Tag: yemen

Trump Says He Will Continue Bombing Yemen For A ‘Long Time’

President Trump on Wednesday claimed that the US’s daily airstrikes on Yemen have been “very successful” and vowed the bombing campaign would continue for a “long time.”

The US started bombing Yemen again on March 15 in response to the Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, announcing they would reimpose a blockade on Israeli shipping due to Israeli ceasefire violations in Gaza.

Since the Trump administration launched the bombing campaign, the Houthis have restarted attacks on US warships and resumed firing missiles at Israel, operations they ceased when the Gaza ceasefire went into effect on January 19. Despite this, President Trump claims the Houthis want “peace.”

“The Houthis are looking to do something. They want to know, ‘How do we stop? How do we stop? How can we have peace?’ The Houthis want peace because they’re getting the hell knocked out of them,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

“They want us to stop so badly… They’ve got to say, ‘No mas.’ But I can only say that the attacks every day, every night… have been very successful beyond our wildest expectations… We’re going to do it for a long time. We can keep it going for a long time,” the president said.

The Houthis’ message has been that they will meet “escalation with escalation” and that their attacks won’t stop unless there is a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the Israeli blockade on aid and all other goods entering the Palestinian territory.

“The Yemeni Armed Forces affirm that the American aggression will only increase the Yemenis’ steadfastness and resilience, and that the confrontations over the last few days were only the beginning of what will be a gradual expansion of defensive operations in the coming days,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said on Thursday when announcing new attacks on US warships and on Israel.

Trump also claimed that the Houthis are being “hit harder than they have ever been.” But from 2015 to 2022, the Houthis faced a brutal US-backed Saudi-UAE war against them, which involved a heavy bombing campaign, a blockade, and a ground campaign. Trump supported the war during his first term in office and vetoed a War Powers Resolution passed by Congress that would have ended US involvement in the conflict.

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‘We Are the Only Ones… Who Can Do This’

The so-called SignalGate scandal centered on the bombing of Yemen is highly revelatory. First, some resources. CNN has a useful annotated account of the chats exchanged at the highest levels of the Trump administration. At their respective Substacks, Lenny Broytman and Caitlin Johnstone have telling dissections of these chats as well. At Jacobin, Branko Marcetic has an important article that reminds us of the illegality of the attacks. As the article’s subheading puts it: The press [mainstream media] is mostly framing the Yemen group chat scandal as a story of incompetence. There’s little attention being paid to the deadliness, illegality, and ineffectiveness of the strikes themselves.

To me, among the most telling “chats” came from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It highlights the “exceptional” nature of America:

Pete Hegseth to Vice President JD Vance: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.

But Mike [Waltz, the National Security Adviser] is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing…

This is precisely the problem for America since the Vietnam War, if not before then. We’ve created a monster military, a “global strike” force, that is capable of destroying any target anywhere around the globe. “Nobody else even close,” SecDef Hegseth correctly says. And because we can do it, because we are exceptional in military force, our leaders believe we should do it, even if it’s only to send a “message” to the world how tough we are, how committed we are to killing others.

Other countries – like those “free-loading” European ones – are PATHETIC because they don’t have America’s military might. Only we can smite evildoers around the globe, only we can do so while also arming Israel to the teeth and covering its flanks while it continues its annihilation of Gaza, and this is something we are immensely proud of.

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Was This ‘Leak’ Accidental or Is It Pro-War Psyops?

There are several curious aspects of this ‘leak’ of internal communication of high ranking members of the Trump administration:

Top national security officials for President Donald Trump, including his defense secretary, texted war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, the magazine reported in a story posted online Monday. The National Security Council said the text chain “appears to be authentic.”
…
The material in the text chain “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported.

The Atlantic is the worst magazine in America. Its editor in chief, ..

.. Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped out of an Ivy League University to volunteer to be an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada. In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that he helped cover up serious prisoner abuse.

Goldberg is a neo-conservative who has yet to see a U.S. instigated war he dislikes. To trust his reporting is dangerous.

