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      Trans soldiers served their country. Now the US is rolling back their healthcare

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      When Savannah Blake joined the air force at 22 years old, she was looking for stable employment and a way out of poverty. For the last few years of her service, she worked as a cyberdefense operator in the intelligence squadron. But the work, which involved overseeing computers operating drone surveillance, eventually took a toll on her mental health.“If I had to watch any more of this, I was going to not be alive anymore,” Blake said, who says she experienced suicidal ideations. “I just felt like the bad guy. I felt evil.”View image in fullscreenAfter seven years of service, Blake, who is trans, left the air force with PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder and chronic depression. But she also left with the hope she could finally live as herself without fear of harassment from fellow service members. Last year, she began receiving estrogen through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Now she fears for the future of that care.“Every day, I wake up and I don’t know what the rules are anymore in the country I live in,” said Blake. “It’s becoming increasingly hard to see a future where we’re OK.”Blake is one of about 134,000 transgender veterans living in the US. It’s an alarming time to be someone like her. On his first day in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order recognizing only two sexes, stamping out gender identity in federal documents and public spaces. A series of other orders have attempted to restrict trans rights, including participation in sports, access to gender-affirming care for youth, educational materials in schools and military service.The crackdown has sent shock waves through the VA, which functions as one of the US’s largest healthcare providers, offering free or low-cost care to more than 9 million veterans. After Trump’s inauguration, some VA health centers began removing LGBTQ+ affiliated objects, including pride flags, rainbow magnets, stickers and posters.When Mary Brinkmeyer’s medical center ordered the removal of LGBTQ+ patient flyers and other affirming material days after Trump’s executive orders, she refused, and ultimately resigned. For nearly three years, she had worked as a psychologist and LGBTQ+ veteran care coordinator at the VA facility in Hampton, Virginia. Hospital leadership ordered her to stop LGBTQ+ outreach, advocacy and gender-affirming training to departments because it could be considered “gender ideology”.View image in fullscreen“We all have ethics codes in our professions that say that you’re supposed to do no harm, and that if you’re caught between institutional pressure and the ethics code, you’re supposed to resolve it in a way that’s consistent with the ethics code,” Brinkmeyer said.Brinkmeyer fears for the mental health of trans veterans, whom she saw experience “really intense suicidal crises” after Trump announced a ban on trans people enlisting in the military in 2017. After the election last November, some of her patients requested the removal of trans identifiers in medical records, and others withdrew from coverage over fears of being targeted and losing access to care. For many, those fears have become a reality.Rollbacks became official in March when the VA rescinded directive 1341, a policy that ensured “the respectful delivery of health care to transgender and intersex Veterans”, and announced the phasing out of gender-affirming medical care. The agency had been providing gender-affirming treatment including hormone therapy, prosthetics, hair removal, voice coaching and pre-surgical evaluation including letters of support for more than a decade. While cisgender veterans will still be able to access these treatments, veterans diagnosed with gender dysphoria are now excluded. Mental health services for trans patients and existing VA and military coverage for hormone therapy won’t be affected, according to the memo, which also formalizes banning trans patients from using facilities that align with their gender identity.View image in fullscreen“I am scared for the huge amount of people that are about to be forcibly separated, because the VA is not there to actually catch these people,” Blake said, referring to an influx of trans service members who could be forced out of the military under Trump’s transgender military ban. “I hate that the ladder was pulled up behind me.”‘A death sentence’The changes have put trans veterans seeking gender-affirming care in limbo. It has also created a climate of fear for the trans veterans already receiving hormone therapy, who worry it could be pulled at any time.View image in fullscreenThat’s the reality for Kaydi Rogers. While at the moment her hormone therapy will not be disrupted, she is terrified of losing access to estrogen if the VA continues its crackdown.Rogers spent about five decades acquiring estrogen pills through pharmacies in Mexico or friends with prescriptions.“I was desperate,” Rogers said. “I didn’t know any way of doing anything about what was going on with me. It was not a common thing back in the 70s and 80s to come out trans.”She finally switched to VA coverage because of the potential health risks of taking unregulated pills. But Rogers said if the VA ever stopped prescribing her estrogen, the desperation would return and she would again rely on self-medication for survival.Beyond her concerns about continued access to care, Rogers feels the loss of welcoming and safe spaces inside VA clinics. She says she tries to avoid drawing attention to herself during appointments, fearful of being harassed or attacked.