Seeing as it was a "double tap" it was clearly a deliberate target. Bomb the school, wait until officers from the nearby base with kids at the school arrive to try and rescue their daughters and hit it again. Clearly a war crime, possibly using Israeli targeting information, which clouds which State is ultimately responsible.
Yes, the definition of war crime is not "intentionally targeted building" it is "intentionally targeted building that it knew was non-military and full of civilians". If you plausibly believed it to be a military target, then it's plausibly not a war crime.
The question about whether US launched the missiles is not really in dispute, the intent and knowledge is in dispute. NYT did a great analysis essentially concluding it was plausibly a mistake, not an intentional or indiscriminate civilian attack.
The double tap to me is really what is cruel. I understand americans don't want to hear it, because they need to believe their military is moral, but a double tap to me show cruelty and willingness to target doctor, nurses, firemen and any person courageous enough to help.
The US military and its sailors already showed me everything i wont to know about them when i saw the report on them shooting torpedoes at capsized boats.
Well the current leaders of the US Government have demonstrated that they believe that people of certain races, sexual orientations, and genders are less than human - and enthusiastically engage with other leaders who have similar beliefs. It’s because of this, along with their arrogance and incompetence, that I am personally not the least bit surprised that they have committed and will continue to commit war crimes.
I guess the trick for me is (1) convincing others and (2) convincing others to give a shit.
TFA addresses this. It doesn't matter if it was a "mistake": the US acted recklessly "[amounting] to more than mere negligence," even when warned by their own commanders. Ignorance doesn't excuse crimes.
> The UN mission concluded that the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school constituted an indiscriminate attack causing civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure, amounting to a war crime under international law.
> According to the report, the US relied on intelligence suggesting a senior Iranian military commander was present at the site but failed to adequately verify the information before launching the strike.
> Investigators said the failure to update targeting intelligence and confirm the building was a military objective amounted to more than mere negligence.
> “Rather, the US directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”
That article from March doesn't refute what the UN stated in its report today:
> The UN mission concluded that the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school constituted an indiscriminate attack causing civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure, amounting to a war crime under international law.
Again, because this was preventable and the US acted recklessly and without regard for civilians ("indiscriminate"), going so far as to ignore the warnings of its own commanders.
Right, your position is defensible. I just think mine is too. I think that "indiscriminate" requires
Unless otherwise provided, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court only if the material elements are committed with intent and knowledge.
A mistake of fact shall be a ground for excluding criminal responsibility only if it negates the mental element required by the crime.
... (rome statute on it), meaning that they had to know that civilians were there or that their actions would cause undue risk of civilian deaths. That's more than just "maybe".
It's something worth arguing about, but I dont think it's open-and-shut.
Because the human rights chief has a lifetime of experience and credentials to be able to make these determinations [1], whereas Hegseth and Trump do not. Furthermore, Hegseth has stated repeatedly that the US military should ignore rules of engagement (and has worked to strip legal oversight from the military), which lends credence to the findings of the UN investigation that the US acted recklessly and without regard to civilians in violation of international humanitarian law [2][3].
[2] US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth commented at a news conference on March 2, 2026, about “stupid rules of engagement,” suggesting that they may interfere with “fight[ing] to win.” These remarks are concerning in light of Hegseth’s actions in the past year that have weakened US military posts and mechanisms intended to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war. - https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/02/us-defense-secretarys-me...
[3] "We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters." - https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318...
burden of proof is on one making statement, especially if he is passively-aggressively toxic.
Productive discussion would be if you go read that report before bringing it here, and tell what material evidence they have for that specific incident?
US picked some target through some classified protocol, what evidence states that there was some reckless in process?
We're discussing the article that summarizes the report's findings, but sure.
Please refer to the report [1] and read the following sections (they are too long to paste here):
- II (full section)
- IV.B.1 (full section)
- IV.B.2.88-89
- IV.B.2.95-96
- V.B (full section)
The report itself attributes its sources. If that's not enough, the DoD's own preliminary investigation produced the outdated-targeting finding. Pre-strike imagery of the school is public.
Are the schoolgirls dead, alongside some of their parents Anna teachers? Did Hegseath eliminate the review process pre stikes to determine if a site is civilian in nature, the CHMR? Yes they did. Ghouls like you have posted so much in this thread ignoring the actions to the point of cheerleading the mass murder of children. Where are the administrators like Dan G to bring you to heel?
>NYT did a great analysis essentially concluding it was plausibly a mistake, not an intentional or indiscriminate civilian attack.
See also somewhat overlooked Bloomberg story from June:
>An Analyst’s Missed Remark Surfaced in Deadly Iran School Strike Probe
>An analyst's missed remarks and US intelligence systems that weren’t connected to one another are among the missteps that investigators have surfaced while probing the cause of a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed an estimated 120 children, people familiar with the matter said.
>Years before the US attacked Iran at the end of February, an intelligence analyst examining information about potential future strike targets in Iran noticed changes at a site the US had previously characterized as a naval facility belonging to the elite wing of the Iranian military in Minab city in the southeast of the country. It was, in fact, now an elementary school.
>The analyst remarked on changes at the site in a digital intelligence tool, but that tool wasn’t linked up to the official intelligence database that the US uses to develop strike targets and the information was never conveyed to military commanders, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be named discussing sensitive matters.
> "intentionally targeted building that it knew was non-military and full of civilians"
That formulation guarantees that most war crimes won't be revealed as such. The militaries of the world are operating under top secrecy about what they know, knew or plan on knowing, ditto for their intent. They can claim whatever they please without regard to actual reality, proof is impossible to obtain.
Thus, under this formulation, war crimes are doubly guarded by the secrecy of two kinds of information available only to the perpetrators and protected by harsh laws again any leaks.
Assange knows, he dealt with it but I doubt he or anyone else will try to break the secrecy again given the zeal of his prosecution. To think that what he revealed was an isolated case is laughable.
How can anyone take this argument seriously when the DoW was simultaneously committing dozens of extrajudicial executions of small boat users in the Gulf?
What was "military" about those motorboats? You're suggesting the same military has vision into dozens of little boat's barrel contents but can't see hundreds of children in a school yard?
What is there to take seriously regarding this strike other than the facts as presented?
There were 900 strikes in 12h, and only one target involved a strike on a school, and huge coincidence that target was a dozen meters from a military compound and was in fact part of that military compound not long ago.
It's quite easy to accept that this was a horrific mistake. Whether you agree with the idea of striking Iran at all is up to you, but once they "went hot", precision strikes on military targets were successful in 900 cases, and it's plausible that one precision strike was issued incorrectly.
It doesn't bring back the kiddos. It also doesn't mean it's a war crime. It's right to be angry about that strike or even the larger war if you oppose it, but spurious legal justifications for outrage aren't required - it can be wrong even when legally justified or plausibly just a mistake.
Dozens of innocent children were destroyed in a heinous crime. Like they were nothing. They were cherished and loved by their families. It will be a scarring tragedy in all their lives. And some guy is like 'ah, darn, poor kiddos!'
That's true. It should never have happened. It was also quite possibly an accidental strike caused by outdated intel, even if the strikes were arguably part of unnecessary hostilities.
But nothing anywhere in any of these increasingly pathological threads do I see evidence of a war crime. Tragedy yes, intentional crime, no. Preventable yes, cold blooded intentional child murder no.
This is a war crime. A school full of children were murdered. It doesn’t matter what justification is presented. If you kill an entire school full of children, “whoopsie!” isn’t a valid legal defense.
Welcome to war. War is bad. Innocent people always get caught up in war and suffer from it. We should do our best to avoid war. But, unfortunately, due to a mix of game theoretical incentives, information asymmetry, and human nature, war isn't going away. We can still at least try to minimize innocents' suffering from war, though.
It was clearly a tragedy. Very few Americans--certainly I've never met one--support that strike in retrospect. Instead they are angry that such a terrible mistake was possible and they generally want a thorough investigation and targeting procedure reforms to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Americans hold their military to a high moral standard. But wars don't have to be fought so cleanly. Certainly the Golden Horde had no compunction about genocide. If acknowledging our shared humanity with innocent victims and expressing remorse for their deaths is ridiculed, then we're primed for a descent into nihilism, wanton cruelty, and mass slaughter.
No you aren’t. Your repeated comments show otherwise. You have trivialized their deaths, ignored other findings and demonstrated a distinct lack of empathy. Do better.
I am not defending this morally, but these are clearly a group of the least competent stewards of the military in a long while. They were "completely clear on OPSEC", with a left-leaning Atlantic reporter in the signal group chat. This bombing also coalesced support in Iran and had a big rally around the flag effect. Data in Iran is hard and the timetable was extremely fast, again, due to incompetence and the inability to constrain a vassal. So its appalling to say, but a bunch of morons with LLMS and outdated targeting, pushed to meet the objectives of corrupt idiots is almost certainly the cause. I personally consider it a war crime, but I am not sure if it meets the legal definition.
The NYT is not credible here. Remember how they lied to manufacture consent to invade Iraq? This bombing was clearly intentional, just like the previous 3 years worth of war crimes committed by Israel/US.
I don't think a third strike is confirmed, but I also think "double-tap" is more of a category meaning "followup strikes to hit responders" so I wouldn't be surprised if 2 followup strikes instead of 1 are still categorized as a "double-tap strike". It seems like splitting hairs either way. We know that the strike caused surviving teachers/students to congregate in a prayer hall. 40 minutes later that was hit as well killing almost everyone
Where do you see that they waited for parents and first responders to arrive? I'm seeing that the attacks were minutes apart and before anyone could arrive.
40 minutes almost exactly. The teachers and surviving students rushed to a prayer hall for protection and then US aircraft (not surface to surface missiles) hit the building a second time killing almost every student and teacher as well as first responders
These are all detailed in both the UN fact finding mission and the US' own investigation.
"Families and survivors interviewed by Iranian media reported that the school was
struck twice, with a brief interval between strikes. Several sources reported that the first
munition struck the lower floor of the school, leading the principal and teachers to move the
children to a prayer room on the upper floor. A second munition then struck the upper floor,
killing many of the children."
Is there another doc that contradicts the timing or mentions first responders? I'm kinda pissed that The Guardian doesn't link anything.
> Mohammad Yazdanpanah, a driver with the local fire department, said: ‘About half an hour, maybe forty minutes after we had arrived at the scene, there were two additional explosions, one after another. At that time there were perhaps one thousand to fifteen hundred people gathered in the compound and around the area. When the first explosion happened, we immediately threw ourselves to the ground to seek shelter. Just a few seconds later—perhaps three or four seconds afterward—a second explosion followed.’
You said it was the UN report, and tbh I trust that more than a one-off title on an image. Maybe the "brief" pause in the UN report was 40 minutes. Either way, no mention of first responders.
I said UN report and the Pentagon report. The NYTimes leaked an early Pentagon report but I didn't save the original article. All I have is this quote I saved from it, but when I google it the original article doesn't show up:
> At least 165 people, mostly schoolgirls, were killed. One official cited by The New York Times said, “We are still looking into the strike, but the evidence increasingly points to US aircraft as the source of the school being hit.” US authorities have acknowledged the inquiry but have not officially claimed responsibility.
Any ways I think it's a little obfuscated because the initial wave of airstrikes started at 11:22am and there were 9 in total, several hitting near the school and at least 2 hitting the school directly. All of this happened in less than 2 minutes according to a joint investigation by Sky News and Forensic Architecture.[0] I think that's also the source of the confusion of whether this was a "triple tap" or "double tap"
The FA article is good, but yeah it's still not clear when the strikes directly on the school happened. The firefighter's account mentions clearing the area and hearing more explosions but doesn't say whether the school was hit again.
I'm still thinking it's not after families or first responders arrived, because the death toll would've included more than children and teachers. He said 1500 people were gathered.
Highly unlikely an entire chain of military personnel knew it was a school and was like, "yeah get em good, and lets see when they come scrambling in for their kids corpses".
Do you hear yourself? Have you ever in your life met someone this sadistic? It was definitely a mistake. One might argue criminal negligence, but there is no way everyone in the loop here is just pure evil. That just isn't how people think in North America. It is unfathomable that a team of US military (people with families of their own no doubt), would all nod along and agree with your contention.
If the US military was unethical, it wouldn't have lost in Afghanistan.
The problem is fighting unethical enemies, because they do shit like use ambulances as troop transport, have soldiers dress the same as civilians, and given any kid old enough to shoot a rifle.
To your post more specifically, is there is no one holding these unethical enemies responsible. There are no history books, or journalists, or wikipedia articles about the insane shit they do.
The Taliban has a base where they truck in young boys to "service" the officers and it's lost to time. The US has a single ethics catastrophe, and they are held up for it for decades...
