There’s a scandal exciting American mainstream media and minds, and it has to do with bombing. Yet there is an important nuance: it is not the bombing itself that is so scandalizing.

What is troubling many Americans is neither what Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has rightly called the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians with US bombs and support nor the renewed American air campaign against Yemen. Bombing large numbers of essentially defenseless brown people – men, women, and children – into bloody, dusty pulp, has long been a bipartisan tradition of the Indispensable Nation, especially if most of them are Muslims.

What Americans do find irritating is when their leaders spill the beans too early. And have they been spilling! In a cluster-fiasco reminiscent of those loose-lipped German generals caught out last year while prattling about launching their Taurus missiles at Russia via Ukraine, a whole gaggle of Washington top officials have made fools of themselves by a ridiculously feckless breach of elementary security.

In the run-up to the recently renewed US bombing campaign against Yemen, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Vice President J.D. Vance – to name only the most prominent delinquents – have all been involved in online chat meetings via the commercial messaging app Signal.

Having such meetings on Signal, instead of via well-established and obligatory secure channels, is ludicrously amateurish: Signal may be encrypted, but spyware can hack it. There are reasons why officials are instructed to use other means.

It is also seriously illegal (no Stormy Daniels issue this one) to be so sloppy, since it infringes on more than one provision of the National Security Act, which is ironic, considering it seems to have been the national security adviser who initially got this trainwreck going.

Because it was Waltz who – somehow – invited a journalist to participate: Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic does of course not belong in meetings preparing a military strike, especially when sharing sensitive operational data. And talking all too frankly about making the mooching European vassals pay, one way or the other. She may have been shunted off to a sinecure at New York’s hapless Columbia University, but the spirit of Victoria Nuland’s “F*ck the EU!” is alive and well in Washington, as this meeting also unsurprisingly showed.

Nobody has yet explained how it happened that Goldberg was included and why no one seems to have noticed the clearly visible presence of an obvious if conspicuously silent outsider in the virtual room. And all that while........

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