“Before last year, every time I went to the VA, I went dressed as Kaydi and no one seemed to bother me or care,” Rogers said. “Now, not so much.”Other veterans share these safety concerns, including Lindsay Church, the executive director and co-founder of Minority Veterans of America. Church, who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, has experienced harassment and discrimination inside VA clinics in the past, and began carrying a printed copy of directive 1341 to prove they were entitled to treatment that respected their gender identity. With that directive rescinded and no guarantee of protection, they’ve canceled VA appointments and sought care elsewhere.View image in fullscreenThe veterans affairs secretary, Doug Collins, stated that trans veterans “will always be welcome at VA and will always receive the benefits and services they’ve earned under the law”. In response to questions about the new policy, the VA press secretary, Peter Kasperowicz, directed the Guardian to the press release from 17 March.Church said the discriminatory climate is having a chilling effect on trans veterans, regardless of whether their care plans have been discontinued under the VA’s new policy. “If I can’t use [my healthcare plan] because I’m scared of being harassed and intimidated, and experiencing physical violence in a bathroom, I can’t use the system,” they said.They called the policy reversal a “death sentence”.View image in fullscreen‘We tell them we will take care of you, and that’s a lie’Trans veterans face higher rates of homelessness, unemployment, PTSD and military sexual trauma compared with cisgender veterans. They are also twice as likely to die by suicide compared with cisgender veterans, and almost six times more likely than the general US population. Advocates and providers say these psychiatric and socioeconomic risk factors, when combined with the loss of an affirming medical environment, places an already vulnerable population even more at risk.One VA clinical social worker, who requested anonymity, said his LGBTQ+ patients don’t feel safe and are experiencing more suicidal ideations than before Trump took office.“I have seen an increase in suicide risk evaluations,” he said. “I’ve done more of those in the last two months than I’ve done the last two years.”View image in fullscreenAnother LGBTQ+ veteran care coordinator said a trans patient attempted suicide at her facility after Trump’s inauguration, and she fears there could be more people who attempt the same. She said notifying trans patients of the policy change has been heartbreaking.“I’ve worked for the past two and a half years to gain people’s trust, and now all of a sudden, I’m pulling out the rug from under them,” she said. “It feels terrible.”She had to tell one patient wanting to start hormone therapy that the VA could no longer help them, and is preparing the same message for trans patients on a months-long waitlist to begin treatment. While she has been looking for ways to provide alternatives, many of her trans patients live in rural areas where accessing gender-affirming care is difficult.Other VA employees see cutting trans healthcare as a betrayal of the benefits promised to service members when they enlist.“We’re asking these 17-year-olds to give their entire bodies to the US government,” said one VA nurse, who requested anonymity over fear of losing her job. “And they’re given one promise, which is that we will care for them. And this is part of care, whether you like it or not.”Gender-affirming medical care has been endorsed by every major medical association in the US, and medical providers say that politicians shouldn’t be allowed to decide how they care for their patients.“You’re giving so much to the military. You give your whole life, you have no say over where you live,” the nurse said. “Then we tell them we will take care of you, and that’s a lie. We’re lying to people – and not just trans veterans, all veterans.” More

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      I’ve got the message: security leaks are no laughing matter | Stewart Lee

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      During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s MTV Europe presenters’ accents and Russia Today op-eds.I began to bait the bots by inserting deliberately incomprehensible, but also somehow provocative, sentences into my pieces, culminating in the following paragraph, from the summer of 2016, after which point the Russian provocateurs left me alone:“One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenic Russian wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.”But nature abhors a vacuum, and soon the comment space the Russians vacated was filled by Tories and Brexiters, like rats entering a vacant building, or unseated Tory MPs getting their own reality TV shows. Between 2020 and the fall of the last government these columns were the subject of complaints and criticisms on the right, many with their own newspaper columns in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, and their own House of Commons notepaper and/or links to opaquely-funded Tufton Street outlets.But although Kemi Badenoch just took a £14,000 freebie from Neil Record – whose tentacular connections include Tufton Street’s climate change denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, its Truss-grooming charity the Institute of Economic Affairs, and its monomaniacal astro-turfed anti-National Trust outfit Restore Trust – the background noise has lessened since the election. Perhaps because the US government are now doing Tufton Street’s job of normalising rightwing talking points more effectively than just getting the former IEA staffer Kate Andrews on to the BBC’s Question Time for the 14th time. That’s what I call a special relationship!But, as I enter my 15th year of satirising the news for money here at the Observer, the quality of complaint has changed again. These past few weeks it has been helpful readers that have been writing in to correct my factual errors and my “jokes”, although admittedly last week’s column on the Trump government’s attitude to its Navajo citizens was a hot mess for which I, like Trump’s national securty adviser Mike