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      Human rights groups rebuke Kristi Noem’s visit to El Salvador prison: ‘political theater’

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      Human rights organizations on Thursday denounced the visit by the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to the notorious prison in El Salvador that is holding hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the US earlier this month without a hearing, calling her actions “political theater”.Critics condemned Noem’s visit as just the latest example of the Trump administration’s aim to spread fear among immigrant communities, as the cabinet member stood in a baseball hat in front of a line of caged men bare from the waist up.Noem visited the so-called Cecot, or Terrorism Confinement Center, an infamous maximum-security prison. The prison, built in 2022 during a brutal government crackdown on organized crime, is where nearly 300 migrants, previously in US custody, were recently expelled and are currently detained.They have been accused of being violent gang members, despite family members of several of the men asserting that they are not.“The Department of Homeland Security secretary’s visit is an example of the fear that Trump’s government wants to instill in immigrants,” attorney Ivania Cruz said on Thursday. Cruz works with the Committee to Defend Human and Community Rights (Unidehc), a human rights organization in El Salvador. “This is precisely what Noem has done — use the Cecot as a cinematographic space,” she added.Noem’s visit to the prison “was a typical gross and cruel display of political theater that we have come to expect from the Trump administration,” Vicki Gass said. Gass is the executive director of the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), a human rights organization based in Washington DC. “That the Trump administration is flouting judicial orders and denying due process to people within the US borders is outrageous and frightening.”Earlier this month, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime provision that allows the executive to detain and deport people coming from an “enemy” nation. Despite a federal judge blocking the invocation of the act, shortly after, planes from the US landed in El Salvador, filled with men and women in immigration custody. More than 250 men, mostly from Venezuela, were quickly and forcibly shuffled into the Cecot, where officials shaved their heads and placed them in cells.Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that the men were members of transnational gangs. When invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump – without proof – accused the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua of having “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government. US intelligence agencies contradict Trump’s claims about ties between the gang and the Venezuelan government, the New York Times has reported, and the Venezuelan government has also denied it is connected.News reports across various publications have emerged revealing the identity of the Venezuelan men expelled to El Salvador, with family members saying some of the men are innocent. When pressed, the DHS has not provided proof of those men’s purported ties to the gang and they were flown out of the US without a hearing, raising questions about violations of constitutional due process rights.The federal judge in Washington who blocked the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has repeatedly pressed the Trump administration to provide information about their process to conduct the operation, also ordering “individualized hearings” for people Trump wants to expel under the act. In response, the Trump administration invoked “state secrets” privilege, to avoid disclosing any information about the operation.The Salvadorian prison that Noem visited was constructed in 2022, during El Salvador’s “state of exception”, a move by the president, Nayib Bukele, that rounded up thousands of people in an attempt to crack down on criminal gangs. According to Cruz, the human rights attorney, and other organizations, the state of exception violated due process rights, with thousands being caught up in arrests and detention without proof of gang membership.Cruz has been targeted for her work denouncing conditions in the Salvadorian prisons. During the state of exception, her brother was arrested and imprisoned by the Bukele government. Cruz fought for his release and since then, she has taken on a role as a key spokesperson for people who have been wrongfully detained in the prisons.“It is not by chance that the expelled immigrants are from Venezuela, when we know there is a political conflict between the two countries,” Cruz said. “Today it is Venezuelans – tomorrow may be Chileans, then Colombians. It’s an international problem that is provoking conflict.”Noem’s visit came one day before a protest organized by a Salvadorian rights organization, opposing the Central American government’s “arbitrary detentions”.“I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” Noem said in a video posted on X from the Cecot prison. “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”The use of another country’s vast, maximum-security prison to detain immigrants from a third country is unprecedented, especially considering the grave allegations of abuses at this and other Salvadorian prisons.“Amnesty International has extensively documented the inhumane conditions within detentions centers in El Salvador, including the Cecot, where those removed are now being held,” the organization said in a statement on Wednesday. “Reports indicate extreme overcrowding, lack of access to adequate medical care, and widespread ill-treatment amounting to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”According to Ana María Méndez Dardón, the Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights non-profit in DC, there are two or three huge prisons in El Salvador where the mass incarceration of people has been concentrated. The detention centers in the country have faced extreme allegations of human rights abuses.“The Cecot has a capacity for 40,000 people, that is to say only 30% of the current prison population, the rest of the population is located in other centers, such as the one in Mariona, where torture and other human rights violations have been documented,” Méndez Dardón said.She added: “Unlike the videos edited and produced about Cecot, President Bukele is not showing the world the true reality within the other detention centers, where the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has stated that they have committed torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment.”Reports have described bare metal bunks stacked high like shelving and with no bedding whatsoever.The Trump administration’s practice of denying due process and defying judicial orders “is outrageous and frightening”, Gass, from LAWG, added. “So is forcibly disappearing them to Cecot where prisoners are not allowed to meet with lawyers or their family members, are jammed into overcrowded cells, and never see the light of day.” More