Genocide is usually not an efficient way to wage war. Even ancient armies usually did not slaughter entire towns, not because of ethics, but because fighting sucks and if you slaughter everybody you come across, nobody is going to surrender and every person you come across will fight you to the death.
I say usually, because there are some exceptions and nukes are one of them, they make genocide a viable war strategy. But even nuking Vietnam would not have worked, cause you will simply get nuked back.
pattern is there: first hit a public place (market, ...), then when people are scrambling to help, hit them again. "double-tap".
Seen in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, ...
It's quite cynical, the topic has its own Wikipedia page:
I wouldn’t say sadistic, but the military command is very desensitized to death. When all you do is basically kill people, then killing more is like pouring a cup of coffee. It’s just part of your day.
Remember that, prior to this, the US military had been conducting many suspicious strikes on boats in the gulf. It’s not like this came out of nowhere. The culture of negligence and lack of care was well-established.
> That just isn't how people think in North America.
With knowledge of history, and having met many Americans, my only comment is that they were probably too tumescent at the idea to be described as "thinking" per se.
You clearly don't understand America but that doesn't stop you from hating the people and imagining yourself above them. FYI, 60% of the population opposes this war.
The accusation is not "let's kill some kids", the accusation was "the target is in a school, bomb it anyway to get the target". Much of these targeted assassinations in the early stage of this campaign consisted of blowing up entire city blocks where a target was believed to be. They actually believed they would get pro-Israel people in the government if they killed the current crop.
The US military has been murdering fishermen off the coast of South America this year, after firing on the boats, disabling them they were shown no quarter and kill shot orders were given AND EXECUTED. Those are WAR CRIMES. The US military has done war crimes alongside the IDF over during this current year in Iran. Furthermore, the President of The United States has publicly stated he will destroy the Iranian civilization. He has ordered new very large bombs be built to Drop on Iran. Do you care to acknowledge these facts?
Did you not see what the same country is supporting in Gaza? The created the largest contingent of child amputees in history, while withholding pain medication to use during the required surgeries. Forcing children to undergo surgery without anesthesia is as evil as it gets
> Highly unlikely an entire chain of military personnel knew it was a school and was like, "yeah get em good, and lets see when they come scrambling in for their kids corpses".
When you phrase it like that, I firmly believe that's exactly what happened.
> Do you hear yourself? Have you ever in your life met someone this sadistic?
This isn't necessarily driven by sadism. A sociopath following an amoral (immoral) decision process where they draft a plan to decapitate military leadership by trying to attract them to a place to then kill them would fit the description.
And from a moral point of view, is it justifiable to kill military personnel in a military engagement that's not even framed as a war?
It was not a double, triple or whatever number "tap". That's literal IRGC propaganda commonly parroted by all of their proxies in the region, irrespective of what actually happened. By now, nobody believes this narrative because of how over-used a lie it has become. (It's their equivalent of the westerners calling every freedom fighter a "terrorist".)
There are two scenarios, one of which is a "double tap" and one which is not:
1) There are 'n' targets. The targets get hit in rapid succession, one bomb each. <- normal bombing
2) There is 1 target. It is hit once. There is a long delay, long enough for first responders to show up. The same 1 target is hit again. <- THIS is a double tap.
The IRGC base had multiple buildings. Each building was hit once. That's not what most people would call a double-tap.
Some people ran from one building to another and were hit twice. That's just... bad luck.
The real crime committed by US forces is that they didn't care to update and review their targeting information, resulting in totally unnecessary civilian deaths. Their hubris, their pride, their unfounded confidence in their own superiority resulted in a shameful atrocity.
Nothing in the UN report claims that this was an intentional strike on civilians. They make NO claim to that effect.
The claim is that "the U.S. failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify that it was a military objective. Updating targeting information and acting upon such information falls within the category of feasible precautions an attacking party is required to take under IHL . . . the strikes are a violation of the obligation to distinguish between civilian objects.
And:
" the Mission concluded that when targeting the school building, the U.S
acted wilfully, that is with the requisite mental element of recklessness (
dolus eventualis)."
And (finally):
". . . the Mission found that these strikes constituted an
indiscriminate attack in violation of the principle of distinction."
The UN report's claim is that the US negligently used outdated information which led them to think this compound hit was still a military target.
It's evident you didn't read the report and submitted a shitpost.
It would be good if future elected politicians would choose to remove the president power to starting wars or killing people in special military operations. I am reminded of this 13 year old rap news video being very prophetic, including mentioning bombing Iran. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMPu5p_QXU
It doesn't really matter what powers the president is "given". As seen with this current US president, there're always ways to grab more power, directly or indirectly, no matter what checks are in place. And there are certain things that a president has to be allowed in some way for them to be able to act as a president in the first place, which preempts making them fully off limits.
Arguing whether it was intentional or a mistake is stupid. It doesn't matter, the enormity of it should shake everyone involved. That it doesn't is the real tell of what kind of people these are.
It makes a huge, huge difference. Gross criminal negligence that results in the deaths of many civilians should of course be fully investigated and prosecuted, but it’s not the kind of pure evil that would do this intentionally. And I don’t believe you think they’re actually the same either.
This is what you say when there's been a repeated pattern of negligence. They struck a school once (edit: well one event with multiple strikes). The school was attached to a navy building. There should still be an investigation into the attack.
There was no reason to strike Iran in the first place. The absurd claim that "they were about to get nukes in 3 days!" is something that Israel has been claiming for 20 years. Our own intelligence agencies have said that they were not developing nukes.
If this was a military command center, this would still be a war crime. The US was not at war with Iran before it attacked them.
This was a stupid war to get into and it’s been prosecuted embarrassingly poorly, but Iran has been sponsoring terrorist groups all over the world for decades. They’re not some innocent country going about their business who was suddenly attacked unprovoked.
> but Iran has been sponsoring terrorist groups all over the world for decades.
Let's say I grant this. The problem you run into is these terrorist groups have not attacked the US. The last time Iran did anything aggressive towards the US was in the 1980s.
In fact, Iran has aided the US in going after common enemies like ISIS/ISIL and Al-Qaeda.
The terrorist groups supported by Iran have primarily been groups fighting Israel, not the US. That's what makes it particularly unprovoked.
In fact, the US has a stronger argument to attack Saudi Arabia than it does Iran because they actually have funded terrorists that directly attacked the US. Heck, you could argue that the US is justified in directly attacking Russia with this sort of argument.
Last time wasn't 1980s. 2024 was the Iran-Israel war, but US was involved too. Iranian proxies attacked US troops then. Iran itself attacked US forces in 2020 after the US killed general Soleimani, after years of Iran's proxies attacking US troops in Iraq etc. It goes back and forth, and I'm sure the bottom of it was the US being involved in the Mid East for no good reason (the reason was Israel/AIPAC), but this didn't start in 2026.
Even the Russian invasion of Ukraine wasn't unprovoked. Yeah Ukraine didn't attack Russia, but they did try to join NATO, then after Germany blocked that, the US was getting involved there in more covert ways. Ukraine overturned pro-Russia Yanukovych's presidential election in '04 which saw meddling from both Russia and US, then he reran and won in '10, then Ukrainian protestors forcibly removed him in '14.
I think the least provoked thing was the Iraq War, cause Bush blamed Saddam Hussein for 9/11 and fake WMDs. He was a legit problem ever since invading Iran and Kuwait, but that wasn't the reason for the war.
It actually hasn't "gone back and forth". That's the issue. What you have is 2 good examples of Iran being attacked, unprovoked, and then responding to the attack and STILL after those attacks trying to establish peace negotiations.
For the 2024 conflict I see no indicator that US troops were involved, other than providing defensive support for Israel. Iran didn't target the US even as it was shooting down their missiles and drones.
Nope. It was a proxy of Hezbollah who Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah all condemned. And after the US attacked Iran in retaliation, they again de-escalated.
> Houthis also attacked US ships if you count that.
This is probably the best example of the point you are making. It was because of Israel's actions in Gaza, but yes, this is a case of an Iranian proxy attacking US ships.
Look, I'm not saying Iran is great or their government good. But I am saying they have been pretty level headed towards the US for quite some time. The main reason the US comes into any sort of conflict with them is Israel and Israeli aggression in the region.
"Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth has literally stated that war crimes are now American military policy. Not that they were really off the table for the US to begin with, but we're no longer even pretending to care about the rules, because rules are for soyboy virgin cucks and our warfighters are warmaxxing Spartan chads. "Maximum lethality, not tepid legality."
FWiW we'd be hearing about a whole lot more if it weren't for House Speaker Mike Johnson shutting things down early to prevent a vote on a bipartisan impeachment motion brought forward against Hegseth.
A number of people on both sides believe him to be both inept and 'accidentally' doing a war crime or three.
Yes because normal people have tomahawks they can shoot to schools in their basements, and it required a court to find out who was responsible: United States, Dr. Evil, or the Cookie Monster?
Their families should receive an apology and compensation if it can be done covertly with a neutral third party I suppose. Even if it take decades. One day.
For now I can only process it better knowing that The Red Cross Society of China allocated $200,000 to the Iranian Red Crescent Society specifically as special funds for the bereaved parents who can apply for it. Each family basically receive about an entire year of earnings, which isn't much but at least it is something to help cover funeral costs.
Colloquially, I think it is well accepted that US launched the missiles. The question is whether they indiscriminately targeted civilians.
NYT did an excellent analysis showing that the US probably did intentionally target the building, believing it to be part of the nearby compound that received several direct strikes. This analysis is really good [1]
The definition of war crime is not "Killed civilians" it is "targeted civilians" or "reckless indiscriminate attacks". My understanding of the NYT analysis is that this was very plausibly misunderstood to still be part of the iran national guard compound.
Everyone gets their own opinion on this. There were 900 or so strikes in the first 12h, and only one school hit, and that school was actually part of the compound before. A horrific accident that was brought on by unnecessary hostilities, i think.
I'll add the definition from the Rome statute that, by my read, establishes a war crime when there is intent to commit the civilian strikes:
Unless otherwise provided, a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court only if the material elements are committed with intent and knowledge.
A mistake of fact shall be a ground for excluding criminal responsibility only if it negates the mental element required by the crime.
Still this is a legal defense that might plausibly be used during a trial, not necessarily a reason to skip a trial.
From that text, it sure sounds to me that these attacks are going to be legal. The article describes them as 'indescriminate', but they were specifically targetted based on a mistake of fact.
There's certainly evidence that the US was neglegent in relying on old information without verifying. That's serious and reprehensible, but I don't know that that rises to the level of a war crime.
I'll add that it's not what I want my country's military to be doing and that if I had any power, there would be consequences for the people involved in decision making that led to this, as well as changes in procedure to reduce this type of mistake in the future, and a settlement paid to the people affected by this strike.
The double tap to me is really what is cruel. I understand americans don't want to hear it, because they need to believe their military is moral, but a double tap to me show cruelty and willingness to target doctor, nurses, firemen and any person courageous enough to help.
The US military and its sailors already showed me everything i wont to know about them when i saw the report on them shooting torpedoes at capsized boats. Like i said before, if any US person is on a boat and need help, i will still do it, because anybody not helping on the sea is an inhuman piece of shit, but i will keep my distance.
Do you resolve a difference between a double tap attack (one in which a delay is inserted to hit first responders) and just hitting the target twice in one salvo? What duration means "double tap" vs "ensure destruction of target".
Under that logic, is the entire Barracks Row strip in DC fair game? It's across the street from a historic Marine Corp barracks, why would anybody put shops and restaurants there, right?
Maybe if the schools was built recently there'd be a case. That's not the case, its as converted a full decade ago. We just didn't bother updating our maps and intel before launching missiles.
In my opinion, a more responsible government would probably not continue to using an abandon military base as a school for this reason. I'm sure the thought had crossed someone's mind that something like this might happen.
I'm not trying to make excuses for the USA here, it's an abhorrent thing and I do agree, much more care should've been taken.
No one is suggesting other kids schools are "fair game" so just calm down a bit?
> a more responsible government would probably not continue to using an abandon military base as a school.
The UK, the US, Germany, et al are therefore not "responsible government" ?
Iran is an old country, leaving aside the assorted historical and urban settlements dating back to some 7,000 years before present time, the Median and Achaemenid Empires there data back to ~ 600 BC.
The age of the country has nothing to do with a 10 year old conversion by, let's a face it a murderous thug regime who kills its own citizens for not wearing Burqa's, who are you kidding?
It wouldn't put it past me if the IRGC steered the USA towards the school for this to happen, that's the kind of people they actually are. They kill protestors, why wouldn't they kill a school full of kids, what's the difference to them?
Age of a country has everything to do with it, even Australia a young country with vast open spaces is repurposing former (WWI -> near present) military sites in urban areas.
Iran with 7,000 years of history can't really leave unused sites idle - and everywhere there has history.