Waltz, take full responsibility.I accept the point that Trump did acknowledge the Navajo veterans by inviting them to the White House in 2017, but at the same event he did then make a joke about Pocahontas while standing in front of a portrait of president Andrew Jackson, author of the Indian Removal Act, which relocated Indigenous peoples and saw their lands seized, which probably soured the celebration for the Indigenous wartime heroes.As usual with Trump, it’s difficult to know if the crass behaviour was calculated to play to his base, or whether it was just evidence of the ongoing tone deaf stupidity and systemic incompetence of his team. As a rule, one should hesitate before ascribing motive to a landslide, for example, or to a prolapse. Like Trump perhaps, they just happen.Which is where the worst western military security failure of the century so far comes in. On 15 March the Trump team used the Signal messaging service to discuss their forthcoming attack on the Houthi pirates, and accidentally invited a Democrat-supporting magazine editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to join their discussion. If it was a sitcom plot you’d reject it as being too on-the-nose.Goldberg could have revealed the bombing plans and a CIA operative’s identity. And now everyone knows the depth of the current American administration’s ideologically-driven contempt for European democracy, and the fact that Mike Waltz, a 51-year-old man in a position of some responsibility, uses emojis to celebrate airstrikes. Like a baby with its own bombs.Does Keir Starmer still think he can salvage the special relationship, an abused husband watching his furious wife throw all of his jazz vinyl out of the bedroom window? The whole world saw America’s Uncle Sam mask slip. But when Trump was questioned about the incident by a journalist on Tuesday, he claimed to know nothing about it, as if he had just been roused from a 24-hour KFC coma and thrust before the cameras without being briefed on a story that was global front page news. Maybe, like in the classic Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads episode where Bob and Terry don’t want to know the football result, Trump was trying to savour the moment of discovery.Clearly, we can no longer share intelligence with Trump’s US, and no future defence or foreign policy plans can rely on the cooperation of a country that wishes Europe material harm. But more importantly, is it worth me writing jokes about Trump’s US? A paranoid reading of recent events makes it look as if they are targeting even their mildest visa-carrying critics, recently denying entry to a French scientist and three-quarters of punk veterans UK Subs. Although to be fair, five years ago the drummer from the offensively apolitical stoner metal band Orange Goblin was also denied entry, like some kind of innocent shrimp-like bycatch.First they came for a French scientist. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a French scientist.Then they came for UK Subs. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a member of UK Subs.And then they came for the drummer from Orange Goblin. And I did not speak out. Because I prefer Electric Wizard.And then they came for me. More

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      The Signal chat exposes the administration’s incompetence – and its pecking order | Sidney Blumenthal

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      On 13 March, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who was the policy director for two secretaries of defense and was a member of the House intelligence committee, sent a message on the commercial Signal app: “Team – establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours.” “The Houthis PC small group” would oversee a US air attack on the Houthis in Yemen.Despite Waltz’s extensive professional background, he misspelled “principals” as “principles” – perhaps an ordinary typo, but symptomatic of the shambles to come. Although the secretaries of defense, state and treasury, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, the vice-president, and the president’s chief of staff were among the 18 people included, neither the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, who is a statutory member of the principals committee of the National Security Council, nor any military designee was invited into this group. Instead, the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was sent a link. Waltz noted: “Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days.”The Atlantic’s publication of Goldberg’s article about the Signal group’s exchanges was followed by a spray of attempts to cover it up. Trump and the rest of his administration simply denied that anything classified had been released; there were no “war plans”, it was a “hoax”, Goldberg was “scum”, “a loser” and “discredited”, and what about Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton? Which prompted Goldberg to publish the detailed war plans he had withheld in his first article. He was the only responsible person involved in the incident.Quite apart from the glaring incompetence and illegality of the whole affair – Goldberg’s careless inclusion, the fact that a provision of the Espionage Act (18 USC § 793) criminalizes “gross negligence” for mishandling classified national security material, and that operating on Signal with timed deletion of messages violates the preservation of records for the National Archives – the conversation pulled back the curtain on the White House.The transcript exposed the internal pecking order of the Trump administration and its actual chain of command, if it could be called anything that regular. In the end, the final decision-maker within the group to whom the others deferred was not any cabinet secretary or the chief of staff. They turned to “SM” – Stephen Miller – the deputy chief of staff who is Trump’s zealous enforcer. The chief of staff, Susie Wiles, came across as a