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      Donald Trump is moving fast and breaking things, but that may result in a better US | Simon Jenkins

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      “Move fast and break things” was Mark Zuckerberg’s motto in launching Facebook 20 years ago. It seemed the antithesis of management-school custom and practice. But it worked, to be imitated after a fashion by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other digital tycoons with similar success. Donald Trump is now seeing if it works in government.The smart money in Washington was that after the fiasco of Trump’s first term, his second would see a more emollient president, one careful of his reputation. He would reach out, consult, become a peacemaker, in his desperation to become a Nobel president like Barack Obama.How wrong that has proved. Trump is doing what few leaders dare do. He is being a cultural revolutionary, a Mao Zedong, a grandiloquent system smasher. He wants to reorder Washington’s role in the US and the US’s role in the world. He knows that he may have just two years before “the system” – the electoral cycle, the judiciary and state governments – blocks his path. If he truly wants revolution he must break things, and fast.The historian Arthur Schlesinger said the US needed occasional shocks to wipe away the cobwebs, the bureaucracy and the dirt of an ever more cumbersome union. Should it get out of hand and disaster threaten, the constitution was designed to pull the country back from the brink. Thus it rid itself of Richard Nixon, but not before his radicalism towards China achieved the US’s exit from Vietnam. Might this apply to Trump?Already a dose of the so-called new realism has torn through Nato’s cobwebs. Trump simply does not regard Russia as a threat to the US and western Europe. It is merely obsessed, as it has been throughout history, with its frontier states, with the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and the “stans”, nations that Trump has little interest in defending. Yet ever since the end of the cold war – and during most of it – Nato’s rationale has relied on a thesis, a conventional wisdom, that Russia is set on the conquest of western Europe. If Keir Starmer really thinks, as he appears to, that Russia’s assault on Ukraine threatens Britain, Trump’s message is that Britain should pare down its welfare state and rearm quickly. American taxpayers are not going to be taken for that ride.It was indeed a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, who warned against exaggerating the Russian threat to sustain Nato, which was already the biggest and richest military establishment the world had ever seen. The defence lobby demanded deterrence to be infinite. Trump has called that bluff. To him the US’s defence is just that: to guard its own borders. So should be Europe’s. It is hardly an outrageous view. No one was screaming for war when Russia invaded Georgia or Ukraine in 2014. It is one thing to disagree with this argument, another to dismiss it as 1939-style appeasement, as western defence lobbyists have done.Meanwhile, on the subject of borders Trump is hardly out on a limb. The US gains about 150,000 Mexican immigrants a year, to join the 11 million already there. Mexico and Canada bombard the US with imports, as does China. To Trump, Americans should pay for their goods what it costs Americans to make them. If they want Chinese cars they can donate 25% of the price to the government as a tariff. As for fentanyl, the way to get countries such as China to stem the flow and the deaths that follow is again with tariffs, massive tariffs. Sometimes in diplomacy only force talks – force backed up with uncertainty.Almost every president comes to Washington promising to cut the bureaucracy. Thus did Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. The reality is that an activist president breeds bureaucrats. The power of the centre in a democracy attracts more power. Trump knows he has no time for a long fight. It is Musk and the chainsaw or it is nothing. Education is not a federal function but a job for the states. So shut the US Department of Education. Ditto USAID. Also slash the state department. Raid the Treasury. Sure, things will get broken, but it is no worse than doing nothing. That is what cultural revolution means.Trump and his administration’s actions have been in many respects appalling. To renege on Joe Biden’s aid to Ukraine in mid-battle, to call Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator, to insult Canada, to threaten Greenland, to stop famine relief to Africa, to propose a Gaza beach resort, to bully lawyers, to leak security meetings, all beggar belief. Trump and his team are like playground thugs in their crudity and rudeness.But this is the sound of things breaking. It illustrates why Washington develops a defensive “swamp”, to guard against inexperienced presidents. As it is, the chance of Trump succeeding in his radicalism is small. You cannot stage much of a revolution in two years.There will be a counter-revolution. Greenland is unlikely to be an American Ukraine. Tariffs will come back down. The Democrats will recover their nerve. Many of Trump’s “broken things” will be patched together. But in among the chaos are challenges to convention that were overdue. Nato could become realistic. A forever war in Ukraine – or wider – could be avoided and Russia readmitted to the community of nations, as China was after Nixon.This is at least possible. More to the point, the US may review its role in the world, a role that has meant a quarter of a century of moral belligerence, with appalling cost and slaughter. It should revert to being what it is, another nation among nations. That may even be the result of someone moving fast and breaking things.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