> It wouldn't put it past me if the IRGC steered the USA towards the school for this to happen, that's the kind of people they actually are.
Uh-huh. Okay. That's quite the long con child sacrifice conspiracy theory you're projecting there to cover up for what's more likely to be general incompetence caused by a rushed strike order in the context of a POTUS with no plan.
You do realize the US qualifies as a murderous thug regime by many measurements. We're actively waging war against Iran for no discernible reason, we're blowing up boats in the Caribbean with zero proof they're drug boats, and we have masked thugs pulling residents off and shipping them to 3rd world nations with zero legal recourse.
Just because Iran has a fucked government (that we helped install, by the way) doesn't let us off the hook or justify stooping to their level.
I think the dishonesty is that if the tables were turned, the overwhelming chorus would be
"Why the fuck would you convert former soldier barracks, still located on an active base, to a kids school and never update the publicly available maps? How fucking dumb are you?"
Hegseth's military had woefully outdated intelligence. And because he's a news host and NOT a war chief, he ended up ordering the destruction of a school full of girls so they could distract the news from the epstein files.
Your claim is that hegseth directed the US Navy to launch an attack on a building it knew to be a school full of kids for the negative headlines, because those negative headlines would distract from the Epstein files outrage?
You seem to be confusing everyone's stances (incompetence vs malice). Some people in this thread believe it was incompetence and therefore not a war crime, and others believe it was malicious and therefore a war crime. I personally don't think stupidity is a good legal defense but what do I know.
The US even said it was Iran who did it. The US has literally become the least trustworthy nation in the world by lying about everything, threatening to go to war against allies for no other reason than wanting the land...
This has very little value when everything gets prefaced with "in my opinion". Government officials should be held to a higher standard when it comes to releasing these types of statements.
Especially when the whole point of such lies is to kill the story before it gets much public interest. A device the sunny state of Israel uses all the time and to great effect.
Well, if the map image I saw initially after the bombing was correct, then the facility did not used to be a school. The building had different, military purposes as it was attached to a military base, and later was converted into a school. My understanding is that the AI that was used to facilitate this attack was trained on maps where the building was still used for military purposes some years back.
It absolutely does not excuse anything, but I suppose that might explain the denial at first. I cannot explain any further denial though.
I mean, for the general public it was pretty clear the US was very likely to be at fault here. But for a UN report you generally expect a way higher level of evidence and standard for the analysis (in practice it’s not always the case though, some UN reports are sometimes fairly shallow, always good to skim through them and not rely only on the reporting if you want the nuanced story)
Trump claimed it was an accident. Then again he seems to be similar to Putin: both lie almost all of the time.
Edit: Actually, others pointed out that at first the narrative was that Iran did it. That's indeed true that the media used that; perhaps one can even build up a timestamp of media reporting falseness here. I forgot which media reported the above lie first.
IIRC the guy who blew up his Tesla truck (in front of Trump Tower) was a drone pilot involved in this (or a similar) mass-casualty bombing. Perhaps he was leadership – but the released parts of his manifesto... were revealing about his opinion on US-motives.
I suspect because some folks don't think this is topical for this audience. I tend to agree, since the conversation always devolves, but I'm not a flagger.
Then do something about it - inform yourself about the other days.
The USA has been dropping bombs on innocent people on average for the past 25 years every 15 minutes.
The only force capable of reining in the US’ out of control military industrial complex, is the American people themselves. Until they do, the atrocities continue unabated.
I can't even get the government to take masked federal agents off my streets, how the hell am I going to rein (not reign) in the military industrial complex?
Indeed, it may be too late for you to do anything effective about it.
What the war criminals that have run your country for decades have done to other nations, they are now going to do to yours.
Protest, inform yourself, demand that your peers are informed, and do not for one instance just let apathy rule. Get out there on the streets every single time, write your representatives, use whatever tepid remains of your ‘democracy’ you have left. Divest yourself of any investments in the military industrial complex - and be damned sure you don’t support it, in any way whatsoever.
Demand justice for your own war criminals at a higher pitch and tempo than the call to eradicate cultures deemed inferior by those very war criminals.
What they do to other nations they will do to yours. Never forget this.
Given all the gun owners who yearn for authoritarians, and the advocates for a CEO-type leader whom only a landed and monied few should be allowed to vote for, I think the guns will actually be brought to bear on those of us who wish to protect what remains of our democracy.
I was in NYC during a no king protest, it was the lamest public demonstration I ever experienced given how bad the circumstances are. On a weekend, everything was done after ~2-3h, then back to work as usual on Monday. If you miss that short period of time you wouldn’t even notice something happened.
If there is one thing you can all learn from Europe is how to do a protest that cannot be ignored by your administration
Trump wants the violence. There's a difference between protesting a government that will follow the rules even if the people don't, and protesting a government that won't follow the rules even if the people do.
Get involved with your local dems at a grassroots level, and help break the incumbents that are hell-bent on maintaining the status quo. You need fresh faces in congress that don't believe it's all just a game.
You can still vote this government out and organize your community to help with that. Remember the three boxes - soap, ballot, and ammo. You still haven't exhausted box #1 and should use box #2 really well this year.
You individually are powerless. It's the American people, not you, that can shut down the industrial military complex. That means talking to people - this is genuinely the only thing I can think of to do.
> how the hell am I going to rein (not reign) in the military industrial complex?
Make sure to vote in this November! Encourage your friends and family to do so as well. Start a YouTube channel; get yourself heard. Reach out to DNC, obviously red party is not an option, tell them you want to help with outreach.
1. Yeah, just because I'm not proud today doesn't mean I've been a booster of every other thing the U.S. has done for the past quarter century.
2. That said, let's not pretend that now is no different than any other point in our history.
3. And finally, I think I am reasonably well informed, since my wife is the director of a non-profit working on this specific issue.
For some context the school shared walls with and used to be part of an active military base. [1]
That being said bombing children is always a tragedy and the US should be doing everything it can to learn from this and not make these kinds of mistakes.
They initially select the target at 3:36. Radio says the group has weapons, so they're identified as insurgents and targeted. I can't exactly tell, but it looks like they have AKs and an RPG like the radio says.
I think the war crime is at 9:31. They kill unarmed people picking up bodies. Maybe they figure they're insurgents too, but that seems like a wild assumption, also the drone operator sounds trigger-happy. Is there any good reason for this?
People do care, including Americans. These Mid East wars aren't popular partially because it's known or even assumed that US soldiers are committing war crimes there.
You should feel angry, and you should be channeling that anger into constructive action.
For now, this means voting Democrat and supporting Democrats for office.
Donald Trump has turned the Republican party into a cult of personality to support a kleptocracy. The GOP is no longer the party of conservative values. The rule of law, respect for traditional mores or institutions, and personal integrity have all been defenestrated by the Trump administration.
Are the Democrats perfect? Of course not. But under the current system, the United States has a zero-sum two party system, and this means voting for one of the two parties. Making room for third parties means adjusting the rules (eg. ranked choice voting, or other). These ideas are worth pursuing. As long as we're stuck in a two party system, this means voting for the lesser of two evils.
Nihilists will scoff at this and point to everything wrong that happened under Obama or Biden. They'll says Democrats are no better than Republicans. They're wrong. At best, they're misguided. At worst, they're actually trying to bring an end to democratic government (that's a lower-case "d" for democracy).
The Democrats are imperfect. The Republican party under the current leadership are far, far worse. It's not even close.
These are baseless and misleading accusations. In WWII many tens of thousands of civilians died because of erroneous bombings and no one ever got accused of "war crimes" over them.
In a war mistakes are made and people will die as a result. But that doesn't mean they're war crimes. Blaming the U.S. whilst leaving Iran alone, which blatantly attacks civilian infrastructure, makes the U.N. look biased and nefarious.
Whenever I read the US or Israel wanting to free Iran from it's "horrible regime", remember this incident plus the hospitals targeted during their attack.
Israel has 0 interest in freeing Iran from its regime, and that's not the point of this war. This thing about which country is more moral is getting tiring. It'd be the same even if only military targets were struck, we're fighting a foreign war for a fake reason, and Israel got us into it.
They want it weakened, that's it. Nobody is putting a replacement in, not even the exiled shah's family. Trump is just barely pretending he wants regime change there while also making dubious WMD claims.
More importantly, if Israel wants something, it's not our job.
They certainly want it gone, weakened is the fallback.
> Nobody is putting a replacement in, not even the exiled shah's family.
What Israel and the US ultimately want is not the same thing as what they will currently put resources behind achieving.
> while also making dubious WMD claims
What is dubious about the WMD claims? Even the IAEA has said Iran has not been complying with safeguards.[0] It's quite obvious based on their enrichment percentages that they have a nuclear weapons program.
> More importantly, if Israel wants something, it's not our job.
Both Israel and the US want the regime gone or at least weakened. Sure, US/Israeli interests aren't always fully aligned but they are often similar. The Iranian regime is probably only an existential threat to Israel in the near term but that doesn't mean the regime is not still a threat to US regional interests. The world shouldn't allow terrorist organizations like the IRGC to obtain nukes.
What's dubious about the WMD claims, Trump keeps waffling back and forth on whether or not we've destroyed their nuclear capabilities.
And this is Israel's interest only. Just because we've also gotten tangled up with UAE, Jordan, etc as a result of catering to their interests doesn't make it our own. Netanyahu called Trump and forced his hand on this, administration admitted it. It's either that or, at best, Trump wanting to manipulate oil markets.
> The world shouldn't allow terrorist organizations like the IRGC to obtain nukes.
It's just us. Our NATO allies don't want this war, even though they're more exposed to Mid East oil. What really shows that we're suckers, our adversaries like Russia and China don't care to get involved either, and they're even closer. They must be happy we're focusing so hard on the Mid East at the expense of say Ukraine.
> What's dubious about the WMD claims, Trump keeps waffling back and forth on whether or not we've destroyed their nuclear capabilities.
Well that's different from whether or not they have a nuclear weapons program, and I think one would probably describe their nuclear weapons program as being damaged but not fully destroyed. I don't think the existence of the nuclear weapons program is reasonably in question however.
> And this is Israel's interest only. Just because we've also gotten tangled up with UAE, Jordan, etc as a result of catering to their interests doesn't make it our own.
Saudi Arabia also wanted the US to attack Iran.[0] Most middle eastern countries seem to consider Iran to be a serious threat.
> Netanyahu called Trump and forced his hand on this, administration admitted it.
It's not super clear what happened here, my interpretation was more that Netanyahu may have somewhat forced Trump's hand on the specific timing of the initial strikes but not really on the decision to attack itself. Hard to say though.
> It's either that or, at best, Trump wanting to manipulate oil markets.
I think what happened is Trump got a bit over confident from the relatively successful Maduro abduction.
> It's just us. Our NATO allies don't want this war, even though they're more exposed to Mid East oil.
I'm pretty sure our NATO allies don't want Iran getting nukes either, it seems the disagreement is mostly in regards to how to prevent that.
> What really shows that we're suckers, our adversaries like Russia and China don't care to get involved either, and they're even closer.
Russia is already clearly involved...on Iran's side. China like usual tends to just play all sides.
> They must be happy we're focusing so hard on the Mid East at the expense of say Ukraine.
Yeah, the US should be doing a lot more to help Ukraine, although at least one of Russia's key allies(Iran) has been degraded a good bit.
And remember how Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens a few weeks prior. And the continual killing of Iranian citizens having differing political options of the regime.
War is never pretty or perfect. Winning a war comes with great cost
Killing civilians and destroying infrastructure in the name of saving oppressed people; it's quite impressive such low-effort imperialist propaganda still works after Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya.
> And remember how Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens a few weeks prior. And the continual killing of Iranian citizens having differing political options of the regime
So, that's over, then? We changed the regime and now things are better?
The purpose of starting a war is to extract concessions from the other side that you were unable to get through diplomacy, not to kill a lot of people because you think they deserve it. So far Iran has not been willing to make any concessions that it wasn't willing to make before the start of the war, and has shown that it can disrupt Gulf oil exports, which it didn't do prior to the US starting the war. Nothing has been achieved besides pointless bloodshed.
You talk about it as if America cared one bit about those citizens. This war just made the regime stronger.
If America succeeded, it would change the head, steal oil and keep the regime there to keep control on locals. Like in Venezuela. Maybe committing few atrocities on top of it.
But also of course, it would then invade Cuba and Greenland and god knows who.
Eh, as much as I might dislike the government of my country, I think I believe I would hate a lot more the country that decided it was a good idea to blow schoolgirls from my country into minced meat.
Invading a country and wanting to steal their resources at any cost, a cost as large as needed, is a crime against humanity.
The USA is not defending itself, it is just trying to control Irans oil to increase the power of American economic elites. Billionaires want more power, children, women and men die indiscriminately because of that.