cheerleader. Miller was the one who gave the stamp of approval. He conveyed Trump’s word. For all intents and purposes, Stephen Miller acted as the de facto president.The desultory discussion on Signal also highlighted the juvenile towel-snapping bro culture at the top of the administration. The Fox News personalities in the cabinet and the others who have habituated themselves to blathering forceful opinions appeared in the leaked transcript to have seamlessly carried over their habits of loud and thoughtless talk. Above all, they don’t know when not to speak; nor do they know what they reveal about themselves when they do. They don’t know how to conduct themselves as serious people in the room. Their incompetence comes naturally.About the military plan on the eve of being executed, JD Vance opined: “I think we are making a mistake.” By venturing his view at this advanced point in the operation, he showed that he had been out of the loop. Vice-presidents since Walter Mondale, under President Jimmy Carter, have been made indispensable figures in important decisions, especially involving national security. But Vance sounded like an outsider, a guest on a podcast.He went on about how the Houthis menacing the trade in the Hormuz Strait affected Europe more than the United States. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” he said. Vance felt that it was Trump who was out of the loop or assumed Trump’s ignorance. If only Trump understood his own contradictions.But Vance conceded: “I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself.” Where did he think he would voice his dissent, Joe Rogan’s show? He did not know Goldberg was already listening in. Then Vance suggested: “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.”“There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line,” piped up Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, lending support to Vance. Kent has been an overlooked figure in the scandal. He has an extensive history of associations with extremist domestic terrorist organizations. As a Republican congressional candidate, he paid a consulting fee to a member of the Proud Boys; he has also been close to the Christian nationalist Patriot Prayer group involved in violent street brawls in Portland; defended the white supremacist Nick Fuentes; and stated: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white people special interest group,” during an interview with a group called the American Populist Union. In 2022, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Kent called him “very reasonable”. When Kent ran for the House that year, after his ties to the far right were exposed, he claimed he had distanced himself from such groups. Kent was the deputy of the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, on the Signal group.Waltz joined in the Europe-bashing with talking points to buttress Trump’s zero-sum mercantilist view of the world, explaining: “Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”Vance broke in to say that if Hegseth wanted “to do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”Hegseth agreed: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” He added: “Question is timing.”Enter Stephen Miller. “As I heard it,” he said, “the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”“As I heard it …” Miller spoke as if he were the only one to hear Trump. No one else said they had. Miller was definitive. He was more than the Trump whisperer. He was the voice of Trump.Miller also chimed in on the chorus of contempt for Europe. It was as though Europe was the enemy. The allies are not really allies; they are renters, and the rent should be raised.On 15 March, Hegseth returned with an “update” of precise details of the attack. “I will say a prayer for victory,” he wrote. It was a go. As it proceeded, Waltz chronicled the targets hit on Signal.Susie Wiles weighed in: “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.”Waltz posted three emojis – a fist, a flag and a fire.“Great work all. Powerful start,” said Miller. He was the one to give the praise. He apparently had the authority.In Russia, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, responded with two prayer emojis, a flexed muscle emoji and two American flag emojis.Afterward, Witkoff, a former New York real estate operator and Trump golfing partner, gave an interview to Tucker Carlson, the far-right podcaster who is highly influential with JD Vance and Hegseth, in which Witkoff said he “liked” Vladimir Putin, who was not “a bad guy”, “straight up”, and had presented him with a portrait of Trump to take home – “such a gracious moment”.Proclaimed a “success”, the operation itself will do little to quell the Iran-backed Houthis, who resumed their missile attacks on shipping in the Hormuz Strait after Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking to maintain his fragile grasp on power, abandoned the ceasefire in Gaza, which Trump declared he “fully supports” after doing nothing to sustain it. Instead, Trump proposed turning the ravaged Palestinian territory into a beachfront property, a “riviera of the Middle East”. Trump shared an AI-generated video of himself and Netanyahu lolling on the beach with dollars raining down and half-naked dancing women. Trump’s policy, of which the Houthi strike supposedly demonstrates “success”, has further entangled the US in cycles of violence without any clear path forward.As soon as Goldberg’s article appeared, the cover-up effort began. “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic; to me it’s a magazine that is going out of business,” Trump said. “I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?”Republicans in the Congress stammered or were silent. At last, the senator Roger Wicker, of Mississippi, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, called for an expedited report from the Pentagon’s inspector general. Unfortunately, there is no such inspector general – at least not a permanent one. Trump