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      Private data of Trump officials in Signal scandal accessible online: report

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      The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday, adding to the fallout from the officials’ use of a Signal group chat to plan airstrikes on Yemen.Mobile phone numbers, email addresses and in some cases passwords used by national security adviser Mike Waltz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard can be found via commercial data-search services and hacked data dumped online, it reported. It is not clear in all cases how recent the details are.The Trump administration has been facing calls for the resignation of senior officials amid bipartisan criticism after Monday’s embarrassing revelations. The chat group, which included vice-president JD Vance, Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to carry out strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen via the Signal app, potentially threatening the safety of US servicemen and women taking part in the operation.On Wednesday evening, Trump backed Hegseth, saying “He had nothing to do with this” and calling the scandal a “witch-hunt”.The phone numbers and email addresses – mostly current – were in some cases used for Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, cloud-storage service Dropbox, and apps that track a user’s location.Der Spiegel reported it was “particularly easy” to discover Hegseth’s mobile number and email address, using a commercial provider of contact information. It found that the email address, and in some cases even the password associated with it, could be found in more than 20 data leaks. It reported that it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.It said the mobile number led to a WhatsApp account that Hegseth appeared to have only recently deleted.The Gabbard and Waltz numbers were reportedly linked to accounts on messaging services WhatsApp and Signal. Der Spiegel said that left them exposed to having spyware installed on their devices.It said it was even possible foreign agents were spying during the recent Signal group chat on top-secret US plans for airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels on 15 March.Waltz inadvertently included a journalist in the chat, the Atlantic magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg. The magazine published further details of the conversation on Wednesday.Der Spiegel said the three officials had not responded to its requests for comment.The national security council said the Waltz accounts and passwords referenced by the German magazine had all been changed in 2019.With Agence France-Presse More

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      What we’ve learned from Trump team’s Signal chat | Letters

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      You report that White House top dogs described their “loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC” in a group chat on Signal (White House inadvertently texted top-secret Yemen war plans to journalist, 24 March). The subject of the chat was secret military plans for US attacks on the Houthis to protect shipping lanes in the Red Sea.In early 2014, Victoria Nuland (then Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state) was heard saying “Fuck the EU” to Geoffrey Pyatt (the US ambassador to Ukraine) in a bugged phone conversation about the crisis in Ukraine that led to the Maidan revolution. It seems that Europe’s approach to the election that saw a pro-west president replace a pro-Russia one was not hawkish enough for then US tastes.What’s new today, I suppose, is the medium through which these sentiments about an erstwhile close ally are communicated. What’s not new is the obvious inference that Europe is something for the US to pick out of its political dressing-up box when bruiting abroad its leadership of the free world.Susan HorwoodMillbrook, Cornwall What is fascinating in the Houthigate leak is the level of venom directed towards Europe by Donald Trump’s senior team. Surely Gulf petrostates and Israel, not to mention China, the US’s main strategic rival, would also hugely benefit from unhindered shipping flowing through the Suez canal, but they do not rate a mention.Could it be that Europe, with its model of higher taxes, longer holidays and more accessible healthcare, is a greater challenge to the US that the neoreactionaries are trying to construct than any autocracy, in much the same way that Vladimir Putin is trying to demonstrate to the Russians that a liberal Ukraine has no future?Jan KamienieckiLondon The Signal leak is yet another sign that the Trump White House is being run like a boys’ club, where responsibility is something to be dodged. The amateurish handling of sensitive military information should alarm not just Americans but all of us in allied nations. It’s astonishing that senior US officials treat matters of national security with such recklessness. This isn’t just political drama; they are playing with real-world consequences and the stakes couldn’t be higher.What safeguards exist to prevent these self-serving juveniles from mishandling even more dangerous aspects of the US military arsenal? If those in charge cannot be trusted with something as basic as secure communication, how can we trust them with strategic decision-making that affects global stability? The phrase “the lunatics have taken over the asylum” has never felt more apt.John ClucasSt Ives, Cambridgeshire The gods of human destiny certainly have a sense of humour. Just days after Donald Trump cancelled security clearances for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton et al, headlines reveal that the key defence team included a journalist in their messaging circle. Will Trump now revoke security clearance for JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and the rest of the incompetent gang? Patricia Baker-CassidyOxford Is the VP referred to as a participant in the Signal messages Vladimir Putin, by any chance?Kapil JujWembley, London So Europeans are “free-loaders”. Is it about time we raised the rent for American airbases in the UK?David ChanterLedwell, Oxfordshire More

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      Trump wants a Nobel peace prize. Here’s how he can earn one | Ken Roth

