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beloch 17 hours ago [-]
"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the ranked options, and the system, depending on who is using it, either sends the target package to an officer for approval or moves it to execution."
----------------
Maven is a tool for use in the middle of a war. When both sides are firing, minutes saved can mean lives saved for your side. Those lives, at least partly, balance the risks of hitting a bad target.
This was not a strike made in the middle of a war. If Maven was used in the strike that took out a school, it was being used as part of a sneak attack. Nobody was shooting back while this was being planned. Minutes saved were not lives saved. There should have been a priority placed on getting the targets right. Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means. This clearly didn't happen. The school was obviously a school that even had its own website. Humans would have spotted this if they had done more than make their three clicks and move on to the next target.
Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it. Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse, they are directly responsible for the deaths of those little girls. I sincerely hope there are (although I doubt there will be) consequences for this person beyond taking that guilt to their grave.
pasquinelli 13 hours ago [-]
> Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse snip
it could be both, but we know no. 2, the complete disregard for the lives of civilians, is in play because, whatever else was going on, america was initiating war for the purpose of destabilizing a country, afaict at least, the reasoning has been unclear. destablize means to try to make things fuck up, and that tends to kill people. what people? how? who knows? things fucking up means out of control. at that point it's up to physics, not people.
it's like, if i set a house on fire, then later defended that action by claiming to have not known where i started the fire was a nursery.
back in the war on terror days america had a habit of blowing up weddings, and then claiming it was an accident. and i would think, accident how? did the missile fire itself?
YZF 16 hours ago [-]
I couldn't find a web site for the school when I searched for one and I also noticed that while schools are generally marked on Google Maps in Iran this school was not. Both are IMO not really relevant or reliable sources of targeting data anyways. I found very little evidence searching online for the school but I did find something that looked like a blog about a school trip. Again though the Internet is not a reliable source of data for targeting - should be obvious.
The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage.
I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school).
It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence.
In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.
gruez 16 hours ago [-]
>It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns.
You might be overestimating how much satellite capacity there is to do this level of analysis for every target.
lejalv 13 hours ago [-]
Well, but this is irrelevant. You can't possibly say 'listen, the richest army on Earth does not have the means to prevent bombing a school'
Griffinsauce 3 hours ago [-]
Then don't bomb it.
"we couldn't tell whether it was a legit target" does not fly as a reason to continue.
Jensson 4 minutes ago [-]
How many American lives would you sacrifice for that? The people who made the decision to fire a missile at this place didn't decide to start the war, once you have started the war you have to make ugly tradeoffs like being too liberal or too conservative with targeting decisions.
megous 16 hours ago [-]
Missing the forest for the trees, are you? Wars of aggression are against UN rules, and US is in the wrong regardless of what it hit.
Feels like we're talking here about whether rapist should have known that the rapee was a child or an adult, and they had a good reason to believe it was an adult person (there was mother of the girl standing next to it, so, hard to distinguish...), so yeah, obviously a tragedy they raped a child instead, but it happens sometimes when you rape a lot of people at once. A tragedy, but let's get on with raping more...
YZF 15 hours ago [-]
Iran has been waging war since the Islamic Revolution and the US claims that there was a threat of attack on US bases and US interests and therefore the attack was in self defense. The body that decides is the UNSC and given the US has veto powers it's not going to obviously declare the US attack illegal.
From Israel's perspective there's an even stronger self defense argument given the amount of missiles aimed at Israel from Iran and the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel. So the US argument that they knew Israel was planning the attack and they knew Iran would retaliate against US interests seems at least on the surface to bad valid.
dylan604 15 hours ago [-]
> the US claims that there was a threat of attack
What the US claims is really not a strong source of anything, and I'm saying that as an American. The most compelling reasoning is that Israel was going to do something so US decision makers decided joining was the best worst decision, and I'm being very bend over backwards generous with that. Anything else is just excuses trying to cover it up. It seems obvious now that there was no stopping Israel from their strike on Iranian leadership. It was too ripe of a target, they have been emboldened by current US admin, so at that point it was in for a penny, in for a pound mentality.
If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets, then the world would possibly have some sympathy. No rational person could condone an outright first strike just because we thought something was going to happen. Yet the fact that in the "we think they will do something" spit balling never suggested shutting the down the strait seems very suspect as well.
leereeves 12 hours ago [-]
> If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets
A reasonable belief, because Iran in fact responded to the US+Israeli strikes by attacking US allies and even neutral nations like Qatar.
And why should we doubt that Iran would have closed the Strait of Hormuz even if the US had not attacked, leaving Israel to attack alone? The strategic calculation (threaten the world economy so other nations oppose the war) would have been the same.
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
But had the US not been part of the first strike, they could have applied much more diplomatic pressure to open the strait. As an active aggressor, they have no wiggle room. It might seem like semantics to you, but there's a huge difference diplomatically.
leereeves 11 hours ago [-]
Pressure from most of the world isn't enough, why would additional pressure from the US (who Iran already regarded as an enemy) have made the difference?
dylan604 10 hours ago [-]
Iran didn't really do anything last year after supposedly having their facilities "totally annihilated". But it used to be that the US was respected enough that public saber rattling and behind the scenes diplomatic efforts would avoid conflict. Sadly, we've done our damnedest to turn that respect into a joke. We used to make deals with people, but the greatest deal maker ripped up all of them and replaced them with nothing on the word better deals were for the taking.
parineum 2 hours ago [-]
> But it used to be that the US was respected enough that public saber rattling and behind the scenes diplomatic efforts would avoid conflict.
This is isn't true in practice, even if you want to argue it's technically true. Iran has been participating in conflict through proxies continually for decades. US sabre rattling has done nothing to quell that violence.
tovej 4 hours ago [-]
Qatar is not a neutral nation. It is a US ally, and the US army has a big presence there, inclusing CENTCOM forward headquarters and air operations.
The largest US base in the region is an air base in Qatar (which Iran has hit).
leereeves 2 hours ago [-]
It's also been an ally of Iran. Qatar is not neutral in that it stays distant from both sides, it is neutral in that it attempts to maintain good relations with both sides.
Iran has attacked the US base in Qatar before. When they did so in 2025, Iran's Supreme National Security Council issued a statement: "this action does not pose any threat to the friendly and brotherly country, Qatar, and its noble people, and the Islamic Republic of Iran remains committed to maintaining and continuing warm and historic relations with Qatar".
This time Iran attacked Qatar itself, including the Ras Laffan gas facility and Hamad International Airport.
epolanski 8 hours ago [-]
You can't relabel aggression like in Venezuela and now Iran as defense.
An aggression is an aggression.
As in tribunals, to claim you acted in self defense, you need proof.
And the Pentagon itself admits there were no threats.
cma 15 hours ago [-]
> the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel.
Iran has supported a treaty on elimination of weapons of mass destruction in the middle east, Israel has been the blocker of it, only actor in the region that has nukes, and isn't in the NPT.