And, you are totally right. Billionaires does not care that winning a war comes with great cost, because the cost is for USA service men and for all Iranians.
GPS spies on everyone. Flock cameras too. Meta-spy glasses continue that trend.
Now officials tell the public "we used old maps" when bombing a school with kids. That's a deliberate lie. It wastes our time to even want to lend any credibility to wanting to believe such a lie.
Point of clarification - GPS/GNSS does not work that way. The GPS in your phone only _listens_ to GPS signals and is not transmitting to/observable by the satellite. https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
I think what the commenter meant is that by using the GPS in mobile devices, these devices and their apps report their locations to various other places, including data collectors, which is probably how the US determined there was an Iranian commander at or near the school.
One great thing about the Internet is it lets you see how other people live, if you want to go looking for it. Think about all the things you want in your life: a house to live in, a car to drive, children (maybe), your children being able to get an education safely, good health, time with family and friends and so on.
The point is that Iranian families want all of those things too. Because they're people just like you are. You can see videos of ordinary Iranians going to the market, going to work, having family over, eating a meal together and so on. It saddens and frightens me how easy it seems to dehumanize other people and basically be OK with killing them en masse.
Now I want you to think about what you'd do if you sent your 11 year old daughter to school one day and some foreign government double tapped that school with 2 Tomahawk missiles killing almost 200 people, most of them children.
We kind of do know because it's basically what happened after 9/11. We spent $8T+ on a 20 year war to kill over a million people in vengeance that really didn't do anything else. Remember that Afghanistan offered to hand bin Laden over after 9/11 [1].
The Trump administration tried (badly) lying about what happened. First it never happened. Second, it wasn't us. But nobody else has Tomahawk missiles so that was never going to work.
The only question is where the targeting information came from and what verification was done. I am not convinced that Israel didn't supply this information so the US military would commit atrocities to keep them in a war that Israel had desperately wanted for decades. Every president since Reagan had been begged by Israeli PMs to invade Iran. All of them refused. It's widely believed that Netanyahu threatened to use nukes if Obama wouldn't do it. Obama called his bluff. Until Trump. And here we are.
> The point is that Iranian families want all of those things too. Because they're people just like you are. You can see videos of ordinary Iranians going to the market, going to work, having family over, eating a meal together and so on. It saddens and frightens me how easy it seems to dehumanize other people and basically be OK with killing them en masse.
The IRGC/regime is what prevents them from living normal lives. The Iranian diaspora is protesting in favor or removing the regime since they know who the real enemy is.[0]
> We kind of do know because it's basically what happened after 9/11. We spent $8T+ on a 20 year war to kill over a million people in vengeance that really didn't do anything else
The 'we' in your first sentence is not the same 'we' that is in your second sentence.
I don't think you've done this intentionally but this kind of talk is how propagandists conflate what the masses want and do with what people in power want and do.
This conflation is hugely problematic - it's like saying sometimes we go to the movies, sometimes we murder children. No, no, 'we' are not murdering children, some people are murdering children and those people are a problem.
the classic gotcha that doesn't work on outsiders that don't care about the partisan devide. All US presidents going back for quite a while are war criminals.
Christians aren't bad people. Its just that the older ones (and a few young ones) get their information from terrible sources. They watch Fox News, where every day Trump is presented as the hero fighting against the evil democrats. They don't notice the propaganda like a fish doesn't notice water. Bad inputs bad outputs.
Christians aren't bad people, but it's undeniable that the one demographic that supports Trump more than any other are Christians. Trump is the face, heart and soul of American Christianity. Where else are Christians arguing that genocide on behalf of Israel is a moral imperative, or that empathy is a sin?
If so many Christians were so easily swayed by hateful propaganda then that's still a fault and failure of the religion, as is the utter failure of the "good" Christians to do anything about it. People aren't machines that blindly process inputs into outputs, at least not in any useful sense that takes morality and ethics into account. People have agency, they're responsible for their own decisions. And these people have a Bible probably at arms reach at all times and they know what it says.
>"Christians aren't bad people, but it's undeniable that the one demographic that supports Trump more than any other are Christians."
Christianity itself really has little to do with it. I think it's more so that "Christian" is just the default cultural identity and worldview of native born Americans who have zero self awareness, thoughtfulness, or perspective on the world. Almost none of them actually believe anything really when you start to ask questions about it. It's just the in-group that they latch on to because they've never had an independent thought in their lives.
ECHR, UN and ECJ will find any and everything as crime against humanity so it is best to ignore them and make your own judgement. It is like asking ADL if something is antisemitism or SPLC if something is racism - the answer will always be yes, so why bother.
> ECHR, UN and ECJ will find any and everything as crime against humanity
That doesn't make them automatically wrong. This is clearly a crime against humanity.
> It is like asking ADL if something is antisemitism
There is a huge difference between hating Jews and condemning the actions of the Israeli government in occupied Palestine and the support it has from other countries.
Of course I want to see accountability. Two valuable and expensive ammunitions were wasted and pilots were exposed to unnecessary risk due to sloppy intelligence work. Also there should be punishment for the civilian deaths I guess. But unless the school was deliberately targeted because it was a school, double taping on military barracks that are attached to a military base shouldn't be looked as a war crime. USG is under no obligation to have up to date information.
>Following the United States and Israeli attacks on 28 February, the mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks resulting in the loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects.
The attacks were obviously not indiscriminate. Indiscriminate is covering an area with napalm and throwing a match.
>USG is under no obligation to have up to date information.
Why not? This is not the perspective of the various international agreements the US has signed about war. Knowing what you are shooting is in fact an obligation.
Hell, knowing what you are shooting is an obligation of deer hunters in my state. If you shoot someone because you thought they were a deer, you are in trouble even if they weren't wearing an orange vest.
The reason this obligation exists is because you always have the option to not shoot. If you do not know accurate info about what you are shooting at, you are supposed to not shoot at it.
We all know this happened. What I find hilarious in the discussion here is that everyone also knows it was caused by AI replacing humans on the battlefield, but because so many here have deeply conflicted interests they pretend they don’t know and act as though some human somewhere did this intentionally. Greed really corrupts the dialog around military use of AI.
Wasn't it right next to a military base, and previously used as part of that military base? And therefore a reasonable part of the targeting list that should've gotten more scrutiny but just didn't?
This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.
I don’t understand your attitude. The slaughter of hundreds of children seems genuinely inherently upsetting and unacceptable to me. I don’t see why an element of negligence would make this something to just “not pontificate on” in a court of law or in public discourse.
> This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.
If a soldier on the ground had called in the airstrike, there is a good chance they would be in military prison.
The fact that the administration itself did it means nothing will happen.
Always know what you're shooting at, especially if it changed purposes over a decade ago.
Seeing as it was a "double tap" it was clearly a deliberate target. Bomb the school, wait until officers from the nearby base with kids at the school arrive to try and rescue their daughters and hit it again. Clearly a war crime, possibly using Israeli targeting information, which clouds which State is ultimately responsible.
Yes, the definition of war crime is not "intentionally targeted building" it is "intentionally targeted building that it knew was non-military and full of civilians". If you plausibly believed it to be a military target, then it's plausibly not a war crime.
The question about whether US launched the missiles is not really in dispute, the intent and knowledge is in dispute. NYT did a great analysis essentially concluding it was plausibly a mistake, not an intentional or indiscriminate civilian attack.
More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49739018#49741081
The double tap to me is really what is cruel. I understand americans don't want to hear it, because they need to believe their military is moral, but a double tap to me show cruelty and willingness to target doctor, nurses, firemen and any person courageous enough to help.
The US military and its sailors already showed me everything i wont to know about them when i saw the report on them shooting torpedoes at capsized boats.
Well the current leaders of the US Government have demonstrated that they believe that people of certain races, sexual orientations, and genders are less than human - and enthusiastically engage with other leaders who have similar beliefs. It’s because of this, along with their arrogance and incompetence, that I am personally not the least bit surprised that they have committed and will continue to commit war crimes.
I guess the trick for me is (1) convincing others and (2) convincing others to give a shit.
Not torpedoes, but as a former enlisted member of the US Navy, most everything else here I agree with. Shameful.
TFA addresses this. It doesn't matter if it was a "mistake": the US acted recklessly "[amounting] to more than mere negligence," even when warned by their own commanders. Ignorance doesn't excuse crimes.
> The UN mission concluded that the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school constituted an indiscriminate attack causing civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure, amounting to a war crime under international law.
> According to the report, the US relied on intelligence suggesting a senior Iranian military commander was present at the site but failed to adequately verify the information before launching the strike.
> Investigators said the failure to update targeting intelligence and confirm the building was a military objective amounted to more than mere negligence.
> “Rather, the US directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”
The NYT - never a fan of trump - did an excellent analysis on this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-m...
That article from March doesn't refute what the UN stated in its report today:
> The UN mission concluded that the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school constituted an indiscriminate attack causing civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure, amounting to a war crime under international law.
Again, because this was preventable and the US acted recklessly and without regard for civilians ("indiscriminate"), going so far as to ignore the warnings of its own commanders.
Right, your position is defensible. I just think mine is too. I think that "indiscriminate" requires
... (rome statute on it), meaning that they had to know that civilians were there or that their actions would cause undue risk of civilian deaths. That's more than just "maybe".It's something worth arguing about, but I dont think it's open-and-shut.
> The UN mission concluded
why "The UN mission" conclusions are blindly considered as some high quality analytics?
Because the human rights chief has a lifetime of experience and credentials to be able to make these determinations [1], whereas Hegseth and Trump do not. Furthermore, Hegseth has stated repeatedly that the US military should ignore rules of engagement (and has worked to strip legal oversight from the military), which lends credence to the findings of the UN investigation that the US acted recklessly and without regard to civilians in violation of international humanitarian law [2][3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volker_T%C3%BCrk
[2] US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth commented at a news conference on March 2, 2026, about “stupid rules of engagement,” suggesting that they may interfere with “fight[ing] to win.” These remarks are concerning in light of Hegseth’s actions in the past year that have weakened US military posts and mechanisms intended to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war. - https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/02/us-defense-secretarys-me...
[3] "We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters." - https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318...
> has a lifetime of experience and credentials to be able to make these determinations [1]
This sounds like extreme hand-waving to me.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Feel free to refute the substance of what I've said.
burden of proof is on one making statement, especially if he is passively-aggressively toxic.
Productive discussion would be if you go read that report before bringing it here, and tell what material evidence they have for that specific incident?
US picked some target through some classified protocol, what evidence states that there was some reckless in process?
We're discussing the article that summarizes the report's findings, but sure.
Please refer to the report [1] and read the following sections (they are too long to paste here):
- II (full section)
- IV.B.1 (full section)
- IV.B.2.88-89
- IV.B.2.95-96
- V.B (full section)
The report itself attributes its sources. If that's not enough, the DoD's own preliminary investigation produced the outdated-targeting finding. Pre-strike imagery of the school is public.
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
So who's the better source then? Israeli military intelligence? Kremlin?
Or there is no reliable source. We know that we don't know.
Are the schoolgirls dead, alongside some of their parents Anna teachers? Did Hegseath eliminate the review process pre stikes to determine if a site is civilian in nature, the CHMR? Yes they did. Ghouls like you have posted so much in this thread ignoring the actions to the point of cheerleading the mass murder of children. Where are the administrators like Dan G to bring you to heel?
Why instead of answering specific question you switch on explicit personal insults?
The NYT may not like Trump but they love killing Muslims in the Middle East. They have many Zionist connections.
>NYT did a great analysis essentially concluding it was plausibly a mistake, not an intentional or indiscriminate civilian attack.
See also somewhat overlooked Bloomberg story from June:
>An Analyst’s Missed Remark Surfaced in Deadly Iran School Strike Probe
>An analyst's missed remarks and US intelligence systems that weren’t connected to one another are among the missteps that investigators have surfaced while probing the cause of a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed an estimated 120 children, people familiar with the matter said.
>Years before the US attacked Iran at the end of February, an intelligence analyst examining information about potential future strike targets in Iran noticed changes at a site the US had previously characterized as a naval facility belonging to the elite wing of the Iranian military in Minab city in the southeast of the country. It was, in fact, now an elementary school.
>The analyst remarked on changes at the site in a digital intelligence tool, but that tool wasn’t linked up to the official intelligence database that the US uses to develop strike targets and the information was never conveyed to military commanders, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be named discussing sensitive matters.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-06-26/an-analys...
https://archive.is/LNMMf
> "intentionally targeted building that it knew was non-military and full of civilians"
That formulation guarantees that most war crimes won't be revealed as such. The militaries of the world are operating under top secrecy about what they know, knew or plan on knowing, ditto for their intent. They can claim whatever they please without regard to actual reality, proof is impossible to obtain.