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      Donald Trump’s instinctive deference to the Israeli government is at odds with his self-image as an expert dealmaker. Much as it may seem laughable that the president wants the Nobel peace prize, his quest may be the best chance we have for securing any US government regard for the rights and lives of Palestinians in Gaza.Trump currently seems to endorse the strategy of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of trying to pummel Hamas into accepting defeat. To force Hamas to release its remaining hostages and to disband its diminished military force, Netanyahu has resumed Israel’s strategy of starving and bombing Palestinian civilians. In less than a week, about 600 Palestinians have already been killed.The second phase of the ceasefire was supposed to have led to the release of Hamas’s last hostages in return for the freeing of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and a permanent end to the fighting. Instead, the Israeli government has unilaterally changed the terms. It wants the hostages released and Hamas dismantled without committing to end the war. Hamas has rejected that one-sided ultimatum, evidently worried that Netanyahu would then resume attacking Palestinian civilians unimpeded.This is not an idle fear. The point of the renewed attacks may not be simply to wrest concessions from Hamas. The vast majority of the hostages freed so far have been released after negotiations rather than by military action, and most families of the hostages, prioritizing survival of their loved ones, want a negotiated solution.Rather, Israel’s aim may be to advance the project of expelling Palestinian civilians from Gaza, the longtime dream of the Israeli far right. Already the defense minister, Israel Katz, is threatening to seize and annex parts of Gaza, and Netanyahu is reportedly planning a new and larger ground invasion. Now that Trump has endorsed the forced permanent deportation of 2 million Palestinians from Gaza – a massive war crime and crime against humanity – Netanyahu may feel he has a green light to pursue that callous strategy.Tellingly, the far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir has rejoined Netanyahu’s governing coalition as police minister now that the temporary ceasefire, which he opposed, has ended. Head of the pro-settler, nationalist-religious Jewish Power party, Ben-Gvir has long been unabashed about his desire to “solve” the conflict in Gaza by getting rid of the Palestinians. And we should recognize that Gaza would most likely be just a prelude to the occupied West Bank.In these circumstances, a deal with Hamas seems unlikely. Why would Hamas capitulate if that would permanently separate the Palestinian people from their homeland?Netanyahu and Trump may calculate that overwhelming military force, if applied with sufficient brutality, would force Hamas’s hand. That has long been the Israeli strategy. Trump has even resumed delivery of the enormous 2,000lb bombs that Joe Biden had suspended because Israel was using them to indiscriminately decimate entire Palestinian neighborhoods.The international criminal court prosecutor has already hinted that this indiscriminate bombardment may be the next focus of his war-crime charges. Trump himself would be at risk of being charged for aiding and abetting these atrocities – an eventuality that would not lead to his immediate jailing but would severely limit his ability to travel to the 125 governments that as members of the ICC would have an obligation to arrest him. (Trump might ask Vladimir Putin about how it felt not to be able to attend the August 2023 Brics summit in South Africa for fear of arrest.)Hamas has so far shown no inclination to succumb to this war-crime strategy, and the surrounding Arab states have rejected becoming a party to another Nakba, the catastrophic forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The big question is whether Trump comes to recognize that a deal, not forced surrender, is the most likely way out of the current horrors in Gaza that he had vowed to end.For now, Trump’s deference to Israel seems firm, but one should never take anything for granted with Trump. If there is any constant to his rule, it is that his self-interest overcomes concern for others.That’s where the Nobel prize comes in. If Trump wants to be known as the master of the deal, it won’t be by underwriting more Israeli war crimes.Trump alone has the capacity to force Netanyahu to adopt a different approach. Despite Israel’s dependence on US military assistance, Netanyahu got away with ignoring Biden’s entreaties to curb the starvation and slaughter of Palestinian civilians because the Israeli leader knew that the Republican party had his back. But Trump has become the Republican party. If he pressures Israel, Netanyahu has nowhere to the right to turn.That is how Trump played a decisive role in securing the temporary ceasefire that began shortly before his 20 January inauguration. He could do the same thing now to force Netanyahu toward a more productive, less inhumane path.What might that look like? The best option remains a two-state solution – an Israeli and Palestinian state living in peace side-by-side. The main alternatives would be rejected by Israel (recognition of the “one-state reality” with equal rights for all) or most everyone else (the apartheid of endless occupation).The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has said that he will not normalize relations with Israel, which Trump craves, without a Palestinian state. Both the Saudis and the Emiratis have also insisted on a state as a condition for financing the rebuilding of Gaza.But wouldn’t a Nobel peace prize for Trump be preposterous? No more so than the one granted, however controversially, to Henry Kissinger. He had directed or approved war crimes or mass atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh and Chile, but the Nobel committee honored him nonetheless for concluding a peace deal with Vietnam and withdrawing US forces. A Trump pivot away from Netanyahu’s endless war would be no more surprising than Kissinger’s about-face.Admittedly, it would be foolhardy to bet on Trump becoming an advocate for a Palestinian state, but it is worth recognizing that his personal ambitions could lead him in that direction. It speaks to the topsy-turvy world of Trump that the Palestinians’ best hope in the face of an Israeli government that respects no legal bounds is to play up what it would take for Trump to secure his coveted Nobel. We must persuade Trump to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

      Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs, was recently published by Knopf and Allen Lane More

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      Wednesday briefing: Just how bad was the White House accidentally leaking military plans over Signal?