As a non-signer of the NPT, military aid to Israel is also illegal under US law, so we play along with strategic ambiguity and pretend they don't have them.
cool_dude85 15 hours ago [-]
>Iran has been waging war since the Islamic Revolution
On who?
alex43578 15 hours ago [-]
At various times, and potentially via proxies:
Iraq
Saudi Arabia
Israel
Kurdish Rebels
The US
“All countries” via actions against shipping in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz
shykes 10 hours ago [-]
Iran proxies were extremely active in Syria, as they were close allies of the Assad regime. They are responsible for countless exactions.
In 1992 there was a deadly car bomb attack in Argentina, killing 29 people and injuring 250 more. Then again in 1994 a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 87 people. Eventually the investigation demonstrated conclusively that Iran was responsible.
epolanski 8 hours ago [-]
You have better examples for Iran like Hezbollah and Hamas.
Albeit Hamas has been largely propped by Israel itself and Qatar.
shykes 8 hours ago [-]
> You have better examples for Iran like Hezbollah and Hamas.
Yes but that was mostly covered already by the comment I was responded to. I was just filling a few gaps in the list.
> Albeit Hamas has been largely propped by Israel itself and Qatar.
Qatar has certainly financed and supported Hamas a great deal.
Israel has absolutely not "propped up" Hamas. I'm aware of the allegations to the contrary, but they are wildly inflated nonsense. Israel and Hamas have been enemies to the death for decades.
energy123 15 hours ago [-]
They've colonized the whole region with their proxies, from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq, previously Syria which they attacked with Hezbollah to support the Russia-backed Assad. About 1 million dead people from all this proxy warfare. Lebanon in particular wants to be a normal liberal democracy but their proxy militia assassinates any politician who stands in their way.
sumeno 13 hours ago [-]
How many dead from the US's proxy wars?
dylan604 12 hours ago [-]
This is irrelevant to the topic at hand. Not dismissing your point, but it's really not a useful follow up. The two things can be bad at the same time.
tovej 4 hours ago [-]
Not really irrelevant if the original question was whether this was "self defense".
SanjayMehta 10 hours ago [-]
Excuses.
The fact is that the US routinely commits acts of perfidy. This was the second time they attacked Iran during negotiations.
I've said before that I'm no fan of the Iranian mullah regime, but the US is basically run by war criminals.
And they're proud of it. Albright and her "murdering 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it," Hillary and her "we came we saw he died," and
Nobel Peace Prize Barack Hussein Obama with his targeting US citizens via drone + 28000 bombing attacks, to this orange monster demolishing the White House (literally and figuratively) and any pretence at being trustworthy or civilised.
swat535 7 hours ago [-]
Imagine if the inverse had happened: IRAN killed 170 American children.
Then claimed it was "AI"'s fault.
I think the comment section here would look different.
aaron695 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Hikikomori 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Jensson 2 hours ago [-]
> Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it
Who said they had all the time in the world? You can't get most of Irans upper leadership in a single room every day when they were publicly trying to hide.
jvanderbot 16 hours ago [-]
I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate. TFA discusses 50 specific strikes all of which missed via automated analysis. That doesn't seem the same.
I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground.
However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.
Denzel 16 hours ago [-]
So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties
How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.
> so this already is a low error rate
As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.
We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.
> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.
Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
dylan604 12 hours ago [-]
> So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
TFA is from The Guardian while GP you responded to specifically called out the NYT analysis. These are different things. Maybe reading the GP's suggested source would leave you with a different set of questions?
Denzel 7 hours ago [-]
Friend, TFA commonly refers to the effing article that’s posted for discussion.
EDIT: The irony that GP then goes on the quote TFA and not NYT.
jvanderbot 15 hours ago [-]
I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once.
> . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
> The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”
> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”
---
> Please reason through the implications now?
It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.
> 1000s
1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.
Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.
> we targeted and killed young children
We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.
xrd 14 hours ago [-]
"it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation."
I think you and I disagree on what the situation is here. I don't think it was necessary to bomb Iran and it feels like you are saying we did.
tunesmith 13 hours ago [-]
It feels like an appreciation for hypotheticals or givens is missing here. One can simultaneously be against the war and the bombing in general, and also accept it as a given and then think about a certain situation being understandable within that given.
Denzel 7 hours ago [-]
Thanks for point-by-point.
Your first two quotes are about targeting in the Iraq War; specifically how the breakdown in careful analysis, precipitated by the new systems, led to the exact mis-targeting they were trying to solve. That’s what the entire article is about.
And your third quote is from an ex-official commenting on the event after the school strike happened.
These quotes contradict your original point, ie they show how careful analysis has been designed out of the system.
> We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
This sounds incredibly naive. For starters, plausible deniability due to diffuse responsibility is a thing.
“Of course we don’t target schools and kill children, this was a system error.” But the message gets sent regardless and meanwhile we have people arguing back-and-forth over grains of sand because they took an action with deliberate plausible deniability.
Of course they didn’t intend to kill the children, they only intended to disperse the strikers by setting their tents on fire. It was simply a mistake.
burkaman 15 hours ago [-]
> If you do - how can you? Why would they?
I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.
pegasus 14 hours ago [-]
This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.
burkaman 13 hours ago [-]
The claim I'm responding to is "I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed." I agree it's unusual for anyone in the US military to drop a bomb primarily because they want to kill some children. I think it is not unusual for people involved in bombing campaigns to anticipate killing children and move forward anyway.
ImPostingOnHN 13 hours ago [-]
> This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself
Targeting a single person which might be a valid target had war been declared, while also intentionally striking many civilians around them, is the same as targeting those civilians. You knew the bomb you dropped was going to kill them, and you pressed the button. It makes no difference who the primary "target" is.
Otherwise, countries would just bomb all the civilians and all their infrastructure and medical facilities and schools with the excuse that they heard from an unnamed source that there was a combatant nearby, like israel does in Palestine.
cyberax 13 hours ago [-]
Ask yourself this: the 9/11 bombings damaged economically valuable targets for the US, and the Pentagon is a straightforwardly valid military target.
Can your logic be used to justify these strikes?
stickfigure 14 hours ago [-]
No evidence has shown up suggesting there was some sort of compelling target in the school. As foul as Trump and Hegseth may be, they aren't cartoon character villains. The Occam's razor explanation is that this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
pasquinelli 13 hours ago [-]
just because you assume that trump and hegseth aren't cartoonishly evil, doesn't mean they aren't. looking at america's actions for a long time, the occam's razor explanation is that america is cartoonishly evil. the reason you struggle with that is about emotions, not logic. and i get it.
worik 14 hours ago [-]
It is possible that two things are true
1. this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
2. Trump and Hegseth are (like) cartoon character villains.
pegasus 14 hours ago [-]
There are no cartoon villains in general, that's the point GP is making by using the word "cartoon". Let's use some common sense, it's not like Trump and Hegseth got together and sneaked in the school on the list of targets just because they liked the idea of children being killed. It's naive to suggest this is a possibility worth considering.
tastyface 13 hours ago [-]
Given their glee at droning unarmed fishermen in the Caribbean, I would argue they are much farther along this axis than you realize.
fud101 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there boss. The man Hegseth in all his 'no quarter' bravado is only affirming his own mother's claim that he is a piece of shit. respectfully of course, I would not put it past him to kill some kids for a political or terrorism reason (the parents).
