Afrasianet - The American political landscape has been rocked by revelations that the administration of US President Donald Trump discussed plans to strike Yemen in a chat group that included a journalist from The Atlantic magazine.
Senior Trump administration officials face difficult questions about their operational security, their use of consumer apps, and even their use of emojis. However, little attention has been paid to the details of the strike itself, let alone the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strikes was a civilian residential building.
This came after The Atlantic magazine revealed that its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was invited to the Signal group chat and published the actual messages exchanged between senior Trump administration officials, which included precise operational details and the names of specific weapons to be used in the strikes in Yemen.
The Atlantic decided to publish these conversations, which included Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Vice President J.D. Vance, after the White House attempted to deny that any classified information had been exchanged.
Before publishing the messages from the so-called "Houthi microchannel" on Signal, Mike Waltz announced that the recent attacks had "eliminated key Yemeni leaders, including their chief missile officer." "We hit their headquarters. We hit their communications centers, weapons factories, and even some of their naval drone production facilities," Waltz said in an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, before Jeffrey Goldberg's leaks. But in the group chat, Mike Waltz revealed that the US military "destroyed a civilian home, or an apartment building, to kill a Yemeni official."
Waltz wrote on Signal: "The first target, their top missile official, we confirmed his ID going into an apartment building, and the building is now down," to which J.D. Vance replied: "Excellent."
In this context, Stephanie Saville, director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, told The Intercept that “news coverage of the Signal chat leak often lacks any real discussion of the act of war itself and the fact that the US is bombing people in Yemen.”
She added that “53 people were killed in the latest wave of US airstrikes, including five children,” while these “are just the latest deaths in a long history of US killings in Yemen. Research indicates that US airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and terrorizing innocent civilians and destroying their lives and livelihoods.”
The Intercept said that over the past century, the US military has demonstrated a persistent disregard for civilian lives. It has repeatedly “mislabeled ordinary people as enemies or deliberately targeted them, failed to investigate allegations of civilian harm, excused casualties as inevitable tragedies, and failed to prevent such incidents or hold those responsible accountable.”
The website noted that these established practices "starkly contradict the media campaigns promoted by American officials, which portray US wars as humanitarian, its airstrikes as precise, its concern for civilians as essential, and the killing of innocents as a tragic incident and an exception."
It's worth noting that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, revealed that the Trump administration planned its strikes on Yemen using a Signal group chat, sparking a storm of reactions in the United States, most of which criticized the laxity in discussing sensitive matters over the chat app and the lack of verification of its members.