Thus, under this formulation, war crimes are doubly guarded by the secrecy of two kinds of information available only to the perpetrators and protected by harsh laws again any leaks.
Assange knows, he dealt with it but I doubt he or anyone else will try to break the secrecy again given the zeal of his prosecution. To think that what he revealed was an isolated case is laughable.
How can anyone take this argument seriously when the DoW was simultaneously committing dozens of extrajudicial executions of small boat users in the Gulf?
Every military strike is extrajudicial, question is if they hit a legitimate target.
What was "military" about those motorboats? You're suggesting the same military has vision into dozens of little boat's barrel contents but can't see hundreds of children in a school yard?
I don't know, I didn't see how they selected the target
What is there to take seriously regarding this strike other than the facts as presented?
There were 900 strikes in 12h, and only one target involved a strike on a school, and huge coincidence that target was a dozen meters from a military compound and was in fact part of that military compound not long ago.
It's quite easy to accept that this was a horrific mistake. Whether you agree with the idea of striking Iran at all is up to you, but once they "went hot", precision strikes on military targets were successful in 900 cases, and it's plausible that one precision strike was issued incorrectly.
It doesn't bring back the kiddos. It also doesn't mean it's a war crime. It's right to be angry about that strike or even the larger war if you oppose it, but spurious legal justifications for outrage aren't required - it can be wrong even when legally justified or plausibly just a mistake.
"the kiddos"
I have no idea why this is in scare quotes. It's a term of endearment, and I'm saddened by their deaths as much as anyone.
Dozens of innocent children were destroyed in a heinous crime. Like they were nothing. They were cherished and loved by their families. It will be a scarring tragedy in all their lives. And some guy is like 'ah, darn, poor kiddos!'
That's true. It should never have happened. It was also quite possibly an accidental strike caused by outdated intel, even if the strikes were arguably part of unnecessary hostilities.
But nothing anywhere in any of these increasingly pathological threads do I see evidence of a war crime. Tragedy yes, intentional crime, no. Preventable yes, cold blooded intentional child murder no.
This is a war crime. A school full of children were murdered. It doesn’t matter what justification is presented. If you kill an entire school full of children, “whoopsie!” isn’t a valid legal defense.
Welcome to war. War is bad. Innocent people always get caught up in war and suffer from it. We should do our best to avoid war. But, unfortunately, due to a mix of game theoretical incentives, information asymmetry, and human nature, war isn't going away. We can still at least try to minimize innocents' suffering from war, though.
It was clearly a tragedy. Very few Americans--certainly I've never met one--support that strike in retrospect. Instead they are angry that such a terrible mistake was possible and they generally want a thorough investigation and targeting procedure reforms to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Americans hold their military to a high moral standard. But wars don't have to be fought so cleanly. Certainly the Golden Horde had no compunction about genocide. If acknowledging our shared humanity with innocent victims and expressing remorse for their deaths is ridiculed, then we're primed for a descent into nihilism, wanton cruelty, and mass slaughter.
EDIT: @Hikikomori, I cannot reply to your post, but I am happy to engage if you follow HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
Yes, ridicule is the real crime here.
Didn't know it was HN comedy week.
No you aren’t. Your repeated comments show otherwise. You have trivialized their deaths, ignored other findings and demonstrated a distinct lack of empathy. Do better.
In all sincerity, people take it seriously because it helps them sleep at night.
I am not defending this morally, but these are clearly a group of the least competent stewards of the military in a long while. They were "completely clear on OPSEC", with a left-leaning Atlantic reporter in the signal group chat. This bombing also coalesced support in Iran and had a big rally around the flag effect. Data in Iran is hard and the timetable was extremely fast, again, due to incompetence and the inability to constrain a vassal. So its appalling to say, but a bunch of morons with LLMS and outdated targeting, pushed to meet the objectives of corrupt idiots is almost certainly the cause. I personally consider it a war crime, but I am not sure if it meets the legal definition.
The NYT is not credible here. Remember how they lied to manufacture consent to invade Iraq? This bombing was clearly intentional, just like the previous 3 years worth of war crimes committed by Israel/US.
Double tap? It was a triple tap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
The page you linked says "Attack type: Double tap missile strike"
Edit: it also explicitly says "double tap" under "Events" and links to the article for "Double-tap strike"
I don't think a third strike is confirmed, but I also think "double-tap" is more of a category meaning "followup strikes to hit responders" so I wouldn't be surprised if 2 followup strikes instead of 1 are still categorized as a "double-tap strike". It seems like splitting hairs either way. We know that the strike caused surviving teachers/students to congregate in a prayer hall. 40 minutes later that was hit as well killing almost everyone
Page has been edited after my comment and changed from triple to double tap, and now they had to protect the page from vandalism.
The third missile didn't hit I guess
Where do you see that they waited for parents and first responders to arrive? I'm seeing that the attacks were minutes apart and before anyone could arrive.
40 minutes almost exactly. The teachers and surviving students rushed to a prayer hall for protection and then US aircraft (not surface to surface missiles) hit the building a second time killing almost every student and teacher as well as first responders
These are all detailed in both the UN fact finding mission and the US' own investigation.
UN fact-finding mission https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies... says,
"Families and survivors interviewed by Iranian media reported that the school was struck twice, with a brief interval between strikes. Several sources reported that the first munition struck the lower floor of the school, leading the principal and teachers to move the children to a prayer room on the upper floor. A second munition then struck the upper floor, killing many of the children."
Is there another doc that contradicts the timing or mentions first responders? I'm kinda pissed that The Guardian doesn't link anything.
Reuters title is literally: "The primary school targeted in the attacks bombed twice, 40 minutes apart in Iran"
https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/the-primary-school-targe...
EDIT: and here's Forensic Architecture https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/airstrikes-o...
> Mohammad Yazdanpanah, a driver with the local fire department, said: ‘About half an hour, maybe forty minutes after we had arrived at the scene, there were two additional explosions, one after another. At that time there were perhaps one thousand to fifteen hundred people gathered in the compound and around the area. When the first explosion happened, we immediately threw ourselves to the ground to seek shelter. Just a few seconds later—perhaps three or four seconds afterward—a second explosion followed.’
You said it was the UN report, and tbh I trust that more than a one-off title on an image. Maybe the "brief" pause in the UN report was 40 minutes. Either way, no mention of first responders.
I said UN report and the Pentagon report. The NYTimes leaked an early Pentagon report but I didn't save the original article. All I have is this quote I saved from it, but when I google it the original article doesn't show up:
> At least 165 people, mostly schoolgirls, were killed. One official cited by The New York Times said, “We are still looking into the strike, but the evidence increasingly points to US aircraft as the source of the school being hit.” US authorities have acknowledged the inquiry but have not officially claimed responsibility.
Any ways I think it's a little obfuscated because the initial wave of airstrikes started at 11:22am and there were 9 in total, several hitting near the school and at least 2 hitting the school directly. All of this happened in less than 2 minutes according to a joint investigation by Sky News and Forensic Architecture.[0] I think that's also the source of the confusion of whether this was a "triple tap" or "double tap"
[0] https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/airstrikes-o...
The FA article is good, but yeah it's still not clear when the strikes directly on the school happened. The firefighter's account mentions clearing the area and hearing more explosions but doesn't say whether the school was hit again.
I'm still thinking it's not after families or first responders arrived, because the death toll would've included more than children and teachers. He said 1500 people were gathered.
Highly unlikely an entire chain of military personnel knew it was a school and was like, "yeah get em good, and lets see when they come scrambling in for their kids corpses".
Do you hear yourself? Have you ever in your life met someone this sadistic? It was definitely a mistake. One might argue criminal negligence, but there is no way everyone in the loop here is just pure evil. That just isn't how people think in North America. It is unfathomable that a team of US military (people with families of their own no doubt), would all nod along and agree with your contention.
> It is unfathomable that a team of US military (people with families of their own no doubt), would all nod along and agree with your contention.
The Vietnam and Korean wars would like to have a word.
Your belief that the US military is guided by any kind of moral or ethical line is naïve at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23427726
If the US military was unethical, it wouldn't have lost in Afghanistan.
The problem is fighting unethical enemies, because they do shit like use ambulances as troop transport, have soldiers dress the same as civilians, and given any kid old enough to shoot a rifle.
To your post more specifically, is there is no one holding these unethical enemies responsible. There are no history books, or journalists, or wikipedia articles about the insane shit they do.
The Taliban has a base where they truck in young boys to "service" the officers and it's lost to time. The US has a single ethics catastrophe, and they are held up for it for decades...
> If the US military was unethical, it wouldn't have lost in Afghanistan
You can be unethical and still profoundly incompetent.
Smoking out villages and shooting everything that moves with cutting edge weaponry doesn't require much competence.
Which is why the US famously won the Vietnam war...
If that was the case the My Lai Massacre would be meaningless, because the entire war would have been that.
The entire war was that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
Genocide is usually not an efficient way to wage war. Even ancient armies usually did not slaughter entire towns, not because of ethics, but because fighting sucks and if you slaughter everybody you come across, nobody is going to surrender and every person you come across will fight you to the death.
I say usually, because there are some exceptions and nukes are one of them, they make genocide a viable war strategy. But even nuking Vietnam would not have worked, cause you will simply get nuked back.
Its more that you make it clear that you will kill anyone who doesn't surrender. Then most people end up surrendering.
In modern militaries though, the expectation is that you will just leave civilians alone.
There are some terrorist states that indiscriminately kill civilians though, such as Israel and the USA.
The worst thing people would do is surrendering in those cases.
As opposed to who? Iran fired missiles at Israeli (and Arab) civilian areas, so did Hezbollah and Hamas when they used to have that capability.
That's precisely what I expected. That people would pop up defending US atrocities by equating them with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.
And you know what? You're right. Those are all terrorist organizations.
> Do you hear yourself? Have you ever in your life met someone this sadistic? It was definitely a mistake.
Unfortunately there's a very large, compelling body of evidence of the US military routinely killing civilians with double tap.
Intentionally.
This is not a negligence, this is a strategy because they get off scot free.
- https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
- https://www.culawreview.org/journal/double-standards-in-inte...
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/23/substantial-evidenc...
- https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2013-08-01/bur...
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/2/trumps-boat-bombing...
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24557333
- https://lab.imedd.org/en/double-tap-the-tactic-that-is-consi...
Routine. They routinely exterminate civilians with this kind of attacks.
Where have you lived for the last 10 years?
pattern is there: first hit a public place (market, ...), then when people are scrambling to help, hit them again. "double-tap". Seen in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, ... It's quite cynical, the topic has its own Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-tap_strike
Where does the article you linked say "Public Place"?
You just linked to a standard military tactic
I wouldn’t say sadistic, but the military command is very desensitized to death. When all you do is basically kill people, then killing more is like pouring a cup of coffee. It’s just part of your day.
Remember that, prior to this, the US military had been conducting many suspicious strikes on boats in the gulf. It’s not like this came out of nowhere. The culture of negligence and lack of care was well-established.
> Have you ever in your life met someone this sadistic?
Yes, I have. In the US. Some were active military personnel at the time.
Some folks are just warped, but some folks change a lot after they have experienced war.
> Have you ever in your life met someone this sadistic?
All the time, on the internet. People will reveal the most deranged opinions when they feel immune from consequences for them.
The current president of the USA said he would end the entire Iranian civilization. What do you think that entails?
Lying and bravado, as always.
> That just isn't how people think in North America.
With knowledge of history, and having met many Americans, my only comment is that they were probably too tumescent at the idea to be described as "thinking" per se.
You clearly don't understand America but that doesn't stop you from hating the people and imagining yourself above them. FYI, 60% of the population opposes this war.
You wouldn't be British, by any chance?
The accusation is not "let's kill some kids", the accusation was "the target is in a school, bomb it anyway to get the target". Much of these targeted assassinations in the early stage of this campaign consisted of blowing up entire city blocks where a target was believed to be. They actually believed they would get pro-Israel people in the government if they killed the current crop.
The way such things can actually happen is, when the executing side is of the opinion, that the targeted side are lesser beings.
I'd love to live in your fantasy world.
Which america you're talking about? It's pretty normal and expected behaviour from USA.
It's hard to tell here between naivety or deliberate thickness.
Most likely trolling. No one is that naive.
The US military has been murdering fishermen off the coast of South America this year, after firing on the boats, disabling them they were shown no quarter and kill shot orders were given AND EXECUTED. Those are WAR CRIMES. The US military has done war crimes alongside the IDF over during this current year in Iran. Furthermore, the President of The United States has publicly stated he will destroy the Iranian civilization. He has ordered new very large bombs be built to Drop on Iran. Do you care to acknowledge these facts?