Obama and Bush both regularly bombed weddings where a single target was present.
It's a non-sequitur point anyway, these kids weren't families of terrorists.
sirfz 14 hours ago [-]
It's incredible, after all the grotesque stories about rape, torture and murder of children, men and women during the Iraq war, active support of genocide (and 10s of thousands of children murdered by Israel, on purpose), prisoners rape and child imprisonment, a "secretary of war" and president publicly admiting to war crimes and saying things like "negotiate with bombs" you still "refuse to believe" that anyone in decision chain wouldn't do anything like this.
jvanderbot 14 hours ago [-]
our views of the world are probably irreconcilable, and I don't think your comment was written to try to fix that.
sirfz 13 hours ago [-]
My comment is to say the US has proven how brutal they are consistently through all the wars of aggression they have waged in the past several decades. They do not see their "enemies" as human. I can't fix anything unfortunately.
shadowgovt 14 hours ago [-]
The terrorists that struck the World Trade Center targeted a building too.
If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.
shevy-java 13 hours ago [-]
Which terrorists exactly though?
If I recall we saw two planes. We did not see any individual as such in the planes, did we? We saw some passports; not sure that this proves much at all. We also had WTC 7 going down and the strike on the other building (was it in Washington) but not much aside from this.
I am not saying the-cake-is-a-lie, everything was fabricated, mind you. What I am saying is that IF we are going to make any conclusions, we need to look at what we have, and then find explanations and projections to what is missing. For instance, any follow-up question such as damage to a building, can be calculated by a computer, so this is not a problem. The problem, though, is IF one can not trust a government, to then buy into what they show or present to the viewer. Hitler also used a fake narrative to sell the invasion of Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
That does not mean everything else is a false flag or fake, per se, but I do not automatically trust any allegation made by any government. You can look back in history and wonder about attempts to sell explanations, such as Warren Commission and a magic bullet switching directions multiple times. Again, that can be calculated via computers, so that's not an issue per se; the issue is if they made claims that are factually incorrect and/or incomplete.
lovich 14 hours ago [-]
> I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?
And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.
I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?
stickfigure 14 hours ago [-]
Nobody deliberately produces propaganda for their enemies. The people involved may be evil and stupid, but nobody is that evil and stupid.
ImPostingOnHN 12 hours ago [-]
we are speaking politicians who make a habit of bluster and liking "shows of force" and are openly contemptful of the lives of those who don't agree with or look like them
some of them believe that it is their religious duty to start this war and make it heinous enough to start ww3 and bring forth the return of jesus christ
I think you are ascribing a level of systems thinking and care about consequences which one cannot simply assume is there
if you were to, say, start with an assumption that some of the actors have the mental patterns and world model of an angsty, self-centered teenager, or younger, then you might draw different conclusions
nostrademons 13 hours ago [-]
Just pointing out that this...
> Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case.
...is a logical fallacy (false dichotomy). It presumes a level of intent that isn't necessarily present.
For an example of how these might coexist, I'd encourage The Toxoplasma of Rage, which is a long essay that frequently comes up here:
The idea is that rage is its own, self-replicating emotion, and given the medium of the Internet, it's possible that some memes have no purpose other than self-perpetuation. A story about a girls' school being blown up is self-replicating: it gets people riled up enough to share it. A story about a random factory, or some dead person's house, or an empty patch of desert is not really. It's entirely possible that attacks on these happened hundreds of times in the Iran war, but if it did, I would never know about it. I probably wouldn't care about it. Those are not stories that go viral, they don't have enough emotional valence to make people care. And the media knows this, and so they don't bother to seek them out or run them.
tovej 4 hours ago [-]
And in fact, a handful of illegal targets get hit each day, according to HRANA. HRANA is an Iranian human rights org that was banned in Iran during an election and has since been re-established in the US. They are a reliable source.
If you scroll down to the "Facilities Protected Under International Humanitarian Law", you will see a list of non-military targets. That part is never empty in these reports.
dbt00 16 hours ago [-]
How many American schoolchildren have Iran killed in the last 25 years? How many Iranian schoolchildren have America killed?
Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?
gruez 16 hours ago [-]
This feels like moving the goalposts. The OP and the preceding comments are pretty clearly talking about the targeting mistake aspect of this incident, not the war itself. You're moving the discussion from the former to the latter to it easier to argue that US is in the wrong, but if the argument is that the war was unjust to begin with, then do you really need a school getting bombed to push you over the edge? After all, even if they bombed an IRGC compound and only killed soldiers, those soldiers are still people's sons, fathers, husbands. Even if there's no deaths, you could still make the macroeconomic argument that any economic losses are impoverishing the Iranian people.
kakacik 15 hours ago [-]
No, I am fine with parent's take. We treat children as absolutely innocent (which they are, regardless of the way anybody tries to spin this or ie Gaza), and killing children is extra heinous crime compared to killing adult, same with rape etc. Children rapist get extra special treatment in jails, often from other murderers and society is largely fine with that.
As a parent, even when cutting off most of the emotions related to this horrible war crime, I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
gruez 15 hours ago [-]
>I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
No, it's not whataboutism, it's moving the goalposts. Consider the following exchange:
Alice: "McDonalds mistreats its workers by paying them below the minimum wage"
Bob: "No they don't. They all get paid at or above the local minimum wage"
Charlie: "Well that doesn't matter, because McDonald's still mistreats its workers because it's a capitalist institution, which by definition means they're siphoning the fruits of the worker's labor"
Even if you agree with Charlie's point, at the very least it's in poor taste to bring it up in a conversation specifically talking about the minimum wage. Otherwise every discussion about some aspect of [thing] just turns into a plebiscite about [thing].
jvanderbot 15 hours ago [-]
Please ask yourself if there is true evil in the world. People who are willing to kill children on purpose, or maim them, or burn them with acid, or commit other bad things I wont get into.
Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them.
Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
And ask if we were trying to target people from group A or group B.
This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.
zmmmmm 15 hours ago [-]
> Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
false dichotomies are a common rhetorical method (and sometimes useful) to argue your way to a moral justification, but that doesn't make them reflect reality
There is no A and B. You want to force a situation where B is pure good intent and we either have to choose that or choose A where there is only bad intent. The reality is, this war is about ego, power and money as much as it is about any "good intent". The decisions to start the war were made with a full knowledge of the risks and costs it would entail, with almost all of those being externalised to other people than those taking the choices.
