy program and cease its tiny role in the global arms dealing dominated by the United States. The Hegseth Hacks are also claiming that anything Yemen does will count as an act of war by Iran. There hasn’t been such a push for getting the other side to start a war against your poor innocent wittle self since — there’s that date again — 1941.