Did you not see what the same country is supporting in Gaza? The created the largest contingent of child amputees in history, while withholding pain medication to use during the required surgeries. Forcing children to undergo surgery without anesthesia is as evil as it gets
> Have you ever in your life met someone this sadistic?
Not met anyone personally like that. But I have made sure that I kept good company.
However, there was precedence in the form of Nazi Germany.
Can we be sure without evidence that this administration did not do it knowingly, given how they have been behaving thus far?
> Highly unlikely an entire chain of military personnel knew it was a school and was like, "yeah get em good, and lets see when they come scrambling in for their kids corpses".
When you phrase it like that, I firmly believe that's exactly what happened.
> Do you hear yourself? Have you ever in your life met someone this sadistic?
This isn't necessarily driven by sadism. A sociopath following an amoral (immoral) decision process where they draft a plan to decapitate military leadership by trying to attract them to a place to then kill them would fit the description.
And from a moral point of view, is it justifiable to kill military personnel in a military engagement that's not even framed as a war?
Who will investigate war crimes these days against the US?
Either the American people do, fast, or they become parties to the crime, fast.
Sorry, we and our elected representatives too busy debating who the real victims of bestiality are.
It was not a double, triple or whatever number "tap". That's literal IRGC propaganda commonly parroted by all of their proxies in the region, irrespective of what actually happened. By now, nobody believes this narrative because of how over-used a lie it has become. (It's their equivalent of the westerners calling every freedom fighter a "terrorist".)
There are two scenarios, one of which is a "double tap" and one which is not:
1) There are 'n' targets. The targets get hit in rapid succession, one bomb each. <- normal bombing
2) There is 1 target. It is hit once. There is a long delay, long enough for first responders to show up. The same 1 target is hit again. <- THIS is a double tap.
The IRGC base had multiple buildings. Each building was hit once. That's not what most people would call a double-tap.
Some people ran from one building to another and were hit twice. That's just... bad luck.
The real crime committed by US forces is that they didn't care to update and review their targeting information, resulting in totally unnecessary civilian deaths. Their hubris, their pride, their unfounded confidence in their own superiority resulted in a shameful atrocity.
That's bad enough.
Nothing in the UN report claims that this was an intentional strike on civilians. They make NO claim to that effect.
The claim is that "the U.S. failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify that it was a military objective. Updating targeting information and acting upon such information falls within the category of feasible precautions an attacking party is required to take under IHL . . . the strikes are a violation of the obligation to distinguish between civilian objects.
And:
" the Mission concluded that when targeting the school building, the U.S acted wilfully, that is with the requisite mental element of recklessness ( dolus eventualis)."
And (finally):
". . . the Mission found that these strikes constituted an indiscriminate attack in violation of the principle of distinction."
The UN report's claim is that the US negligently used outdated information which led them to think this compound hit was still a military target.
It's evident you didn't read the report and submitted a shitpost.
The comment you're replying to doesn't say anything about the UN report, it's just about the double-tap strike.
> It's evident you didn't read the report and submitted a shitpost.
Chill.
So... what's gonna be done about it? The recent precedent has been to invade the country, grab the president and try them.
It would be good if future elected politicians would choose to remove the president power to starting wars or killing people in special military operations. I am reminded of this 13 year old rap news video being very prophetic, including mentioning bombing Iran. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMPu5p_QXU
It doesn't really matter what powers the president is "given". As seen with this current US president, there're always ways to grab more power, directly or indirectly, no matter what checks are in place. And there are certain things that a president has to be allowed in some way for them to be able to act as a president in the first place, which preempts making them fully off limits.
A very good one minute summary of exactly what is about to happen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Whrat_Rn0I
If anyone else got their hopes up: this was a funny video not a serious reply
This is a flagrant mischaracterization and you should be ashamed. They even issued a retraction: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5SZYz7lZRRI
Similar sketch by the Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPfVkuPmpc8
This was just great... It was so real I couldn't really distinguish the scenes with animate scenes that were clearly CGI from reality.
Arguing whether it was intentional or a mistake is stupid. It doesn't matter, the enormity of it should shake everyone involved. That it doesn't is the real tell of what kind of people these are.
It makes a huge, huge difference. Gross criminal negligence that results in the deaths of many civilians should of course be fully investigated and prosecuted, but it’s not the kind of pure evil that would do this intentionally. And I don’t believe you think they’re actually the same either.
It is the same. At a certain level, intentions don't matter any more.
This is what you say when there's been a repeated pattern of negligence. They struck a school once (edit: well one event with multiple strikes). The school was attached to a navy building. There should still be an investigation into the attack.
There was no reason to strike Iran in the first place. The absurd claim that "they were about to get nukes in 3 days!" is something that Israel has been claiming for 20 years. Our own intelligence agencies have said that they were not developing nukes.
If this was a military command center, this would still be a war crime. The US was not at war with Iran before it attacked them.
Unprovoked aggression is completely wrong.
I agree that we shouldn't be in this war, but that doesn't make everything a war crime.
It's a war of aggression. That is a war crime.
Iraq was also a war crime.
The reason Putin is a war criminal is because of his unprovoked attack of Ukraine.
This was a stupid war to get into and it’s been prosecuted embarrassingly poorly, but Iran has been sponsoring terrorist groups all over the world for decades. They’re not some innocent country going about their business who was suddenly attacked unprovoked.
> but Iran has been sponsoring terrorist groups all over the world for decades.
Let's say I grant this. The problem you run into is these terrorist groups have not attacked the US. The last time Iran did anything aggressive towards the US was in the 1980s.
In fact, Iran has aided the US in going after common enemies like ISIS/ISIL and Al-Qaeda.
The terrorist groups supported by Iran have primarily been groups fighting Israel, not the US. That's what makes it particularly unprovoked.
In fact, the US has a stronger argument to attack Saudi Arabia than it does Iran because they actually have funded terrorists that directly attacked the US. Heck, you could argue that the US is justified in directly attacking Russia with this sort of argument.
Last time wasn't 1980s. 2024 was the Iran-Israel war, but US was involved too. Iranian proxies attacked US troops then. Iran itself attacked US forces in 2020 after the US killed general Soleimani, after years of Iran's proxies attacking US troops in Iraq etc. It goes back and forth, and I'm sure the bottom of it was the US being involved in the Mid East for no good reason (the reason was Israel/AIPAC), but this didn't start in 2026.
Even the Russian invasion of Ukraine wasn't unprovoked. Yeah Ukraine didn't attack Russia, but they did try to join NATO, then after Germany blocked that, the US was getting involved there in more covert ways. Ukraine overturned pro-Russia Yanukovych's presidential election in '04 which saw meddling from both Russia and US, then he reran and won in '10, then Ukrainian protestors forcibly removed him in '14.
I think the least provoked thing was the Iraq War, cause Bush blamed Saddam Hussein for 9/11 and fake WMDs. He was a legit problem ever since invading Iran and Kuwait, but that wasn't the reason for the war.
It actually hasn't "gone back and forth". That's the issue. What you have is 2 good examples of Iran being attacked, unprovoked, and then responding to the attack and STILL after those attacks trying to establish peace negotiations.
For the 2024 conflict I see no indicator that US troops were involved, other than providing defensive support for Israel. Iran didn't target the US even as it was shooting down their missiles and drones.
There have been 20 years of Iranian proxies attacking US forces, mostly after the Iraq War and during the Syrian Civil War.
2024 Hezbollah killed US troops in Jordan. Houthis also attacked US ships if you count that.
> 2024 Hezbollah killed US troops in Jordan
Nope. It was a proxy of Hezbollah who Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah all condemned. And after the US attacked Iran in retaliation, they again de-escalated.
> Houthis also attacked US ships if you count that.
This is probably the best example of the point you are making. It was because of Israel's actions in Gaza, but yes, this is a case of an Iranian proxy attacking US ships.
Look, I'm not saying Iran is great or their government good. But I am saying they have been pretty level headed towards the US for quite some time. The main reason the US comes into any sort of conflict with them is Israel and Israeli aggression in the region.
Magnitude matters just as much. If they struck your child's school im pretty sure you wouldn't care if it was the first or second occurrence.
"Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth has literally stated that war crimes are now American military policy. Not that they were really off the table for the US to begin with, but we're no longer even pretending to care about the rules, because rules are for soyboy virgin cucks and our warfighters are warmaxxing Spartan chads. "Maximum lethality, not tepid legality."
We should assume it was intentional.
> war crimes are now American military policy
Can you give a source please?
1. (of many) https://law.stanford.edu/press/pete-hegseth-dropped-a-largel...
FWiW we'd be hearing about a whole lot more if it weren't for House Speaker Mike Johnson shutting things down early to prevent a vote on a bipartisan impeachment motion brought forward against Hegseth.
A number of people on both sides believe him to be both inept and 'accidentally' doing a war crime or three.
Yes because normal people have tomahawks they can shoot to schools in their basements, and it required a court to find out who was responsible: United States, Dr. Evil, or the Cookie Monster?
I don't know, Cookie Monster is pretty suspicious. Never trust a junkie.
He’s not a junkie, he can quit at any time.
Yes but I'm sure there was oil under the school and it was all for the best. After all "it’s more fun doing it this way."
Their families should receive an apology and compensation if it can be done covertly with a neutral third party I suppose. Even if it take decades. One day.
For now I can only process it better knowing that The Red Cross Society of China allocated $200,000 to the Iranian Red Crescent Society specifically as special funds for the bereaved parents who can apply for it. Each family basically receive about an entire year of earnings, which isn't much but at least it is something to help cover funeral costs.
That was never a question right?
Colloquially, I think it is well accepted that US launched the missiles. The question is whether they indiscriminately targeted civilians.
NYT did an excellent analysis showing that the US probably did intentionally target the building, believing it to be part of the nearby compound that received several direct strikes. This analysis is really good [1]
The definition of war crime is not "Killed civilians" it is "targeted civilians" or "reckless indiscriminate attacks". My understanding of the NYT analysis is that this was very plausibly misunderstood to still be part of the iran national guard compound.
Everyone gets their own opinion on this. There were 900 or so strikes in the first 12h, and only one school hit, and that school was actually part of the compound before. A horrific accident that was brought on by unnecessary hostilities, i think.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-m...
I'll add the definition from the Rome statute that, by my read, establishes a war crime when there is intent to commit the civilian strikes:
Still this is a legal defense that might plausibly be used during a trial, not necessarily a reason to skip a trial.From that text, it sure sounds to me that these attacks are going to be legal. The article describes them as 'indescriminate', but they were specifically targetted based on a mistake of fact.
There's certainly evidence that the US was neglegent in relying on old information without verifying. That's serious and reprehensible, but I don't know that that rises to the level of a war crime.
I'll add that it's not what I want my country's military to be doing and that if I had any power, there would be consequences for the people involved in decision making that led to this, as well as changes in procedure to reduce this type of mistake in the future, and a settlement paid to the people affected by this strike.
The double tap to me is really what is cruel. I understand americans don't want to hear it, because they need to believe their military is moral, but a double tap to me show cruelty and willingness to target doctor, nurses, firemen and any person courageous enough to help.
The US military and its sailors already showed me everything i wont to know about them when i saw the report on them shooting torpedoes at capsized boats. Like i said before, if any US person is on a boat and need help, i will still do it, because anybody not helping on the sea is an inhuman piece of shit, but i will keep my distance.
Do you resolve a difference between a double tap attack (one in which a delay is inserted to hit first responders) and just hitting the target twice in one salvo? What duration means "double tap" vs "ensure destruction of target".
To me, more than 20 minutes, less than a day. Which is what happened (40 minutes between the missiles and the bombs)
To recap:
A Iranian military structure was converted into a school.
After conversion, the rest of the naval base remained there (< 100m away).
Missile strikes hit both the base and the adjacent school.
---
FYI, it's not unusual for schools to be part of military bases. The U.S. itself operates over a 100. [1]
[1] https://www.dodea.edu/
11 years ago. If we're operating on decade+ old info, that's pretty damning.
Is there a "reckless endangerment" or "manslaughter" equivalent in the war-crimes sphere?
Is it me or is it reckless to leave a school in part of an old military complex ? That seems negligent to me, for this exact reason.
Maybe it was intentional too ?
Under that logic, is the entire Barracks Row strip in DC fair game? It's across the street from a historic Marine Corp barracks, why would anybody put shops and restaurants there, right?
Maybe if the schools was built recently there'd be a case. That's not the case, its as converted a full decade ago. We just didn't bother updating our maps and intel before launching missiles.
In my opinion, a more responsible government would probably not continue to using an abandon military base as a school for this reason. I'm sure the thought had crossed someone's mind that something like this might happen.
I'm not trying to make excuses for the USA here, it's an abhorrent thing and I do agree, much more care should've been taken.
No one is suggesting other kids schools are "fair game" so just calm down a bit?
> a more responsible government would probably not continue to using an abandon military base as a school.