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      Good morning. Look, it could happen to anyone: I well remember, for example, the time I added my mum to a thread with my siblings discussing what to get her for Christmas. On the other hand, I don’t have a secure communications facility in my house for when I need to get something out on the family group chat. Also, we rarely digress from pictures of cute kids to setting out war plans for an imminent set of airstrikes on the Houthis in Yemen.So perhaps the latest Trump administration hullabaloo isn’t that relatable, after all. Two days after the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had been mystifyingly added to a thread on Signal – an encrypted WhatsApp-like instant messaging app – in which vice-president JD Vance, defence secretary Pete Hegseth, and a host of others chatted about a highly sensitive operation, there are as many questions as answers. How on earth did Goldberg get added in the first place? Why didn’t anybody realise the error? Are White House officials doing this all the time? And how vulnerable are their communications to interception from America’s adversaries?Today’s newsletter explains this absolute dumpster fire of a story, and why it matters. Here are the headlines.Five big stories

      Spring statement | Rachel Reeves will make additional welfare cuts in her spring statement on Wednesday after the Office for Budget Responsibility rejected her estimate of savings from the changes announced last week. The chancellor is expected to announce an additional £500m in benefits cuts to make up part of the £1.6bn shortfall.

      Ukraine | Russia and Ukraine have agreed to “eliminate the use of force” in the Black Sea, though the Kremlin said it was conditional on sanctions relief for its agricultural exports. The warring parties also agreed to implement a previously announced 30-day halt on attacks against energy networks.

      Assisted dying | The introduction of assisted dying in England and Wales is likely to be pushed back by a further two years in a delay that supporters fear could mean the law never comes into force. The delay marks the latest major change to the proposals, which have proven deeply contentious in the Commons and beyond.

      Gaza | Press freedom organisations have condemned the killing of two journalists in Gaza on Monday by the Israeli armed forces. Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old correspondent for the Al Jazeera Mubasher channel, and Mohammed Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today, died in separate targeted airstrikes.