fired him on 27 January along with 16 others across federal agencies and departments, without reason, contrary to the Inspector General Act of 1978, tightened in 2022. “I don’t know [the fired inspectors general],” Trump said, “but some people thought that some were unfair or were not doing the job.” For now, there is an acting inspector general.The scandal might have been avoided if Hegseth could have consulted with the Pentagon’s legal authorities, the judge advocate generals. But he fired the top Jag officers of the army, navy and air force three weeks before the Signal group was formed.Nor did Hegseth, or anyone else, apparently think to include the joint chiefs of staff, who just might have objected to the obvious sloppiness and illegality of the Signal setup. But on 21 February, Trump fired the chair of the joint chiefs, the four-star general CQ Brown Jr, the chief of naval operations and the air force vice-chief of staff. He had already removed the chief of the US Coast Guard.Brown, the former air force chief, was the first Black person to head a branch of the armed forces. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt,” said Hegseth in dismissing Brown. Adm Christopher Grady, serving as the acting chair of the joint chiefs, was not sent the invitation for the Signal group that Goldberg received.To replace Brown, Trump has nominated a retired three-star general, Dan Caine, whom Trump insists on calling “Razin’ Caine”. But no one raised Caine to participate in the chat.He might be grateful to have been ignored. Instead of the three-star general, Waltz mobilized three emojis.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      US Naval Academy to no longer consider race when evaluating candidates

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      The US Naval Academy has changed its policy and will no longer consider race as a factor when evaluating candidates to attend the elite military school, a practice it maintained even after the US supreme court barred civilian colleges from employing similar affirmative action policies.The Trump administration detailed the policy change in a filing on Friday asking a court to suspend an appeal lodged by a group opposed to affirmative action against a judge’s decision last year upholding the Annapolis, Maryland-based Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions program.Days after returning to office in January, Donald Trump signed an executive order, on 27 January, that eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the military.The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, two days later issued guidance barring the military from establishing “sex-based, race-based or ethnicity-based goals for organizational composition, academic admission or career fields”.The US Department of Justice said that in light of those directives, V Adm Yvette Davids, the Naval Academy’s superintendent, issued guidance barring the consideration of race, ethnicity or sex as a factor in its admissions process.The justice department said that policy change could affect the lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by affirmative action opponent Edward Blum, which has also been challenging race-conscious admissions practices at other military academies.Blum’s group had been seeking to build on its June 2023 victory at the supreme court, when the court’s 6-3 conservative majority sided with it by barring policies used by colleges and universities for decades to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and other minority students on US campuses.That ruling invalidated race-conscious admissions policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina. But it explicitly did not address the consideration of race as a factor in admissions at military academies, which the conservative supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, said had “potentially distinct interests”.After the ruling, Blum’s group filed three lawsuits seeking to block the carve-out for military schools. The case the group filed against the Naval Academy was the first to go to trial.But a federal judge in Baltimore, Richard Bennett, sided with then president Joe Biden’s administration in finding that the Naval Academy’s policy was constitutional. More

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      The Trump team group chat news is obscuring an essential question | Mohamad Bazzi

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      The revelation that top members of Donald Trump’s administration disclosed secret US military plans against the Houthi militia in Yemen in a private group chat that included a prominent journalist has generated predictable outrage in Washington. Democrats are calling for a congressional investigation and the resignation of some of the officials involved in the breach, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the national security adviser, Mike Waltz.In an article published on Monday, the Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, outlined how he was able to follow the conversation among members of Trump’s cabinet over two days leading up to a series of US airstrikes on 15 March. But in the widespread outrage over the sharing of military information on a Signal chat, one essential question is getting lost: why is Trump bombing Yemen in the first place? Five consecutive US presidents and administrations (George W Bush, Barack Obama, the first Trump administration, Joe Biden and the second Trump administration) have ordered military attacks on Yemen, which is the poorest country in the Middle East.Collectively, these leaders have continued more than two decades of failed US policies toward Yemen, centered on repeated bombings, counter-terrorism operations and support for a dictator who ruled the country for decades. Trump, who portrayed himself throughout the last presidential campaign as “the candidate of peace”, appears almost eager to repeat past US mistakes in Yemen. During