The UK, the US, Germany, et al are therefore not "responsible government" ?
Iran is an old country, leaving aside the assorted historical and urban settlements dating back to some 7,000 years before present time, the Median and Achaemenid Empires there data back to ~ 600 BC.
A lot of buildings and places have prior history.
The age of the country has nothing to do with a 10 year old conversion by, let's a face it a murderous thug regime who kills its own citizens for not wearing Burqa's, who are you kidding?
It wouldn't put it past me if the IRGC steered the USA towards the school for this to happen, that's the kind of people they actually are. They kill protestors, why wouldn't they kill a school full of kids, what's the difference to them?
Age of a country has everything to do with it, even Australia a young country with vast open spaces is repurposing former (WWI -> near present) military sites in urban areas.
Iran with 7,000 years of history can't really leave unused sites idle - and everywhere there has history.
> It wouldn't put it past me if the IRGC steered the USA towards the school for this to happen, that's the kind of people they actually are.
Uh-huh. Okay. That's quite the long con child sacrifice conspiracy theory you're projecting there to cover up for what's more likely to be general incompetence caused by a rushed strike order in the context of a POTUS with no plan.
I will reiterate, a government who is fine killing woman for not wear head scarfs is just as capable of such an atrocity.
Not sure why you're such an IRGC apologist but do it somewhere else?
You do realize the US qualifies as a murderous thug regime by many measurements. We're actively waging war against Iran for no discernible reason, we're blowing up boats in the Caribbean with zero proof they're drug boats, and we have masked thugs pulling residents off and shipping them to 3rd world nations with zero legal recourse.
Just because Iran has a fucked government (that we helped install, by the way) doesn't let us off the hook or justify stooping to their level.
Both things can be true, no need to take sides.
Now that you mention it, I did go to school in the US for years at a military base that was abandoned after the Cuban missile crisis had died down.
We still continued to have Civil Defense drills in case of nuclear attack.
I think the dishonesty is that if the tables were turned, the overwhelming chorus would be
"Why the fuck would you convert former soldier barracks, still located on an active base, to a kids school and never update the publicly available maps? How fucking dumb are you?"
US army used to have unit responsible to unsure this dont happen. Guess who dismantled it due to being too woke and not lethal enough.
Hegseth's military had woefully outdated intelligence. And because he's a news host and NOT a war chief, he ended up ordering the destruction of a school full of girls so they could distract the news from the epstein files.
Your claim is that hegseth directed the US Navy to launch an attack on a building it knew to be a school full of kids for the negative headlines, because those negative headlines would distract from the Epstein files outrage?
No no no, they didn't know that it was a school because they're incompetent, but ALSO knew it was as school because they're evil.
You seem to be confusing everyone's stances (incompetence vs malice). Some people in this thread believe it was incompetence and therefore not a war crime, and others believe it was malicious and therefore a war crime. I personally don't think stupidity is a good legal defense but what do I know.
Well the US government tried to deny it was a school at first, so that's put to bed at least.
The US even said it was Iran who did it. The US has literally become the least trustworthy nation in the world by lying about everything, threatening to go to war against allies for no other reason than wanting the land...
Overstated.
It was never given as a fact.
Was literally "in my opinion" speculation. A dumb opinion? Okay. But not statement of fact.
This has very little value when everything gets prefaced with "in my opinion". Government officials should be held to a higher standard when it comes to releasing these types of statements.
Especially when the whole point of such lies is to kill the story before it gets much public interest. A device the sunny state of Israel uses all the time and to great effect.
I don’t commonly hear that.
Just in the instance that was chosen.
Well, if the map image I saw initially after the bombing was correct, then the facility did not used to be a school. The building had different, military purposes as it was attached to a military base, and later was converted into a school. My understanding is that the AI that was used to facilitate this attack was trained on maps where the building was still used for military purposes some years back.
It absolutely does not excuse anything, but I suppose that might explain the denial at first. I cannot explain any further denial though.
Google says the building was converted 11 years ago.
We waged an AI-directed attack based on decade+ maps. That should be criminal.
They’d like us to believe otherwise (the administration)
I mean, for the general public it was pretty clear the US was very likely to be at fault here. But for a UN report you generally expect a way higher level of evidence and standard for the analysis (in practice it’s not always the case though, some UN reports are sometimes fairly shallow, always good to skim through them and not rely only on the reporting if you want the nuanced story)
Trump claimed it was an accident. Then again he seems to be similar to Putin: both lie almost all of the time.
Edit: Actually, others pointed out that at first the narrative was that Iran did it. That's indeed true that the media used that; perhaps one can even build up a timestamp of media reporting falseness here. I forgot which media reported the above lie first.
Yes which is why this is an uninteresting thread
let me guess, the end result of this will be "strong condemnation"?
IIRC the guy who blew up his Tesla truck (in front of Trump Tower) was a drone pilot involved in this (or a similar) mass-casualty bombing. Perhaps he was leadership – but the released parts of his manifesto... were revealing about his opinion on US-motives.
rug_sweep.gif
Why is this flagged?
Typically, it's because one or more users have selected the "flag" link just under the title.
Yes but why flag it?
I suspect because some folks don't think this is topical for this audience. I tend to agree, since the conversation always devolves, but I'm not a flagger.
Was it not a former miiltary building wrongly designated by claude as a target ?
Do we have any evidence that it was actually designated by Claude as a target? Or is it just someone's convenient excuse.
“Are we the baddies?”
The guy who campaigned on ending wars sure loves killing children.
I hope it was not deliberate but it may have been. Blowing up the kids of military generals is a strategic move when you ignore the "rules of war".
I'm gonna guess they will blame AI and say we need more AI safety, bonus if they claim it was an open weight model.
I mean... of course it's the US. Who else could it be?
Ok. Everybody knew that. The first war crimes were free. Now what?
Vote me again so I can keep bombing more girls tomorrow?
Without action this is just a barely veiled attempt to appease the furious voters just before an election. All talk, no real will to fix this mess.
> failed to adequately verify the information before launching the strike
I'm so proud to be an American today :-(
Then do something about it - inform yourself about the other days.
The USA has been dropping bombs on innocent people on average for the past 25 years every 15 minutes.
The only force capable of reining in the US’ out of control military industrial complex, is the American people themselves. Until they do, the atrocities continue unabated.
I can't even get the government to take masked federal agents off my streets, how the hell am I going to rein (not reign) in the military industrial complex?
Indeed, it may be too late for you to do anything effective about it.
What the war criminals that have run your country for decades have done to other nations, they are now going to do to yours.
Protest, inform yourself, demand that your peers are informed, and do not for one instance just let apathy rule. Get out there on the streets every single time, write your representatives, use whatever tepid remains of your ‘democracy’ you have left. Divest yourself of any investments in the military industrial complex - and be damned sure you don’t support it, in any way whatsoever.
Demand justice for your own war criminals at a higher pitch and tempo than the call to eradicate cultures deemed inferior by those very war criminals.
What they do to other nations they will do to yours. Never forget this.
Don't you guys have your famous 2nd amendment to protect your democracy from tyrants?
Given all the gun owners who yearn for authoritarians, and the advocates for a CEO-type leader whom only a landed and monied few should be allowed to vote for, I think the guns will actually be brought to bear on those of us who wish to protect what remains of our democracy.
No that’s just for school shootings and LARPers.
That’s all we have left. Speeches, voting, and juries will not save us from a system this corrupt. The ongoing civil war will turn bloody eventually.
Only local tyranny, like the county government.
Americans were literally more up in arms over social distancing and masks than any thing Trump has ever done.
I was in NYC during a no king protest, it was the lamest public demonstration I ever experienced given how bad the circumstances are. On a weekend, everything was done after ~2-3h, then back to work as usual on Monday. If you miss that short period of time you wouldn’t even notice something happened.
If there is one thing you can all learn from Europe is how to do a protest that cannot be ignored by your administration
Trump wants the violence. There's a difference between protesting a government that will follow the rules even if the people don't, and protesting a government that won't follow the rules even if the people do.
This is correct. Nothing will change.
Get involved with your local dems at a grassroots level, and help break the incumbents that are hell-bent on maintaining the status quo. You need fresh faces in congress that don't believe it's all just a game.
I can’t stop them from tracking our posts to use against us under NPSM7 at some point in the future.
Don’t use political violence, intimidation, and domestic terror.
Use your democracy while you still can.
What democracy?
You can still vote this government out and organize your community to help with that. Remember the three boxes - soap, ballot, and ammo. You still haven't exhausted box #1 and should use box #2 really well this year.
Tyrants feed on the belief they can't be removed.
Why are you so convinved that the current administration leaves, even after defeat?
Then, and only then, you might consider the third box.
You individually are powerless. It's the American people, not you, that can shut down the industrial military complex. That means talking to people - this is genuinely the only thing I can think of to do.
It's not gonna be low-stakes protests like No Kings, I'll tell you that.
> how the hell am I going to rein (not reign) in the military industrial complex?
Make sure to vote in this November! Encourage your friends and family to do so as well. Start a YouTube channel; get yourself heard. Reach out to DNC, obviously red party is not an option, tell them you want to help with outreach.
> Make sure to vote in this November!
Make sure to vote blue in this November!
1. Yeah, just because I'm not proud today doesn't mean I've been a booster of every other thing the U.S. has done for the past quarter century. 2. That said, let's not pretend that now is no different than any other point in our history. 3. And finally, I think I am reasonably well informed, since my wife is the director of a non-profit working on this specific issue.
For some context the school shared walls with and used to be part of an active military base. [1]
That being said bombing children is always a tragedy and the US should be doing everything it can to learn from this and not make these kinds of mistakes.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
Are these the same lessons they should have learned from bombing Afghan weddings or Iraqi funerals?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack#/map/... red is navy base, green is school
I am very sorry this is happening to your country. I hope you manage to fix it.
Better late than never to look past the propaganda, I guess.
It's been like that every single time you guys went to the middle east, not just "today" lmao
Some of it is publicly available on videos for 15+ years, nobody cares: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
They initially select the target at 3:36. Radio says the group has weapons, so they're identified as insurgents and targeted. I can't exactly tell, but it looks like they have AKs and an RPG like the radio says.
I think the war crime is at 9:31. They kill unarmed people picking up bodies. Maybe they figure they're insurgents too, but that seems like a wild assumption, also the drone operator sounds trigger-happy. Is there any good reason for this?
People do care, including Americans. These Mid East wars aren't popular partially because it's known or even assumed that US soldiers are committing war crimes there.
> also the drone operator sounds trigger-happy
That’s a manned AH-64 Apache attack helicopter with a pilot and gunner.
You should feel angry, and you should be channeling that anger into constructive action.
For now, this means voting Democrat and supporting Democrats for office.
Donald Trump has turned the Republican party into a cult of personality to support a kleptocracy. The GOP is no longer the party of conservative values. The rule of law, respect for traditional mores or institutions, and personal integrity have all been defenestrated by the Trump administration.
Are the Democrats perfect? Of course not. But under the current system, the United States has a zero-sum two party system, and this means voting for one of the two parties. Making room for third parties means adjusting the rules (eg. ranked choice voting, or other). These ideas are worth pursuing. As long as we're stuck in a two party system, this means voting for the lesser of two evils.
Nihilists will scoff at this and point to everything wrong that happened under Obama or Biden. They'll says Democrats are no better than Republicans. They're wrong. At best, they're misguided. At worst, they're actually trying to bring an end to democratic government (that's a lower-case "d" for democracy).
The Democrats are imperfect. The Republican party under the current leadership are far, far worse. It's not even close.
Get out and vote.
"Hey Claude, where should I bomb Iran? Make no mistakes."
These are baseless and misleading accusations. In WWII many tens of thousands of civilians died because of erroneous bombings and no one ever got accused of "war crimes" over them.
In a war mistakes are made and people will die as a result. But that doesn't mean they're war crimes. Blaming the U.S. whilst leaving Iran alone, which blatantly attacks civilian infrastructure, makes the U.N. look biased and nefarious.
The UN doesn't leave Iran alone though, not even in the same article that mentions the US strike. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
Whenever I read the US or Israel wanting to free Iran from it's "horrible regime", remember this incident plus the hospitals targeted during their attack.
Israel has 0 interest in freeing Iran from its regime, and that's not the point of this war. This thing about which country is more moral is getting tiring. It'd be the same even if only military targets were struck, we're fighting a foreign war for a fake reason, and Israel got us into it.
> Israel has 0 interest in freeing Iran from its regime, and that's not the point of this war.
Israel for very obvious reasons[0] has plenty of interest in freeing Iran from its regime as well as an interest in weakening the regime.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Israel_in_Irani...
They want it weakened, that's it. Nobody is putting a replacement in, not even the exiled shah's family. Trump is just barely pretending he wants regime change there while also making dubious WMD claims.