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It Wasn’t a Leak, It was a Devious “Charlie Foxtrot”

Charlie Foxtrot is a polite euphemism for a crude military term — Clusterfu*k. That describes the first scandal of the Trump Administration. Somehow, whether deliberate or accidentally, a Zionist journalist by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal chat by Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz, or by someone who worked for Waltz. Goldberg suddenly found himself part of a group chat of Trump’s top defense, diplomatic and intelligence officials. The group included CIA Director Ratcliffe, DNI’s Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, among other luminaries.

If you are not familiar with Signal, you create a group chat by naming a group and then adding members from your list of contacts. This tells us that Goldberg was part of Waltz’s list of contacts. Goldberg is a particularly slimy character, not because he published portions of the chat, but because he behaved as a political hack instead of a journalist. A journalist with that unexpected access, would have written an immediate story announcing that the US was going to start bombing Yemen just to make an example of it. What did Goldberg do? He waited till the bombing happened and then hoisted the Trump gang on its own petard. He made the story about Charlie Foxtrot, which he published on Monday in The Atlantic magazine.

This was not a leak. This was a gift to Goldberg. While the contents of the chat are not officially classified, the information being discussed was operationally sensitive. The chat exposed most of the Trump team as shallow and dismissive of the military and diplomatic implications of the decision to start bombing Yemen.

If Waltz and company wanted to discuss the pros and cons of bombing Yemen, he should have convened a Secure Video Conference, aka SVTC (pronounced, CIVITS).

Pete Hegseth’s remarks to the press, responding to the Goldberg article, makes a solid case that he is not qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense. Instead of admitting that this was a fu*kup on the part of Waltz, he decided to attack Goldberg. Moreover, he pretends that the US was hitting hardened, military targets.

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Jeffrey Goldberg Accidentally Proved His ‘Signalgate’ Narrative Is a Hoax

The Democrats’ latest effort to manufacture a Trump administration scandal blew up in their faces this week after Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, reported that he was somehow included in an encrypted Signal chat group with top administration officials discussing a planned attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. According to Goldberg, officials discussed classified and/or top-secret war plans.

No one disputes that Goldberg was erroneously included in the chat, but the real issue is whether classified or top-secret war plans were actually discussed.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe and DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard testified that nothing classified or top secret was discussed in the chat. Others in the administration have said the same thing.

Goldberg had been given the opening to release the chats in their entirety to prove them wrong. But he insisted that he wouldn’t.

During an interview on The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller, Goldberg repeatedly evaded calls to produce evidence, raising serious questions about the credibility of his claims.

Miller directly challenged Goldberg, pointing out that top Trump administration officials had accused him of lying. “Now, the Secretary of Defense and the White House Press Secretary have said you’re lying, have said there are no war plans there, have said there’s no classified information,” Miller stated. “So the obvious question is, shouldn’t you now demonstrate it? Shouldn’t you publish the text?”

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“Those Are Some Really Sh*tty War Plans”: Hegseth Ridicules Atlantic ‘Bombshell’ After Signal Chats Released

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has responded to the growing calls among Dems for him to step down. This is hours after The Atlantic published the fuller chat logs, alleging that he’s discussing ‘war plans’ in an insecure and unclassified setting – also with a journalist inadvertently added to the group chat.

Hegseth emphasized on X that there were No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.” And he said sarcastically these these make for “some really shitty war plans.”

Still, this is unlikely to appease the Trump White House’s enemies, who are also now claiming that national security officials ‘lied’ before the Senate yesterday.

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Mike Waltz Wonders If It Was a Conspiracy. We’re Wondering About a Few OTHER Things.

Have the Democrats declared that this is “bigger than Watergate!” yet? Because — checks watch — it’s definitely gonna happen. I’ve lost track of all the GOP scandals that were “bigger than Watergate!” but it’s still the left’s go-to epithet. If they haven’t used the phrase yet, I’ll bet you a Diet Coke they’ll use it by noon tomorrow.

