What Would Daniel Ellsberg Have Done? Thoughts On The Waltz-Goldberg Yemen War Signal Leak

This week’s lesson in journalistic ethics:

A good and honorable journalist who receives leaked information about illegal, unconstitutional, and unforgivable acts of war committed by the US government must act quickly to

1) close the leak before he learns anything more,

2) alert the world about the “security breach,” and

3) report about it in a way that makes the leak into the sole point of interest, and treats the act of war itself like a minor thing on the side.

At that point, the “anti-Trump” opposition party can step in to decry and condemn the alleged breach in communications security, without needing to dwell even for a moment on the war crimes, or the unconstitutionality of the undeclared war, or the murdered victims numbering in the dozens or hundreds.

Some things are designed and released as propaganda operations by one or another group with an interest. Other things converge out of incidental parts in ways that look like designed psyops. Both the former and the latter make us say things like, “You can’t make this shit up,” or “If this was a Hollywood script it would be rejected, it’s too on-the-nose.”

Here are three possibilities, three scenarios for what happened:

First, the Waltz-Goldberg Signal leak is the accident it appears to be, as I believe it is. The story is that the national security advisor, Waltz, accidentally included a likely-frequent contact, the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, in a chat meant for the political big wheels of Trump’s war junta only: Hegseth, Vance, Gabbard, Ratfcliffe, et al. Contrary to the impression we’ve been given, the transcript of the chat does not indicate the chat was operationally part of planning or ordering the latest mass-murder attack on Yemen, which killed 50-100 civilians. Rather, it begins with Hegseth informing a group of the regime’s major security officials (and the accidental extra man, who stays silent) that the attack has been ordered. They share their impressions. Vance’s are the most extended; he presents himself as upset that the US is paying for this action and not the “Europeans,” whose vital interests it supposedly serves. Once they hear that the bombs are dropping, they do some congratulatory back-slapping and God-thanking, with emojis.

A second possibility is that this could have been arranged as an intentional leak by one or more of the characters in the chat group itself, for example as a way of sharing their concerns about the US bearing the costs of the war (in dollars, not in human lives) and broadcasting their ideology about freeloading Europeans. (One possible motive might have been opposite that idea: that the leak puts pressure on Vance for expressing reservations about Trump’s attack order.) In any case, intended or not, the leak will serve to demonstrate the absolute impunity of all of the bastards involved, and that may be motive enough. Without a doubt, this “scandal” will raise up much of that good old Shakespearean “sound and fury” but generate no negative legal or political consequences for the chatterers and leakers. Nowadays that seems always to be the case with anything given a “-gate” suffix. In the end, it signifies nothing.

Or, third, and to me least likely, this could have been a move orchestrated by an outside party, e.g. at a place like NSA or other institutions where people have the means to fuck around with comms via Signal. Recall that Signal is favored by the CIA as a preferred means of “secure” communications for foreign dissidents and their own agents. If this was an act of sabotage or a psychological operation of some kind by elements inside the government but outside the chat group, Goldberg would no longer be the accidental recipient of the leak, but would have been chosen as such (whether he knew it or not). Returning to the second scenario, if this was an intentional leak by someone inside the chat group, again the choice of Goldberg would no longer be an accident. But even if the leak was strictly an accident by Waltz, as per official story and as seems likeliest, it’s probably not a random matter that Goldberg was on a short list of those most likely to accidentally receive such a leak. Why? Who is this guy? As a young man, the “good and honorable journalist” in our story, a US citizen, did a stint with the Israeli Defense Forces at a concentration camp, guarding Palestinian prisoners. W know this because he published an article about it. Going on to become a writer at The Atlantic, he distinguished himself as a major perpetrator of the 2002 “WMD” propaganda operation, a vast multi-track complex of lies by multiple intelligence services and friendly big-name journalists about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” held by the ruling regime in Iraq. This was essential in preparing the Bush regime’s 2003 unprovoked aggressive invasion. Goldberg remained a reliable producer of propaganda in the service of US and Israeli military-intel needs, which may be the reason why he is on Waltz’s list of Signal contacts in the first place. He was not punished and his career did not suffer from any of this; rather he was ascended to the job of Atlantic editor-in-chief. Eventually, this month, Goldberg was included, by accident or by intent, in the Signal Chat of Perfidy. Again, I lean to the the official rendering, as admitted by the White House and as is being “investigated” or condemned by the Democrats. The current pressure in all of our bifurcated media is for all of us to put out or adopt a limited number of prefabricated tropes and narratives every day. This is like a weather condition, and it is so powerful that random elements constantly converge to produce unlikely stories in ways that seem planned and convenient.

And now we know what Goldberg did when he had the leak delivered to him. What would Daniel Ellsberg have done?

Young people, return with me to a time, in the late 1960s, when xerox was a verb. The Pentagon Papers were literally typed on paper, and if you wanted copies, you needed to copy or “xerox” them. Even the best copiers were very slow.

The papers were a Pentagon-commissioned secret history for insiders, running thousands of pages, about the US involvement in the Indochina wars since 1945. Through many volumes the papers demonstrated, without any doubt, that the government had for decades continuously lied to the American public about the real reasons for the US involvement and escalating military actions in Vietnam. Given the mounting casualties (mostly the Americanm ones, although they were outnumbered by the Vietnamese dead by 20:1), and given the increasing opposition to the war among Americans and US soldiers, this was potentially explosive material.

Ellsberg had access to the papers, as a top consultant to the Pentagon who had quietly come to understand that the United States was engaged in great and unforgivable crimes. He sat on the papers for many months, using the time to make copies of the entire work. Only then did he begin to release the papers to the press and politicians, going into hiding and eluding the authorities until all of the material could be published and entered into the Congressional record. Finally, he turned himself in. The extremely serious criminal case against him was thrown out of court due to prejudicial actions by the Nixon administration.

The result of the exposure of the Pentagon papers was to help build domestic and international pressure leading to the end of the criminal US invasions of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, which caused the deaths of an estimated minimum of two million people living in those countries. Indirectly, it also set off a chain of ill-advised defensive reactions from the Nixon administration that generated the only “-gate” scandal that ever had consequences: that of Watergate.

No danger today from “honorable journalists.”

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