Yemen’s long civil war, years of intense bombing by two US allies – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – failed to dislodge the Houthis from power. By the end of 2021, the UN estimated that the Yemen conflict had killed 377,000 people – nearly 60% of whom died not in fighting but from indirect causes, including famine, cholera outbreaks and destruction of the health system. And while Yemeni civilians suffered, the Houthis emerged stronger after each military confrontation.Why aren’t Democrats and other critics of the Trump administration asking this basic question: what have two decades of regular US attacks on Yemen achieved, beyond more death and misery in a country where Washington already helped instigate one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters? Anyone interested in real accountability for US policymaking should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.The Trump administration says the latest US strikes on Yemen are intended to pressure the Houthi militia to stop attacks on international shipping lanes in the Red Sea. After the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, the Houthis began firing missiles and drones at commercial vessels sailing around the Bab el-Mandeb strait, where the Red Sea comes closest to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen. The Houthis said they were acting in support of besieged Palestinians and pledged to stop targeting shipping lanes once Israel ended its war on Gaza.The attacks disrupted global shipping, as companies rerouted hundreds of vessels around South Africa, which can add thousands of miles to a freighter’s journey between Asia and Europe. In January 2024, the Biden administration, along with Britain, launched missile strikes against dozens of targets in Yemen. But Houthi leaders did not back down, and they stepped up their attacks on shipping vessels and continued to fire drones and missiles at Israel, most of which were shot down before reaching Israeli territory. Starting in July 2024, Israel carried out four rounds of airstrikes against Yemen, including attacks on the international airport in Sana’a, power stations and several ports.For more than a year, Biden avoided the most clear-cut path to stopping the Red Sea attacks and US escalation against the Houthis: his administration failed to apply pressure on the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to end Israel’s assault on Gaza and accept a ceasefire with Hamas. Biden refused to withhold billions of dollars in US weapons or to stop providing political cover for Israel at the UN security council and other international bodies. Instead, the Biden administration continued to insist that it could bring the Houthis to heel by force.Biden’s strategy failed to secure international shipping in the Red Sea. And the Houthis, who were losing support inside Yemen before the Gaza war, turned US attacks into a public relations bonanza. Houthi leaders portrayed themselves as one of the few movements in the Arab world willing to defend the Palestinian cause and fight Israel and its western allies – in contrast to Arab governments that stayed on the sidelines and occasionally issued statements condemning Israel’s war. The Houthis also used the Gaza conflict to elevate their profile within the so-called “axis of resistance”, a network of regional militias supported by Iran. Two of the main factions in this alliance, Hamas and the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, were decimated by the Israeli military over the past 18 months, providing a new opening for Houthi leaders to enhance their popularity throughout the Middle East.The Biden administration – along with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy – finally persuaded Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas, which took effect on 19 January, a day before Trump’s inauguration. After the truce in Gaza, the Houthis stopped their attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea, as they had promised for more than a year. But as the ceasefire’s first phase expired on 2 March, Netanyahu refused to start the second phase of negotiations, which required a complete Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza and talks over a permanent truce. Instead, with the Trump administration’s support, the Israeli government imposed a new siege on Gaza, banning all food and other aid deliveries. Netanyahu backed out of the deal he had initially agreed to, and tried to pressure Hamas into accepting a six-week extension of the ceasefire’s first phase.By 18 March, Israel resumed its brutal war on Gaza with airstrikes that killed more than 400 Palestinians in a single day. In the days leading up to the ceasefire’s collapse, Houthi leaders warned that they would restart their attacks on shipping vessels if Israel resumed its war. And that’s when the Trump administration began threatening renewed US military strikes against Yemen.Trump is now repeating the same failed approach to Yemen as Biden and previous US presidents. In the Signal group chat messages revealed this week by the Atlantic’s editor, Trump cabinet members – who included the vice-president, JD Vance; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and the CIA director, John Ratcliffe – expressed disdain for European allies and debated the timing of US attacks on the Houthis. But none of these top officials raised the possibility that pushing for a renewed ceasefire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’s rationale for their aggression against commercial shipping in the Red Sea.The most senior officials on Trump’s national security team did not seem to consider the idea of taking the Houthi leaders at their word: that they would cease disrupting global trade once Israel stops bombing Gaza, as they had done in January. Instead, the US security establishment continues bombing Yemen as it has done for two decades – and somehow hoping for a different outcome this time.

      Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      Newly shared Signal messages show Trump advisers discussed Yemen attack plans

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      The Atlantic magazine has published fresh messages from a group chat among top US officials in which they discuss specific operational details of plans to bomb Yemen, spurring leading Democrats to accuse Trump administration officials of lying to Congress by claiming the messages did not contain classified information.The initial revelations by the magazine and its editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally added to the chat on the messaging app Signal, have sparked a huge outcry in the US.The Trump administration has faced withering attacks over the disastrous leak of sensitive information, including in a House intelligence committee hearing on Wednesday featuring two participants in the chat: the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the CIA director, John Ratcliffe.However, the magazine did not initially include specific details of the attack, saying it did not want to jeopardise national security. But as numerous Trump administration officials have claimed that none of the information shared was classified – despite the apparent inclusion of operational details of the US strike on Yemen’s Houthi militia, which has been attacking shipping in the Red Sea – the Atlantic said in a new article on Wednesday it was now releasing that information.It reproduced numerous messages from the text chat between the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth – who said on Tuesday that “nobody was texting war plans” – and top intelligence officials.They included details of US bombings, drone launches and targeting information of the assault, including descriptions of weather conditions.They also mention specific weapons to be used, timings for attacks and references to a “target terrorist”, presumably a Houthi militant. There is further discussion of confirmation that a target had been killed, and the use of several emojis.“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” the magazine said.“If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests – or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media – the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds.“The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.”Trump administration officials have repeatedly claimed that the messages contained no classified information. On Tuesday, after the first article was published, Gabbard and Ratcliffe said the leak contained no classified information.The Atlantic also quoted an email response from the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt – after the magazine contacted the Trump administration to say it was considering publishing the entirety of the email chain – in which she said the chat did not include classified information but also that the White House did not want the messages released.“As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat,” Leavitt wrote. “However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation.”Donald Trump, when asked on Tuesday about the leak, also said: “It wasn’t classified information,” while adding that the leak was “the only glitch in two months”.After the latest messages were published, Leavitt claimed on X that “these were NOT ‘war plans’. This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”Waltz, too, wrote on social media: “No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS,”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLater , at the White House press briefing Leavitt said Elon Musk’s government team was investigating how the incident occurred. “As for your original question about who’s leading, looking into the messaging thread: the national security council, the White House counsel’s office, and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team,” she told reporters.“Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat again to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt added.She also said that Signal, on which senior Trump administration officials accidentally shared military plans in a group containing a journalist, was an approved app. Leavitt said it was loaded on to government phones at the Pentagon, Department of State and Central Intelligence Agency.But Democrats used the intelligence committee hearing on Wednesday to demand an explanation of how operational military plans are not classified information.The Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi had an aide hold up the messages in which Hegseth shared exact details of the strikes.“This is classified information. It’s a weapon system as well as sequence of strikes, as well as details about the operations,” Krishnamoorthi said. “This text message is clearly classified information. Secretary Hegseth has disclosed military plans as well as classified information. He needs to resign immediately.”The committee’s top Democrat, Jim Himes, asked Gabbard why she had told senators the day before that no details of timing, targets or weapons had been shared.“My answer yesterday was based on my recollection, or the lack thereof, on the details that were posted there,” Gabbard replied.