      Society | Non-monogamous people are just as happy in their relationships as those with only one partner but are not “significantly” more sexually satisfied, research suggests. The authors of a new study said their findings challenged what they called a prevailing “one-size-fits-all approach to relationships”.
      In depth: How a journalist got a front row seat to US military planningView image in fullscreen“This is going to require some explaining,” Jeffrey Goldberg writes at the beginning of his Atlantic story about how Pete Hegseth ended up messaging him about an imminent attack on Yemen, and he’s absolutely right.In brief: Goldberg was added to a Signal thread by Michael Waltz, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, who presumably confused his contact with someone else’s. Goldberg was allowed to lurk on the thread for several days as senior officials – here’s a rundown of the dramatis personae – discussed the timing of the strike against the Houthis, fulminated against European “free-loading”, and celebrated the operation’s success with fire emojis. Eventually, Goldberg removed himself, and then wrote a story about it. Since then, all hell has broken loose.Here’s what else you need to know about the significant issues raised by this fiasco – and, as a bonus, the best quote from the fallout so far: “Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot.” (Donald Trump said he was “doing his best”, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive.)What’s the problem with having national security discussions on Signal?The most glaring issue is the lack of adequate security protocols for discussions about US military operations – even if, hilariously, Hegseth sent a message to the group saying “we are currently clean on OPSEC” while Goldberg was still in it.Such conversations are meant to be held in enclosed areas called sensitive compartmented information facilities, or Scifs, which have reinforced physical defences against eavesdropping, tight controls on access, and shields against electronic surveillance. Many senior government officials have Scifs installed at their homes; failing that, they are meant to use secure government-issued devices. Peter Beaumont has more on what America’s adversaries might have learned.To state the most obvious point: if the discussion had been held under such conditions, a journalist would not have been accidentally added. But even if Goldberg hadn’t been included, significant issues would remain.While the messaging app Signal is a more secure way to exchange messages than ordinary texting, it is a rung below official government communication channels. One aspect of the risk is that it is possible to download messages to a desktop, which lacks the layers of security in the app itself. The Pentagon warned its employees against using Signal last week.It is also possible that the participants were using their own devices. In this Politico piece, a former White House official warns: “Their personal phones are all hackable, and it’s highly likely that foreign intelligence services are sitting on their phones watching them type the shit out.”Is it possible the participants broke the law?By holding sensitive national security discussions on a commercially available app, the participants may well have violated the US espionage act. Kevin Carroll, a national security lawyer, told the Washington Post: “I have defended service members accused of violating the Espionage Act through gross negligence for far, far less. If these people were junior uniformed personnel, they would be court-martialed.”Vance, Hegseth and their colleagues may also have been in breach of federal records law – which mandates that messages about official acts be preserved. Many former officials have said that for that reason, they confined their use of platforms like Signal to bland logistical discussions or as a way to direct others to a more secure channel.That is not what happened here – and because Waltz switched on Signal’s “disappearing messages” function, the discussions might have vanished for ever barring Goldberg’s accidental inclusion. Yesterday, CIA director John Ratcliffe, another participant, claimed that the decisions taken in the group were also formally recorded.What did we learn about the Trump administration’s view of Europe?One thing the leak makes absolutely clear: when Vance expresses his disdain for Europe in public, he isn’t putting it on. Part of the discussion about the timing of a strike against the Houthis was focused on the idea that by protecting a trade route used by European shipping, Washington was giving EU countries a free ride.Vance, who expressed his reluctance to conduct the operation immediately, eventually said: “If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” In reply, Hegseth agreed: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”The discussion concluded with a suggestion that “we soon make clear” that Europe should contribute to the cost of the operation.In Brussels yesterday, all of that was greeted with weary dismay. “Horrific to see in black and white,” one European diplomat told the BBC. “But hardly surprising.”Are there any awkward historical precedents which the protagonists have expressed strong opinions about?Funny you should ask! After the story broke, CNN put together a montage that showed just some of the times that those involved in the message thread took a stern line on the notorious row over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while in office.“If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they’d be in jail right now,” Hegseth said on Fox News in 2016. Marco Rubio said in the same year that “nobody is above the law – not even Hillary Clinton.” And Ratcliffe said in 2019 that “mishandling classified information is still a violation of the espionage act”.Later, Trump’s consigliere Stephen Miller tweeted that because of Clinton’s “illegal” behaviour, “foreign adversaries could easily hack classified ops & intel in real time from other side of the globe.” With that uncompromising line, the White House must be hoping Stephen Miller never hears what Stephen Miller’s been up to.The administration steered well clear of addressing that aspect of the story. Hillary Clinton didn’t, though: “You have got to be kidding me,” she wrote on X, along with an eyeballs emoji.How have Trump’s supporters fought back?The White House has admitted the thread “appears to be authentic”. Still, that didn’t stop Hegseth turning to a familiar strategy in response: attack the media.“Nobody was texting war plans,” he said, although Goldberg reported that Hegseth himself texted “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHegseth also sought to discredit Goldberg, among the most eminent journalists in the United States and one with no obvious track record of dishonesty: “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes.” Later, Trump called him a “total sleazebag”. Waltz, for his part, called him “bottom scum” and suggested he could have got himself added to the group “deliberately” because he “wasn’t on my phone”, a fairly head-scratching claim.All of that aligned closely with the approach taken by presenters on Fox News. Sean Hannity dismissed it as “the state-run legacy media mob” being “obsessed with an accidentally leaked text”.Another Will Cain, found a silver lining: “After years of secrecy and incompetence, if you read the content of these messages, I think you will come away proud that these are the leaders making these decisions in America.”But the idea that there’s nothing to see here doesn’t seem to have landed with everyone. At a hearing before the Senate intelligence committee yesterday, John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence who was also on the thread, faced intense questioning about their roles, and found it tricky to agree on a strategy: immediately after Gabbard refused to confirm her participation in the thread, Ratcliffe confirmed he had done so and said it was permissible.“What you’re saying didn’t make sense,” said Democratic senator Mark Warner. Somewhere in Washington, a Republican was probably sending an eyeroll emoji.What else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen

      Lorenzo Tondo spoke to witnesses about the brutal assault on Oscar-winning Palestinian director Hamdan Ballal by settlers, who handed him over to the military, bruised and bleeding. The attack on Ballal, who was subsequently detained, “might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment,” said Basel Adra, another of No Other Land’s directors. Nimo

      The Guardian’s blockbuster invertebrate of the year prize continues with Patrick Barkham singing the praises of the “twerking pollinator with a bum-bag”: it is, of course, the dark-edged bee-fly. Slightly alarmingly, they “use false legs to bumble into a bee burrow and scoff the pollen left for the bee babies”. Archie