Nobody taking those choices should get to just opt out of moral responsibility with some easy "A / B" logic.
yibg 14 hours ago [-]
Group A also include starting a war for bad reasons and then "accidentally" killing school children as a result.
bdangubic 15 hours ago [-]
We (US) are definitely in Group A. We killed and are continuing to kill more innocent people (including children) than everyone else combined but are always hiding under “oh, we really good guys here, just shit happens while we are bombing around the world for decades for no particular reason until we eventually lose and leave”)
ashdksnndck 14 hours ago [-]
The only reason Iranian bombs aren’t hitting America is because their range isn’t long enough. Iran-commanded forces (located in Iran, Lebanon, Yemen) have been targeting civilians for many years.
cramsession 13 hours ago [-]
The only reason Iran would attack the US is because we back the terror colony of Israel. No Israel, no war.
ashdksnndck 13 hours ago [-]
So to clarify, your argument is it’s ok to target civilians with bombs as long as they are located in a nation that practices terror?
cramsession 13 hours ago [-]
Iran has never targeted the US but if they did, I would assume they would hit military targets.
ashdksnndck 13 hours ago [-]
Iran and its proxies frequently target civilians. They would make an exception for the US?
cramsession 12 hours ago [-]
How many American civilians have Iran killed? I would not consider Zionists to be civilians, they're literally living on stolen land.
ashdksnndck 11 hours ago [-]
You believe that anyone who lives on stolen land is not a citizen and deserves to be bombed? Americans live on stolen land too, as does much of the rest of the world population.
cramsession 11 hours ago [-]
If it was 1570, it would absolutely be valid to remove settlers from the Americas. If fact the Pueblo Revolt is considered to be one of the more successful and justified acts of indigenous resistance.
ashdksnndck 10 hours ago [-]
Ok, it sounds the principle here is if any land was stolen in the 20th century the people who live there now aren’t citizens (regardless if they are children or not) and deserve to be bombed? I hope nobody tells the balkans.
cramsession 10 hours ago [-]
Parents are solely responsible for bringing their children on stolen land. There were indigenous children living there that were murdered.
10 hours ago [-]
lejalv 13 hours ago [-]
This is just your opinion. The tragedy here is that there are people with similar opinion and bombs at their disposal that feel complete impunity and go around murdering in the world
Also, remembe the CIA co-staged a coup in Iran in 1953. That's one fact, nor just opinion.
baublet 13 hours ago [-]
I suspect if the IRGC accidentally blew up a school next to a military base in Oklahoma, they would find it in them to condemn those who made such an innocent mistake.
lejalv 13 hours ago [-]
That's all speculation. What we know is that the US agressed Iran without provocation and in the midst of negotiations and started by blowing up a school and not owning up to it. And now they have threatened multiple times with destroying the civilian energy infrastructure, which is a war crime.
HDThoreaun 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
orochimaaru 14 hours ago [-]
No. No childs life is worth some hypothetical regime change. There is no greater evil in this scenario than a hypothetical greater good attempts at justifying this.
stickfigure 12 hours ago [-]
What are the lives of the next 10 thousand protesters the regime will kill worth?
orochimaaru 11 hours ago [-]
Still not worth the lives of children
Forgeties79 15 hours ago [-]
> Accidentally killing a bunch of kids would likely be worth it, morally speaking, if it led to the destruction of the Iranian regime.
It most absolutely is not and I struggle to believe you can build a valid argument that links bombing school children as necessary for the fall of Iran’s government.
How you win a war, especially one as lopsided as this invasion is, is as important as winning. I cannot so easily sleep at night knowing we are committing horrific atrocities during an invasion we chose to launch against a country thousands of miles away with zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
Dylan16807 15 hours ago [-]
Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war. Do you agree with the statement "No war has ever been worth the results."? If yes, then okay end of conversation. But if not then we need to talk about acceptable mistake rates and where this falls, because zero mistakes is not possible. Note that I am not defending the strike here, I'm saying that the criticism needs more depth.
sebastiennight 15 hours ago [-]
Would you mind sharing a handful of examples where, from your perspective, a war was worth its results?
Dylan16807 14 hours ago [-]
I guess I'd start with most colonial freedom wars.
sebastiennight 13 hours ago [-]
I might not know your personal background, but I have a hard time imagining you come from a lineage that has experience the cost of one of those.
The list of today's remaining colonies is short enough[0] that it is worth considering whether decolonization was "an idea that reached its time" in the late 20th century ; and given that there are examples of peaceful revolutions (eg India and West Africa) it is worth asking whether more places could have undergone peaceful transitions, and whether the cost in human lives and atrocities born within a decade of war doesn't outweigh the cost of the colonial system dying by itself within the same order of magnitude of time.
But then again, I think you're veering us somewhat off-topic as I'd consider a "colonial freedom war" to be a revolution (the people overthrowing their overlord) which is quite different from the topic at hand here, war between nation-states.
> Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war.
Killing children is a war crime, and not an inevitable part of war.
ashdksnndck 1 hours ago [-]
Same commenter, 3 hours later, defending bombing of children:
> Parents are solely responsible for bringing their children on stolen land. There were indigenous children living there that were murdered.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
On purpose or with significant negligence, it's a war crime. But collateral damage is not something you can just choose to avoid.
Forgeties79 15 hours ago [-]
I don’t need to hear deep arguments to be convinced that it’s not ok to kill my children/bomb their school.
Dylan16807 14 hours ago [-]
Can you answer the question though? It's not a trick question, I want to see where you're coming from.
And it's not about whether it's "okay".
Forgeties79 11 hours ago [-]
I didn’t answer it because you’re framing it as the end-all be-all of this discussion when it’s bordering on a strawman argument.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
Which part do you think is a strawman? Because one of the people that replied to me does appear to think that no war has ever been worth the results. It's a legitimate point of view, and that's why I asked if it was your point of view.
For the rest of this post I'm assuming it's not your point of view.
I'm very much not trying to strawman you, I'm trying to improve your argument. If any wars are considered "worth it, morally speaking", then single mistakes can't be enough to invalidate the war. We need to talk about how many mistakes happen and how they happen. We need to say how much is too much, and "zero mistakes" is not compatible with "some wars are worth it". The idea that we could have both in the real world is self-deception.
HDThoreaun 15 hours ago [-]
1. This isnt an invasion, just a bombing campaign.
2. Of course it would be better to not kill any kids, but thats just not how war works. Mistakes will be made, that doesnt mean eliminating the number one funder of terror in the world isnt worth it. Even if the next regime hates the US/israel just as much they will likely spend much less supporting terror groups because they know theyll just get bombed again.
3. Of course this is all if the bombing campaign actually worked. It didnt, and thats no surprise, which is why the whole thing is pretty clearly immoral imo.
> zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
The houthis harmed the US quite a bit by destroying American ships and harming global trade. In fact their actions were arguably far more harmful to the average american than any domestic terrorist attack could possibly be because of the economic impact that effected every single american.
cramsession 15 hours ago [-]
The US/Israel are far and away the number one terrorist organization in the world, and it's not even close.