By now, you’ve heard the news: In a weird, inexplicable SNAFU, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic was inadvertently included in a Signal conversation with high-level White House officials, where he eavesdropped on their planning for the (successful) attack on the Houthis. Although it sounds implausible, this Signal conversation has been authenticated by administration officials.

Goldberg contends that Michael Waltz — the U.S. national security advisor — invited him to connect on Signal and join the conversation. And for a short while, that was the dominant theory throughout DC: Waltz was careless, invited the wrong guy, and nobody realized the mistake until Goldberg left the chat.

But what if something else was going on?

Mike Waltz was on Fox News on Tuesday evening, talking about the incident with Laura Ingraham. 

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Is the Signal ‘Scandal’ an Attempt to Cover up the Truth?

We’re two days into what the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the mainstream press are trying to turn into a “scandal” — the accidental inclusion of Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a chat about the Trump administration’s operations against the Houthis on the texting app Signal. The more we learn, the more we know that the whole affair is a massive nothingburger with everything on it and a big ol’ side of fake news fries.

Key members of the administration’s intelligence apparatus testified that the Signal messaging thread didn’t divulge any classified information. And for all the commendation of Goldberg for not spilling too many beans, we have a better idea that there weren’t many beans to spill.

It’s hard not to speculate on why the left is so desperate to blow this thing out of proportion and make it more than it should be. Obviously, the left wants nothing more than to slap the scarlet letter S for “scandal” on this administration because it has been so effective and popular with the American people. But a White House press release from Tuesday reveals the most plausible reason why the left wants to discredit the administration when it comes to action against the Houthis.

“Democrats and their media allies have seemingly forgotten that President Donald J. Trump and his National Security team successfully killed terrorists who have targeted U.S. troops and disrupted one of the most consequential shipping routes in the world,” the White House states (with emphasis in the original). “This is a coordinated effort to distract from the successful actions taken by President Trump and his administration to make America’s enemies pay and keep Americans safe.”

“The Biden Administration sat back as a band of pirates — with precision-guided, Iran-provided weaponry — exacted a toll system in one of the most important shipping lanes in the world,” the press release continues.

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Radical Dem’s INSANE Hot Take On Trump Officials’ Signal Group Chat…

Extremist Democrat Rashida Tlaib has drawn widespread condemnation for expressing outrage at the notion of the Trump administration conducting air strikes on Houthi terrorists.

Several national security officials including Vice President Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were part of a conversation about the strikes on a Signal group chat that a staffer of Mike Waltz inadvertently included an Atlantic journalist in.

While some on the left are seizing on what isn’t really much of a story and inflating it into some sort of ‘national security leak,’ Tlaib instead offered up this insane take…

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Vance Cautioned Against Bombing Yemen, Calling It A ‘Mistake’

Vice President JD Vance cautioned against bombing Yemen before the US restarted its airstrikes on the country, calling it a “mistake,” and suggested delaying the attack by one month, according to a leaked Signal conversation between administration officials.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter for The Atlantic, was included in the Signal thread, apparently by accident, which is how he obtained the conversation. An account believed to be Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared details of the March 15 airstrikes on Yemen two hours before they happened, and the White House confirmed that the Signal conversation appeared to be authentic.

A day before the airstrikes, an account labeled “JD Vance” expressed misgivings about the idea of targeting the Houthis. “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake,” the Vance account said.

Vance framed his opposition to the airstrikes based on President Trump’s policies toward Europe, which have involved pressuring the Europeans to pay more for their own militaries to be less reliant on the US. Vance pointed out that only a small percentage of US shipping goes through the Suez Canal compared to European trade.

The message said: “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

Vance continued, “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

An account believed to be Joe Kent, President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, replied to Vance, saying, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”

Hegseth responded to Vance by saying the messaging to the American people about the war would focus on President Biden failing to deter Yemeni attacks and the Houthis being “Iran funded.” Iran is aligned with the Houthis, but it’s unclear how much support they give to the group, and US officials have acknowledged the Houthis wouldn’t take orders from Tehran and have their own weapons supply.

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