      Rashid Khalidi is searing in his response to Columbia University’s “capitulation” with the Trump administration’s sweeping policy changes last week. “Columbia barely merits the name of a university, since its teaching and scholarship on the Middle East, and soon much else, will soon be vetted by a ‘senior vice-provost for inclusive pedagogy’, in reality a senior vice-provost for Israeli propaganda,” he writes. Nimo

      The bleak sight of Conor McGregor visiting the White House on St Patrick’s Day has not gone down well with most people in Ireland, writes Justine McCarthy – but his putative presidential run risks galvanising the country’s “small but vocal minority on the hard right”. Archie

      For those who are mourning the end of Severance (me), Claire Cao has a great antidote: the film Triangle (pictured above) will scratch the “puzzle box” sci-fi plot itch that the Ben Stiller thriller has left. Nimo
      SportView image in fullscreenFootball | Real Madrid are close to completing a deal to sign Trent Alexander-Arnold on a free transfer this summer. The Liverpool right-back has long been a target for the European champions and there is now a widespread expectation that he will join Carlo Ancelotti’s side when his contract expires at the end of the season.Football | David Brooks scored in the sixth minute of injury time to rescue a point for Wales in their World Cup qualifier against North Macedonia. The game had been 0-0 until Bojan Miovski’s goal as normal time expired.Tennis | As Emma Raducanu enjoys her best run of form since her 2021 run to the US Open title, she now comes up against Jessica Pegula in the quarter final of the Miami Open. The match is just reward for her persistence, writes Tumaini Carayol: “to her credit she kept on ­rolling with the punches and showing up.”The front pagesView image in fullscreen“Fears of further tax rises as Reeves promises to ‘secure Britain’s future’” is the splash on the Guardian today, while the Financial Times says “Reeves to leaven grim spring outlook with £2.2bn defence spending boost.” The spring statement is also previewed in the Daily Mail, which has “Don’t shift blame for economy’s woes, voters tell Reeves,” and the Mirror, which runs an interview with Rachel Reeves under the headline “My mission.”“Victims must see ‘sense of justice being served’” is the lead story on the Express, while “Mortal blow to assisted dying Bill” is the focus in the Telegraph. “JD Dunce hates Britain, hates Europe and hates Ukraine…And could be president at any moment,” says the Star, and the Metro: “Trump backs chump.” The Sun covers a row over the pricing of Oasis tickets with the headline “Definitely Shady”.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenThe arrest that plunged Turkey into turmoilProtesters took to streets after President Erdoğan had his rival arrested. What will happen next? Sami Kent and Ruth Michaelson reportCartoon of the day | Rebecca HendinView image in fullscreenThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badView image in fullscreenIn Grenada, the persistent issue of sargassum seaweed, which has long plagued the island’s shores, is being reimagined as an opportunity rather than a burden. While the decaying seaweed causes bad smells and disrupts fishing and tourism, innovative solutions are emerging. The Grenadian government, in collaboration with the EU, is exploring ways to turn sargassum into a valuable resource, including clean energy, bioplastics, and fertiliser.Companies such as Seafields are developing methods to farm the seaweed and harness its potential, which could boost the economy. A bioenergy project is already converting sargassum into biogas and organic fertiliser. “They use diesel to generate electricity [now], which is very expensive for the local population. We are providing a reliable, cost-effective and sustainable alternative,” Benjamin Nestorovic, who works for the Grenada-based bioenergy company SarGas, says, adding that the company plans to expand across the Caribbean.Bored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

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      Mike Waltz claims ‘full responsibility’ for Signal chat group leaked to journalist

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      Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, said on Tuesday he takes “full responsibility” for the group chat of senior administration officials that inadvertently included a journalist and leaked highly sensitive information about planned airstrikes in Yemen.Waltz’s comments came one day after Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, revealed that he was added to a group on Signal, a private messaging app, that included vice-president JD Vance, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of state Marco Rubio and other high-profile figures discussing “operational details” of planned attacks on the Houthis in Yemen.Goldberg’s account in the Atlantic suggested Waltz had mistakenly invited him to the chat. The prominent journalist remained in the group undetected as the president’s cabinet members discussed policy and coordinated a wave of bombings, an extraordinary breach that critics said put national security at risk.When pressed by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Waltz accepted responsibility for making the Signal group, though he continued to deflect blame, insulted Goldberg and said he couldn’t explain how the mistake had occurred.“It’s embarrassing, yes. We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Waltz said, adding that he was consulting with Elon Musk: “We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.” When Ingraham asked “what staffer is responsible” for adding Goldberg to the Signal group, Waltz responded: “A staffer wasn’t responsible. I take full responsibility. I built the group. My job is to make sure everything is coordinated.”When the Fox host asked how Goldberg’s number ended up in the group, Waltz responded: “Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there? … Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else. Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we’re trying to figure out.”Waltz did not offer any evidence for how Goldberg could have “deliberately” ended up in the group.Earlier in the interview, he said he didn’t know Goldberg or text with him, calling him the “bottom scum of journalists” while criticizing the media for focusing on the controversy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Waltz claimed a staffer was not responsible, Trump appeared to make contradictory remarks in a Newsmax interview, saying: “We believe … somebody that was on the line, with permission, somebody that … worked with Mike Waltz at a lower level, had Goldberg’s number or call through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call.” It’s unclear what exactly the president was suggesting, since Goldberg was added to a text chat, not a phone call.Trump previously defended Waltz, saying he was a “good man” who “learned a lesson”, and also downplayed the incident, saying the leak was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one”.The episode has sparked widespread backlash and ridicule. Mark Warner, vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said on Tuesday the incident was “one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information”.On Monday, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called it “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time”, and Delaware senator Chris Coons said every official in the group had “committed a crime – even if accidentally”.Goldberg’s story suggested Waltz’s coordination of a “national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act”, noting that Signal was not approved by the US for sharing classified information. More