“What was shared today reflects the fact that I was not directly involved with that part of the Signal chat and replied at the end, reflecting the effects, the very brief effects that the national security adviser had shared.”Ratcliffe, meanwhile, said: “I used an appropriate channel to communicate sensitive information. It was permissible to do so. I didn’t transfer any classified information.”Last week, NPR reported that the Pentagon warned its staff specifically against the use of Signal because of its security vulnerabilities. In a Pentagon “OPSEC special bulletin” sent on 18 March, it warned that Russian hacking groups could aim to exploit the vulnerability.Questions have also been raised about whether some of the participants in the Signal chat might have been using their personal phones.Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who was in Moscow at the time to discuss Ukraine with Vladimir Putin, wrote on X that while in Russia “I only had with me a secure phone provided by the government” but then explained that the reason he did not make any comments in the chat until after returning to the US was “because I had no access to my personal devices until I returned from my trip”.The messages in the Signal chat were set to be automatically deleted in under four weeks. The Federal Records Act typically mandates that government communication records are kept for two years.The Atlantic said it did not generally publish information about military operations if it could possibly harm US personnel but that accusations from the Trump administration that it was “lying” caused it to believe that “people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions”.“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” the magazine wrote. More

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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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      Hegseth suggests judge who blocked trans troops ban abused her power

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      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, joined the mounting criticism of federal judges by Donald Trump and others in his administration on Saturday, mocking the judge who blocked a ban on transgender troops in the US military and suggesting she had exceeded her authority.The US district judge Ana Reyes in Washington ruled that Trump’s 27 January executive order, one of several issued by the Republican president targeting legal rights for transgender Americans, likely violated the US constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.Hegseth in a post on social media mockingly called the judge “Commander Reyes” and suggested she was abusing her power by making decisions about warfare.“Since ‘Judge’ Reyes is now a top military planner, she/they can report to Fort Benning at 0600 to instruct our Army Rangers on how to execute High Value Target Raids,” Hegseth wrote. “After that, Commander Reyes can dispatch to Fort Bragg to train our Green Berets on counterinsurgency warfare.”Reyes was appointed by the Democratic former president Joe Biden. There have been rising tensions between Trump’s administration and members of the federal judiciary who have issued rulings impeding some of Trump’s actions since he returned to office in January, and rising concern about the safety of judges.Trump, his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, the attorney general Pam Bondi and other administration officials have assailed judges in recent weeks. For instance, Trump on Tuesday called for the impeachment of the judge presiding over a legal challenge to deportation flights, calling him a “Radical Left Lunatic” and a “troublemaker and agitator” – prompting the US supreme court chief justice to issue a rare rebuke of the president.Federal courts are hearing more than 100 lawsuits challenging various initiatives by Trump and his administration, with some judges imposing nationwide injunctions to block policies, such as his move to curtail automatic birthright citizenship.Hegseth, a military veteran and former Fox News television host, has made culture war issues such as banning transgender troops and abolishing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the US military a top priority.After Hegseth took over the Pentagon, Trump also relieved the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, General CQ Brown, who is Black, and the Navy’s top admiral, who was the first woman to hold the position. Hegseth had previously questioned whether Brown only got the job because he was Black.While Trump and Hegseth have broad authority to relieve US military officers, their efforts to ban transgender service members have triggered numerous lawsuits.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe military said on 11 February it would no longer allow transgender individuals to join the military and would stop performing or facilitating medical procedures associated with gender transition for service members. Later that month, the military said it would begin expelling transgender members.Plaintiffs in the lawsuit before Reyes argued the order was illegal, pointing to a 2020 US supreme court ruling that found that employment discrimination against transgender people is a form of illegal sex discrimination.Lawyers for the administration have argued in court that the military is entitled to bar people with certain conditions that make them unsuitable for service, also including bipolar disorder and eating disorders. At a 12 March hearing, they told Reyes she should defer to the judgment of the current administration that transgender people are not fit for service. More