HDThoreaun 15 hours ago [-]
Which is why I said I dont think it would be immoral for Iran to launch a bunch of rockets at the US or israel to force regime changes.
Forgeties79 15 hours ago [-]
But they can’t and don’t lob missiles at the US so to act as if they are is ridiculous. This is not a fight between equal weight classes.
HDThoreaun 15 hours ago [-]
First, this is completely untrue. Hamas and Hezbollah have been launching missiles at Israel literally nonstop for 20 years. The houithis have and will continue to launch missiles at US assets along the Bab al-Mandab Strait. All of these missiles came directly from the iranian regime. Those groups are an arm of the Iranian government
Thats not the point though. There is no reason for either party to respond proportionally in a war. Going to war against an equal weight class as idiocy, sun tzu figured that one out forever ago.
Forgeties79 15 hours ago [-]
>At the US
HDThoreaun 12 hours ago [-]
So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents? Doesnt make sense to me. Thats before we even get to the major economic damage their terrorist network has caused. The US morally must just sit back while Iran funds and arms the group that routinely shuts down global trade and costs americans billions?
cramsession 12 hours ago [-]
There's literally zero proof that Iran killed any innocent children.
Forgeties79 11 hours ago [-]
I didn’t say literally anything like that. What?
ImPostingOnHN 13 hours ago [-]
israel is not the US
pesus 12 hours ago [-]
Most of our politicians seem to think it is, so maybe it was a Freudian slip.
Forgeties79 15 hours ago [-]
We literally just deployed 5000 troops to Iran after weeks of bombing. We are boots on the ground and our belligerent president literally calls it a war. It is disingenuous to bicker over whether we can call our attack an invasion. If it was happening to us we certainly would call it one.
Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics. Especially when discussing bombing a school.
HDThoreaun 15 hours ago [-]
> Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics.
I was responding to whether the "invasion" could have been accomplished without killing the kids. I dont think that's realistic.
The separate question of whether it's worth it morally to topple the regime given kids will die I think is pretty simply yes. Iran's funding of terrorism kills and will continue to kill far more kids than died in this strike. Iran's funding of Hamas has been partially responsible for the terrible conditions Gazans are subject to. Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off. Same with Yemen, if Iranian funding is cut off conditions for the 15 million children there will improve. So yea for me personally Ive got no problem with a bombing campaign that will undoubtedly accidentally kill some civilians if it means the Iranian regime is toppled.
ImPostingOnHN 13 hours ago [-]
Killing children in an unprovoked attack to stop somebody else from potentially killing children in the future doesn't seem like a moral take to me, even if "someone else" killed more in the past or will in the future. In particular, because it actually sends the message that it's ok to kill children as long as you get what you want in the end. Not a great precedent. Perhaps that is the root of where your utilitarian morals diverge from some others' morals.
Unfortunately for everyone, now the US and israel killed a bunch of kids, and reinforced that precedent for others with these sorts of flimsy justifications, *and* everything will be the same or worse in Iran, especially for civilians. So lose-lose-lose.
> Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that [conditions in the Gaza region of Palestine] I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off.
We can already see the outcome of that in the West Bank region of Palestine: no hamas, yet israel still exercises ultimate control via violence, and keeps oppressing and killing Palestinians and taking or destroying their stuff with impunity, especially as of late.
There's no indication israel would be more generous to Palestinians in the Gaza region of Palestine if hamas wasn't there. Palestinians in Gaza see what israel does to Palestinians in the West Bank, and want no part of it. Who can blame them? It's sick.
HDThoreaun 12 hours ago [-]
Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth. If all the million kids in gaza got to live in conditions as good as the west bank kids get the bombing would be worth it for that alone.
ImPostingOnHN 10 hours ago [-]
> Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth.
'The brutal apartheid ongoing in the West Bank isn't as bad as the brutal genocide ongoing in Gaza' isn't the best flex for israel, especially since they're perpetrating both.
obviously before the latest wave of israel's genocide in Gaza, the oppression, control, and lack of freedom in the West Bank region of Palestine were worse than Gaza. Plus the West Bank still experiences israel imprisoning and killing Palestinian civilians and taking or destroying their land and stuff with impunity
the observant reader might notice that the common factor behind the misery in both regions of Palestine is not hamas, but israel
also, consider reading the first half of the post to which you responded – we were talking about the wisdom and morality of killing kids to achieve your objectives, and then also miserably failing to achieve your objectives. Your thoughts? Still worth killing the kids when it was for nothing?
stickfigure 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
anigbrowl 14 hours ago [-]
I don't think they did, and anyway you're just trying to redirect to a different question.
stickfigure 12 hours ago [-]
No, it's core to the question of whether or not you should feel morally outraged by the targeting mistake.
Which is better, leave the regime alone to continue murdering its own citizens, or run the risk of accidentally bombing a hundred schoolchildren?
It's a pretty classic trolley problem.
anigbrowl 11 hours ago [-]
No it isn't. You're assuming perfect information, when the reality is nowhere near as clear. I certainly believe that Iran killed a lot of protesters recently. Undoubtedly some of them were innocent. Some others were collaborators; Israel is well known to be engaged in a shadow war with Iran and to have infiltrated a large number of people within the Iranian security apparatus. I'm thus extremely skeptical of any specific claims around numbers for the foreseeable future.
The problem with this simplistic utilitarianism is that assumes a degree of omniscience that doesn't exist. You can excuse any atrocity by claiming it's an unavoidable by product of a high-minded end. Life rarely presents neat classic trolley problems, and even if it did there are many unknowns; for example, are you sacrificing the life of one saint to save five serial killers? Absent this information I'd opt to save one person, but would be doing so with the awareness that I might be making a very bad decision for which I'll have to take responsibility.
In this case, the trolley is in a whole other country. Unilaterally attacking it (while negotiations were ongoing) is regarded by most experts as a blatant violation of international law and that's the primary reason nominally allied countries are refusing to assist.
14 hours ago [-]
jazz9k 16 hours ago [-]
If we had all military bases next to elementary schools, things might be different.
vkou 16 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of military bases next to elementary schools in the US.
Where do you think the kids of soldiers go to school?
pphysch 16 hours ago [-]
We do. Grocery stores (commissaries) and residential units as well.
sophacles 16 hours ago [-]
The us has over 150 elementary schools on military bases. If you use a more colloquial definition of military base, many many national guard armories are on the same block as elementary schools or even right next to them.
Can you cite anything that says all iranian military bases are next to elementary schools? If they are on ALL bases, that makes hitting an elementary school on base less forgivable, not more, because if its a fact of every iranian military base, it's a lot harder to claim good intelligence and also that they didn't check that the part of base being bombed was the school.
Also, how is that relevant?
15 hours ago [-]
16 hours ago [-]
torginus 14 hours ago [-]
And a very very true one. If the US military had maps at least the quality of local tourist ones, or Google Maps, they could have know basically the location of every ice cream shop, supermarket, school, and military building.
I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades.