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      US war plans leak shows Five Eyes allies must ‘look out for ourselves’, says Mark Carney

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      Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has said the inadvertent leak of classified military plans by senior US officials means that allied nations must increasingly “look out for ourselves” as trust frays with a once-close ally.Speaking a day after it was revealed that a journalist was accidentally included in a group chat discussing airstrikes against Yemeni rebels, Carney said the intelligence blunder was a “serious, serious issue and all lessons must be taken”. He said it would be critical to see “how people react to those mistakes and how they tighten them up”.Canada is one of the members of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, alongside Australia, New Zealand and the UK and the leak of classified information is likely to put further strain on the group as it weighs how seriously the current American administration takes the handling of top secret information.The revelations came as Canada grapples with a rapidly deteriorating relationship with the United States, its largest trading partner and closest military ally.“My responsibility is to plan for the worst, is to think about the most difficult evolution of the new threat environment, what it means for Canada and how do we best protect Canada,” Carney said during a campaign stop on Tuesday. The prime minister called a snap election on Sunday.“Part of that response is to be more and more Canadian in our defence capabilities, more and more Canadian in our decisions … We have to look out for ourselves.”Asked about the incident on Tuesday, the UK’s armed forces minister, Luke Pollard, told the Commons Defence Committee that no British service personnel had been put at risk as a result.He added: “All UK service personnel are covered by our normal approach to operational security, and the committee will understand that I won’t go into the details of how we keep our involvement in any support for military operations in the Red Sea or anywhere else [secure].“But we’ve got high confidence that the measures that we have got with our allies, including the United States, remain intact.”A spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke at length at a briefing about the contribution the UK makes to joint military operations with the Americans. However, the spokesperson refused to directly criticise the two figures who were most critical of Europe’s record on defence, JD Vance, the vice-president, and Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary. The spokesperson also insisted that the UK remains happy to share intelligence with the US despite the leak.The government of New Zealand declined to comment on the matter. When asked by the Guardian if the security breach had raised concerns about the sharing of sensitive intel with Trump’s administration, the offices for New Zealand’s prime minister, Christopher Luxon, and the minister for defence, Judith Collins, said the situation was “a matter for the US administration”.Behind closed doors, senior government officials would likely be discussing the risks of sharing intelligence with the US, amid what could be viewed as a lowering of protocol standards, but the breach would not be a dealbreaker, said Andrew Little, whose ministerial roles covered security, intelligence and defence under New Zealand’s last Labour government.“Our relationship transcends individual administrations and individual political leaders. There will be things that – like everybody – members of this government, will be looking askance at. But I think it’s about managing the relationship in the long run,” Little said.So far, New Zealand has been managing its US relationship responsibly, Little said, but it was now “a relationship that requires constant vigilance”.Robert Patman, a professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin who specialises in international relations, called the security breach “extraordinary” and “cavalier”. “It does confirm what many of us felt, that Mr Trump has picked people according to loyalty, rather than competence, and this was almost a perfect storm waiting to happen,” Patman said.But the wider issue for New Zealand and other Five Eyes countries was knowing how to respond to the Trump administration’s “radical departure” from the rules-based order, which included making territorial claims against liberal democracies and siding with Russian president Vladimir Putin over negotiations in Ukraine.“We should be friendly towards the Trump administration where our interests converge, but this administration is doing things which are fundamentally a challenge to [New Zealand’s] national interests.”In Australia, the department of foreign affairs and trade said: “This incident is a matter for the United States. Australia and the United States engage regularly on implementation of mutually recognised standards for the protection of classified material.”Ben Doherty contributed additional reporting More