More importantly, if Israel wants something, it's not our job.
> They want it weakened, that's it.
They certainly want it gone, weakened is the fallback.
> Nobody is putting a replacement in, not even the exiled shah's family.
What Israel and the US ultimately want is not the same thing as what they will currently put resources behind achieving.
> while also making dubious WMD claims
What is dubious about the WMD claims? Even the IAEA has said Iran has not been complying with safeguards.[0] It's quite obvious based on their enrichment percentages that they have a nuclear weapons program.
> More importantly, if Israel wants something, it's not our job.
Both Israel and the US want the regime gone or at least weakened. Sure, US/Israeli interests aren't always fully aligned but they are often similar. The Iranian regime is probably only an existential threat to Israel in the near term but that doesn't mean the regime is not still a threat to US regional interests. The world shouldn't allow terrorist organizations like the IRGC to obtain nukes.
[0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164291
What's dubious about the WMD claims, Trump keeps waffling back and forth on whether or not we've destroyed their nuclear capabilities.
And this is Israel's interest only. Just because we've also gotten tangled up with UAE, Jordan, etc as a result of catering to their interests doesn't make it our own. Netanyahu called Trump and forced his hand on this, administration admitted it. It's either that or, at best, Trump wanting to manipulate oil markets.
> The world shouldn't allow terrorist organizations like the IRGC to obtain nukes.
It's just us. Our NATO allies don't want this war, even though they're more exposed to Mid East oil. What really shows that we're suckers, our adversaries like Russia and China don't care to get involved either, and they're even closer. They must be happy we're focusing so hard on the Mid East at the expense of say Ukraine.
> What's dubious about the WMD claims, Trump keeps waffling back and forth on whether or not we've destroyed their nuclear capabilities.
Well that's different from whether or not they have a nuclear weapons program, and I think one would probably describe their nuclear weapons program as being damaged but not fully destroyed. I don't think the existence of the nuclear weapons program is reasonably in question however.
> And this is Israel's interest only. Just because we've also gotten tangled up with UAE, Jordan, etc as a result of catering to their interests doesn't make it our own.
Saudi Arabia also wanted the US to attack Iran.[0] Most middle eastern countries seem to consider Iran to be a serious threat.
> Netanyahu called Trump and forced his hand on this, administration admitted it.
It's not super clear what happened here, my interpretation was more that Netanyahu may have somewhat forced Trump's hand on the specific timing of the initial strikes but not really on the decision to attack itself. Hard to say though.
> It's either that or, at best, Trump wanting to manipulate oil markets.
I think what happened is Trump got a bit over confident from the relatively successful Maduro abduction.
> It's just us. Our NATO allies don't want this war, even though they're more exposed to Mid East oil.
I'm pretty sure our NATO allies don't want Iran getting nukes either, it seems the disagreement is mostly in regards to how to prevent that.
> What really shows that we're suckers, our adversaries like Russia and China don't care to get involved either, and they're even closer.
Russia is already clearly involved...on Iran's side. China like usual tends to just play all sides.
> They must be happy we're focusing so hard on the Mid East at the expense of say Ukraine.
Yeah, the US should be doing a lot more to help Ukraine, although at least one of Russia's key allies(Iran) has been degraded a good bit.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/27/saudi-arabia-u...
And remember how Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens a few weeks prior. And the continual killing of Iranian citizens having differing political options of the regime.
War is never pretty or perfect. Winning a war comes with great cost
Killing civilians and destroying infrastructure in the name of saving oppressed people; it's quite impressive such low-effort imperialist propaganda still works after Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya.
> And remember how Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens a few weeks prior. And the continual killing of Iranian citizens having differing political options of the regime
So, that's over, then? We changed the regime and now things are better?
The purpose of starting a war is to extract concessions from the other side that you were unable to get through diplomacy, not to kill a lot of people because you think they deserve it. So far Iran has not been willing to make any concessions that it wasn't willing to make before the start of the war, and has shown that it can disrupt Gulf oil exports, which it didn't do prior to the US starting the war. Nothing has been achieved besides pointless bloodshed.
Iran was attack as it was making concessions.
> And remember how Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens a few weeks prior.
Yes? How is that a reason to kill even more Iranians, especially schoolgirls?
Yes nothing says we care about you and your citizens then destroying a little girls school. Really helps enforce the message of love and peace.
You talk about it as if America cared one bit about those citizens. This war just made the regime stronger.
If America succeeded, it would change the head, steal oil and keep the regime there to keep control on locals. Like in Venezuela. Maybe committing few atrocities on top of it.
But also of course, it would then invade Cuba and Greenland and god knows who.
Eh, as much as I might dislike the government of my country, I think I believe I would hate a lot more the country that decided it was a good idea to blow schoolgirls from my country into minced meat.
> Winning a war comes with great cost
Invading a country and wanting to steal their resources at any cost, a cost as large as needed, is a crime against humanity.
The USA is not defending itself, it is just trying to control Irans oil to increase the power of American economic elites. Billionaires want more power, children, women and men die indiscriminately because of that.
And, you are totally right. Billionaires does not care that winning a war comes with great cost, because the cost is for USA service men and for all Iranians.
GPS spies on everyone. Flock cameras too. Meta-spy glasses continue that trend.
Now officials tell the public "we used old maps" when bombing a school with kids. That's a deliberate lie. It wastes our time to even want to lend any credibility to wanting to believe such a lie.
> GPS spies on everyone.
Point of clarification - GPS/GNSS does not work that way. The GPS in your phone only _listens_ to GPS signals and is not transmitting to/observable by the satellite. https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
> GPS spies on everyone.
That's... not how GPS works.
I think what the commenter meant is that by using the GPS in mobile devices, these devices and their apps report their locations to various other places, including data collectors, which is probably how the US determined there was an Iranian commander at or near the school.
Water is wet
One great thing about the Internet is it lets you see how other people live, if you want to go looking for it. Think about all the things you want in your life: a house to live in, a car to drive, children (maybe), your children being able to get an education safely, good health, time with family and friends and so on.
The point is that Iranian families want all of those things too. Because they're people just like you are. You can see videos of ordinary Iranians going to the market, going to work, having family over, eating a meal together and so on. It saddens and frightens me how easy it seems to dehumanize other people and basically be OK with killing them en masse.
Now I want you to think about what you'd do if you sent your 11 year old daughter to school one day and some foreign government double tapped that school with 2 Tomahawk missiles killing almost 200 people, most of them children.
We kind of do know because it's basically what happened after 9/11. We spent $8T+ on a 20 year war to kill over a million people in vengeance that really didn't do anything else. Remember that Afghanistan offered to hand bin Laden over after 9/11 [1].
The Trump administration tried (badly) lying about what happened. First it never happened. Second, it wasn't us. But nobody else has Tomahawk missiles so that was never going to work.
The only question is where the targeting information came from and what verification was done. I am not convinced that Israel didn't supply this information so the US military would commit atrocities to keep them in a war that Israel had desperately wanted for decades. Every president since Reagan had been begged by Israeli PMs to invade Iran. All of them refused. It's widely believed that Netanyahu threatened to use nukes if Obama wouldn't do it. Obama called his bluff. Until Trump. And here we are.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
> The point is that Iranian families want all of those things too. Because they're people just like you are. You can see videos of ordinary Iranians going to the market, going to work, having family over, eating a meal together and so on. It saddens and frightens me how easy it seems to dehumanize other people and basically be OK with killing them en masse.
The IRGC/regime is what prevents them from living normal lives. The Iranian diaspora is protesting in favor or removing the regime since they know who the real enemy is.[0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4w728kl4ko
> We kind of do know because it's basically what happened after 9/11. We spent $8T+ on a 20 year war to kill over a million people in vengeance that really didn't do anything else
The 'we' in your first sentence is not the same 'we' that is in your second sentence.
I don't think you've done this intentionally but this kind of talk is how propagandists conflate what the masses want and do with what people in power want and do.
This conflation is hugely problematic - it's like saying sometimes we go to the movies, sometimes we murder children. No, no, 'we' are not murdering children, some people are murdering children and those people are a problem.
[flagged]
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are? we're trying for something different here. We've had to ask you this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718735), and you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355271 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154963, in addition to here).
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
the classic gotcha that doesn't work on outsiders that don't care about the partisan devide. All US presidents going back for quite a while are war criminals.
Christians aren't bad people. Its just that the older ones (and a few young ones) get their information from terrible sources. They watch Fox News, where every day Trump is presented as the hero fighting against the evil democrats. They don't notice the propaganda like a fish doesn't notice water. Bad inputs bad outputs.
Christians aren't bad people, but it's undeniable that the one demographic that supports Trump more than any other are Christians. Trump is the face, heart and soul of American Christianity. Where else are Christians arguing that genocide on behalf of Israel is a moral imperative, or that empathy is a sin?
If so many Christians were so easily swayed by hateful propaganda then that's still a fault and failure of the religion, as is the utter failure of the "good" Christians to do anything about it. People aren't machines that blindly process inputs into outputs, at least not in any useful sense that takes morality and ethics into account. People have agency, they're responsible for their own decisions. And these people have a Bible probably at arms reach at all times and they know what it says.
>"Christians aren't bad people, but it's undeniable that the one demographic that supports Trump more than any other are Christians."
Christianity itself really has little to do with it. I think it's more so that "Christian" is just the default cultural identity and worldview of native born Americans who have zero self awareness, thoughtfulness, or perspective on the world. Almost none of them actually believe anything really when you start to ask questions about it. It's just the in-group that they latch on to because they've never had an independent thought in their lives.
ECHR, UN and ECJ will find any and everything as crime against humanity so it is best to ignore them and make your own judgement. It is like asking ADL if something is antisemitism or SPLC if something is racism - the answer will always be yes, so why bother.
> ECHR, UN and ECJ will find any and everything as crime against humanity
That doesn't make them automatically wrong. This is clearly a crime against humanity.
> It is like asking ADL if something is antisemitism
There is a huge difference between hating Jews and condemning the actions of the Israeli government in occupied Palestine and the support it has from other countries.
Oh ok, so then how do you qualify this event? As whoopsie? A misclick?
Okay. My own judgement is targeting strikes on an elementary school full of hundreds of school children is a war crime.
Do you not want to see accountability for that? Are you not pro-life?
Of course I want to see accountability. Two valuable and expensive ammunitions were wasted and pilots were exposed to unnecessary risk due to sloppy intelligence work. Also there should be punishment for the civilian deaths I guess. But unless the school was deliberately targeted because it was a school, double taping on military barracks that are attached to a military base shouldn't be looked as a war crime. USG is under no obligation to have up to date information.
>Following the United States and Israeli attacks on 28 February, the mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks resulting in the loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects.
The attacks were obviously not indiscriminate. Indiscriminate is covering an area with napalm and throwing a match.
>USG is under no obligation to have up to date information.
Why not? This is not the perspective of the various international agreements the US has signed about war. Knowing what you are shooting is in fact an obligation.
Hell, knowing what you are shooting is an obligation of deer hunters in my state. If you shoot someone because you thought they were a deer, you are in trouble even if they weren't wearing an orange vest.
The reason this obligation exists is because you always have the option to not shoot. If you do not know accurate info about what you are shooting at, you are supposed to not shoot at it.
It was clearly a school and deliberately targeted.
You caring more about munitions than the lives of innocent children says a lot about who you are.
We all know this happened. What I find hilarious in the discussion here is that everyone also knows it was caused by AI replacing humans on the battlefield, but because so many here have deeply conflicted interests they pretend they don’t know and act as though some human somewhere did this intentionally. Greed really corrupts the dialog around military use of AI.
> so many here have deeply conflicted interests
What do you mean by this? I use AI both personally and for work but I'm not conflicted at all about its use for things we generally agree are harmful.
Wasn't it right next to a military base, and previously used as part of that military base? And therefore a reasonable part of the targeting list that should've gotten more scrutiny but just didn't?
This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.
I don’t understand your attitude. The slaughter of hundreds of children seems genuinely inherently upsetting and unacceptable to me. I don’t see why an element of negligence would make this something to just “not pontificate on” in a court of law or in public discourse.
As far as I know, yes. However, it was not quite adjacent but rather within the military base.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=27.10983&mlon=57.08475&z...
After first looking at the map, I was quite surprised as it wasn't mentioned in the news.
Why is a school basically located on a military area, and not in a residential area?
> This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.
If a soldier on the ground had called in the airstrike, there is a good chance they would be in military prison.
The fact that the administration itself did it means nothing will happen.
Always know what you're shooting at, especially if it changed purposes over a decade ago.
> If a soldier on the ground had called in the airstrike, there is a good chance they would be in military prison.
No, they wouldn't and neither would they in any other military; most militaries don't punish most war crimes let alone what looks like negligence.