Mapping enemy targets is basically one of the biggest tasks (in scope) intelligence agencies undertake, and can be done in peacetime.
There was no extreme time pressure here, this was just a lack of due diligence and operational sloppiness.
One of the key stated goals of this war, is to have the Iranian people topple their totalitarian government, thereby avoiding having to fight a ground war, and as such, goodwill is extremely important.
The damage this strike did to that goodwill outweighs any potential military advantage the US possibly could get out of it.
indubioprorubik 13 hours ago [-]
What if the enemy sets up hopsitals and schools on military bases?
sosomoxie 13 hours ago [-]
The US has hospitals and schools on military bases.
12 hours ago [-]
anigbrowl 13 hours ago [-]
Not sure if astonishingly credulous or just pretending.
Iran claims 600 schools have been damaged, with over 1000 students killed. I doubt the veracity of those numbers, but not as much as I doubt the US claims of benign omniscience in targeting and invulnerability from being targeted.
antinomicus 15 hours ago [-]
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the US should not be in this war at all. How people have already moved on from that to making monstrous posts like this makes me sick.
phs318u 10 hours ago [-]
Who said there’s only been one mis-strike among 1000s of sorties? There’s been one mis-strike so egregiously wrong that even the western media call it out. There would be many more that don’t make it onto the front pages of first world media.
dwa3592 16 hours ago [-]
>>I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!).
What a ridiculous take. What does "originally was" mean? Maybe you wanna say "previously was"? That building was converted to a school 10 years ago! The intelligence they relied on is 10 years old!!!!! It's recklessness and stupidity dressed as bravery and courage.
zippyman55 15 hours ago [-]
It seems these targets get reviewed and excluded if they are no longer targets. To me, it looks like someone was not paying attention for ten yrs.
SlinkyOnStairs 16 hours ago [-]
> Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate.
This is giving them too much credit.
Hegseth has already shown himself to entirely disregard the notion of War Crime, even by the US military's own already controversial standards. The double strike on the boats in the caribbean are literally the textbook example in US military textbooks of what not to do, and that it is a warcrime.
This was no mistake. It was the obvious outcome of a pattern of reckless action.
scuff3d 15 hours ago [-]
I'm sure it's a comfort to the parents and families of 150 dead kids that this is actually a very low error rate.
gopher_space 16 hours ago [-]
What are you doing?
yabutlivnWoods 16 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't have been looking for targets if senile old fucks looking to deflect from their personal liabilities hadn't started shooting.
AI didn't do shit here. Stupid people built the AI and the weapons and applied them. Any other argument is intentional obfuscation.
You all are falling for propaganda.
jvanderbot 15 hours ago [-]
That is actually the point of the article, if you had read it
yabutlivnWoods 13 hours ago [-]
Why? You just saw I got the point without reading it.
Am aware content of media coming from either side is so normalized there is little value giving either my attention for free. I am not susceptible to Fox News fear mongering and already read 1984 among others. Neither are going to say anything novel. They're just engaged in barter for food and shelter.
I spent the time engaged in more useful endeavors to those around me and myself.
torginus 14 hours ago [-]
It's almost as if AI's purpose is to shift blame, saying that the 'computer did it', in which case these deliberately unreliable AI systems are used, so that responsibility can be avoided, or smeared across the command chain, so every person was only responsible for an innocious part of the whole disaster.
A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
megous 16 hours ago [-]
For someone that interested in precision of supporting claims with evidence, you make pretty ridiculous and completely unsupported claims yourself, like "there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties".
spaghetdefects 16 hours ago [-]
The New York Times are the same people who spread the lie about Iraq having WMDs, they are not credible, and in fact have been proven to be incredibly biased when it comes to wars in the Middle East.
Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.
originalvichy 14 hours ago [-]
You have clearly articulated what I’ve personally explained to people. Thank you for that. The nature of the strikes as a part of a thoroughly pre-planned surprise attack lays the entire blame at the planners, approvers and those who executed the strike.
The lack of comprehension some people have baffles me, as I’ve had the displeasure of reading several dozens of online posts asking why kids were at school during the strikes. Even giving these people the benefit of the doubt that they do not know that not all countries observe the same weekday/weekend split as in the case of Iran, how in the world is a teacher or a child supposed to know when to hide from a surprise attack?
The easier it gets to give people the tools and power of lethal force, the more preventable injuries and death happen to innocent people. The cover of military conflict should not protect from consequences in cases like this.
Knowing the demographics of this website, it will not make anyone here safer that there is credible proof of Israel using Whatsapp metadata to source location data of adult men, and executing strikes based on that information. Western media already shared stories of how ordinary cell phone metadata was used to conduct strikes that killed innocent civilians. 15-20 years later the exact same deadly inaccurate methods are being used to quench the leaders’ and planners’ thirst for any results. One day a bomb might fall on any of our homes purely based on some circumstantial proof that wouldn’t even be enough for a traffic violation…
puelocesar 13 hours ago [-]
> Knowing the demographics of this website
Any chance of elaborating on that? I’m new here, so I don’t get it
dylan604 12 hours ago [-]
We learned that Israel was going to strike, so the US decided to jump on board. Do we know how long of a notice Israel gave the US? What you're attributing to as a thought out plan of attack seems to imply plenty of time. I don't think it's unreasonable for Israel to have learned of the meeting with little notice, deliberated internally for however long, and then told the US about it with not much time. I could totally see where under current Pentagon leadership, three clicks would have been the reaction. Yes, the US had been saber rattling and building pressure. That's probably part of why the Iranian leadership decided to meet. Whatever plans the US might have had went out the window when Israel called up and said we're striking now.
Hizonner 10 hours ago [-]
May I suggest a better approach to that situation?
Israel: Hey, we're gonna start bombing Iran in 15 minutes, so pick your targets! Time's a-wastin'!
US: We do not give a fuck who is meeting with who when. If you ever want to see another dime, or another spare part, or another kind word, let alone have us actually do anything, then you aren't gonna do jack shit unless and until we're goddamned good and ready. Otherwise, have fun with the blowback.
dylan604 9 hours ago [-]
You may suggest whatever you want, but it means nothing regardless of how sane and rational of a suggestion it might be. This administration has consistently demonstrated that they are not concerned with that.
btown 16 hours ago [-]
I agree with everything you said - but it's also the case that a set of parameters were created that, instead of requiring multi-person validation of target validity and provenance, prioritized speed to provide decision makers with options.
This certainly doesn't absolve the person implementing those parameters, but it is equally the responsibility of the very top of the decision-making structure.
torginus 15 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure how true that is. Enemy factories and command centers don't grow out of the ground overnight.
Nor do planes get maintained, armed, fueled and flown to the target zone in the matter of minutes.
In preparing such an operation, I'm sure the critical path even with traditional planning methods, is in other places.
While I agree, that there are certain scenarios where an important enemy commander or an expensive mobile launcher gets detected, and you only have a window of minutes to hours before its gone, this is not one of those cases.
I feel like the military bought some fancy new hammers, and wanted to show the purchase was justified.
shadowgovt 14 hours ago [-]
And fundamentally, this is aUS doctrine issue. The US is willing to strike targets in foreign soul with no boots-on-the-ground confirmation of target nature.
It's how the Obama administration drone-struck a wedding before this and how a missile got dropped on a Chinese embassy before that. The doctrine itself is flawed.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but how realistic is it? Israel/US says they've been hitting thousands of targets (so reality might mean ~hundreds, still a lot), how are they supposed to verify this at all?
> Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means.
How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only way you can actually verify stuff like this, not every place in the world is on Google Maps or have a web presence at all, so the only realistic way to verify this would be to visually inspect it in person, something neither parties who started this war want to do.
Even better, don't make attacks against other soverign nations that don't pose an immediately and critical threat to you, and this whole conflict could have been avoided in the first place.
But no, the president has to be involved in some sort of child-trafficking scheme, so pulling the country into a war seemed preferable to being held responsible, and now we're here, arguing about fucking details that don't matter.
free_bip 16 hours ago [-]
The school literally had its own website. If the AI involved was as smart as the media hype machine makes them out to be, it would have found the website and marked it as a non-target. It never even would have made it to human review.
ok_dad 16 hours ago [-]
In this case, they would have discovered it was a school with a Google search, basically. There’s no excuse.
jdross 16 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure this is the school that was on the corner of a military base, and the school building hit was previously part of the military base.
dghlsakjg 15 hours ago [-]
That's a non excuse.
I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire.
The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those buildings have it coming.
DoctorOetker 6 hours ago [-]
Technically the statutes of Rome forbid using human shields.
A nation state bombing US mainland bases sounds rather implausible, although I certainly would prefer that civilian infrastructure to have a minimum distance to military targets, even in the US, even if only to set the right example to the rest of the world.
I do believe there would be value in modernizing the statutes of Rome regarding human shields, which would force nation states to compile machine readable lists of school locations, so that non-existent reported childrens schools and secret childrens schools would be automatically screened.
Keeping the school secret, or reporting a school location too close to a military base would then activate the right of the international community to attack that nation, in order to prevent nation states from using elementary schools etc. as human shields.
IRGC wants nuclear ICBM's. Iran invests heavily in STEM education and physics. The whole population is aware of such goals, the whole population is aware of the adversarial relationship with the Western hemisphere. Imagine your child being allocated the school that was bombed in Iran, but before it was bombed: wouldn't you protest and ask for your child to be allocated to a different school? They risk being the first casualties when the inevitable escalation to war occurs. Clearly in this fun society of Iran, those parents didn't get a choice, and could only pray their kids get through elementary before such a foreign attack occurs.
IMHO, the most damning aspect is that proper, modernized international law clarifying the permitted action-reaction patterns around human shields could have prevented these deaths, by disincentivizing such nations from using kids as human shields.
jmye 16 hours ago [-]
Does that make it not a school, somehow? Or are we cool with killing kids just because their parents might be in the military? I'm not clear what the excuse being made actually is.
hackerstuff 15 hours ago [-]
It's definitely not cool to have a school adjacent to a military base.
Not saying this specific attack was justified, but whoever allowed this, let alone if it was done intentionally as a strategy, also has blood on their hands.
mikeyouse 15 hours ago [-]
Where do you think the children of our armed forces go to school? There are hundreds of schools on or adjacent to military installations in the US. The only people with blood on their hands for bombing a school are the people who bombed the school. It’s really not more complicated than that.
ok_dad 13 hours ago [-]
Bro, American bases have schools all over them, houses with families, etc.
jmye 13 hours ago [-]
> It's definitely not cool to have a school adjacent to a military base. Not saying this specific attack was justified
I mean, you kind of are saying it was justified, given the entirety of your focus is on justifying it. The blood is solely on the hands of the useless, dumbshit military that couldn't identify a school and avoid bombing it. And that's the charitable interpretation of their actions.
Tostino 16 hours ago [-]
Or the vast satellite network we run. Pretty easy to see it's school children going in and out of the area.
bilbo0s 13 hours ago [-]
To be fair, we don't really have the capacity to run satellite surveillance on each and every target we select to engage in a sneak attack.
I think sometimes people watch hollywood movies and get the impression that it represents a kind of cataloging of our military capabilities. A demonstration of what we can do to our enemies. With the underlying subtext being "don't mess with us."
I just want to gently suggest that not everything we see in movies is factual with respect to military or intelligence capabilities.
I'm an old timer. I got off the bus at Quantico in 1991. But even though I'm not in right now, I'd feel confident in betting that we don't have the capacity to surveil that many targets via satellite for, say, 1 week, prior to our attack.
(Of course, when I got off the bus at Quantico in '91 I also would have been just as confident in betting that the US would never engage in a first strike. So what do I know?)
AngryData 12 hours ago [-]
That is true for an active war but I don't believe it is true if you have literally months and months to plan an attack. Unless of course there was no plan until just a few days before and you stupidly threw a ton of your advantage right into the trash.
ok_dad 13 hours ago [-]
So don’t sneak attack. Easy solution.
tristanj 14 hours ago [-]
A similar situation happened a few weeks ago when the US/Israel started targeting Iranian police facilities. They bombed a public park in Tehran called "Police Park" because it has the name "Police" in it. It's a normal park.
If you asked AI to "list the top 100 police facilities in Tehran", this location would appear on the list. It's clear they're using AI to pick targets.
11 hours ago [-]
csmpltn 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nailer 12 hours ago [-]
Give me a source that says Police Park was hit. AFAICT while the place exists, this story was made up.
coffinbirth 15 hours ago [-]
The US is a morally and ethically bankrupt country, that's why something like this happens. Not the first time either[1].
Time for a massive boycott to all US-American products? Or what else will stop the thugs?
Jensson 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody will stop USA as long as they fight evil regimes.
wiseowise 1 hours ago [-]
> as they fight *weak* evil regimes
Fixed. US only has chutzpah to fight someone who can’t meaningfully fight back. If US was truly fighting evil regimes, it would go for Russia, China, NK and bunch of other autocrats.
WarmWash 13 hours ago [-]
Being comfortable with China playing America's role.
lejalv 12 hours ago [-]
For a change, yes
tootie 11 hours ago [-]
China will be worse. Either Europe steps up or we just try living life without a hegemon.
epolanski 8 hours ago [-]
Why do I have to keep believing China will be worse?
It's not china mass survelling the planet, the US is. It's not china starting wars, kidnapping foreign leaders, it's the US.
It's not china threatening their allies, not even going short of mentioning annexations, the US is.
efreak 6 hours ago [-]
China does these things to their own citizens, so really only better for those out of range.
wiseowise 1 hours ago [-]
That’s the whole point, though? US does it to everyone, including its citizens.
atomic_reed 6 hours ago [-]
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Lerc 17 hours ago [-]
"the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target."
This article is the first I have seen mention of Claude in relation to this specific incident. There's been plenty of talk about AI use in warfare in general but in the case of this school most of the coverage I have seen suggested outdated information and procedures not properly followed.
FartyMcFarter 17 hours ago [-]
It's definitely been reported before that Claude was used for Iran attacks, at the beginning of March or earlier:
Amodei looks absolutely prescient for taking a stand against use of Claude in the kill chain. Not to mention how utterly foolish DoD looks declaring Claude to be a national security threat while simultaneously using to choose targets. No wonder they got humiliated in court.
DoctorOetker 6 hours ago [-]
Well, to people who don't believe in precognition, it sounds like Anthropic had quality control engineers dedicated to their military clients' usage. Basically running through the prompts and inspecting the answers and digging deeper how their chatbots gave those answers. Somebody must have pressed the high-alert button, resulting in Anthropic taking a stance.
gowld 16 hours ago [-]
"The U.S. used Anthropic's Claude to support Operation Epic Fury against Iran yesterday, sources familiar with the Pentagon's operations tell Axios."
OK. The US probably also used telephones and Diet Coke.
Nothing cited said that Claude was selecting targets or informing target selection.
you, today, can use Claude in Amazon Bedrock, and the way that works is, if you want it to be this way: the piece of code and model weights and whatever other artifacts are involved, they are run on Bedrock. Bedrock is not a facade against Claude's token-based-billing RESTful API, where Anthropic runs its own stuff. In the strictest sense, Bedrock can be used as a facade over lower level Amazon services that obey non-engineering, real world concerns like geographic boundaries / physical boundaries, like which physical data center hardware is connected by what where / jurisdictional boundaries, whatever. It's multi-tenancy in the sense that Amazon has multiple customers, but it's not multi-tenancy in the sense that, because you want to pay for these requirements, Amazon has sorted out how to run the Claude model weights, as though it were an open-weights model you downloaded off Hugging Face, without giving you the weights, but letting you satisfy all these other IP and jurisdictional and non-technical requirements that you are willing to pay for, in a way that Anthropic has also agreed.
This is what the dispute with the Pentagon is about, and what people mean when they say Claude is used in government (it is used in Elsa for the FDA for example too). Anthropic doesn't have telemetry, like the prompts, in this agreement, so they have the contract that says what you can and cannot use the model for, but they cannot prove how you use the model, which of course they can if you used their RESTful API service. They can't "just" paraphrase your user data and train on it, like they do on the RESTful API service. There are reasons people want this arrangement ($$$).
The vendor (Palantir) can use, whatever model it wants right? It chose Claude via "Bedrock." I don't know if they use Claude via Bedrock. Ask them. But that's what they are essentially saying, that's what this is about. Palantir could use Qwen3 and run it on datacenter hardware. Do you understand? It matters, but it also doesn't matter.
It's a bunch of red herrings in my opinion, and this sort of stuff being a red herring is what the article is mostly about.
ImPostingOnHN 10 hours ago [-]
As I understood it, Anthropic was prime on their own contract which the DoD infamously unsuccessfully tried to renegotiate mid-term. Are you saying that Palantir had some subcontracted use of Claude independent of Anthropic's existing contract?
It wouldn't matter either way. The US is doing war crimes and can't even say sorry properly. This might will be a point we think back to in future.
tunesmith 17 hours ago [-]
Really fascinating article. Bits of bias here and there, like "The US military has been trying to close the gap between seeing something and destroying it for as long as that gap has existed" -- you can respond to seeing and understanding something without destroying it -- but it underscores, to me at least, how much denser the "fog of war" has become. The fog of media reporting in general. Those first few paragraphs felt like a breath of fresh air.
machinecontrol 17 hours ago [-]
Interesting article. Seems like AI-washing isn't just for layoffs anymore.
glouwbug 16 hours ago [-]
What AI does best is remove accountability and ownership
thrawa8387336 15 hours ago [-]
Makes one think why Mckinsey et. al. are doing poorly ;)
plorg 14 hours ago [-]
Did anyone seriously believe this was the AI's fault? The modern military use of LLMs is very clearly for the purpose of creating vaguely plausible targets while distancing any person from the decision to murder people. Surely if we cared at all about accomplishing a strategic goal we would have had a set of well documented targets ready to go. Instead the goal seems to be to drop as many bombs as possible, hope the computer's good enough that they mostly hit people who have relevance to things we don't like, and loudly proclaim that it's more important to kill people than it is to have any goal at all.
keiferski 16 hours ago [-]
Before it was the gods, then God, then Nature, and now AI. Human beings really have a fundamental issue with accepting responsibility for their actions.
From a certain angle, the entire industrial and computer age looks like a massive effort to remove all responsibility for our actions, permanently.
atomic_reed 14 hours ago [-]
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DrProtic 15 hours ago [-]
It’s well known that US doesn’t commit war crimes, they just make mistakes.
csmpltn 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Betelbuddy 16 hours ago [-]
Its not a war crime if the AI does it?
burnte 16 hours ago [-]
When AI gets something wrong, it's the operator's fault, IMO.
jmward01 14 hours ago [-]
I blame everything on the air force AOC concept and the joint targeting cycle. They are, at their core, an attempt to manage every aspect of a war from one room. It 'works' in peace time when you have exactly 3 real decisions to make a day and a staff of hundreds to orchestrate it but in war it is completely unresponsive, blind because all information comes through the telephone game and bought 100% into the idea that 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail' problem. We have bombs. Let's bomb them. This is why we loose wars.
Our operational level of war is junk. We have forgotten how to create a task force that has has a clear mission with a clear duration, resources, battlespace, ROE and, most importantly, authority to act. McChrystal 'rediscovered' empowering small teams that every flag officer rediscovers eventually in war. If your supporting the commander's cycle means enabling them to make all the decisions then you have just decided to loose the war. They can't make all the decisions. They need to expand that decision making power. That is their job. Build teams that have the authority and resources. Let those teams, if needed, also build teams if the problem is too big. Most importantly though, let those teams act. If you can't trust those commanders to make decisions and act on them then you shouldn't have put them in the job. Divide and conquer is the only solution here and the JTS/AOC model of warfare is the antithesis of this.
ZeroGravitas 15 hours ago [-]
The House of Saud put out an interesting think piece suggesting the whole war might be a result of AI psychosis.
I wonder if the coordinates for the school were passed to US intel on purpose to have US deeper entrenched into a war with Iran.. Who would benefit from this?
kayodelycaon 14 hours ago [-]
I 100% believe this was done by somebody inside our administration. It’s totally in character for them. Look at what they do to immigrants and our own citizens. They intentionally target children.
But if you wanna look externally, you can’t rule out Israel. They have intentionally bombed a school to kill children in the past, well before Gaza.
Before you take out your pitch fork, remember what the US did in Vietnam. Ugly stuff happens in ideological wars. It is not controversial to say Israel has done similar things.
Also, someone in our very pro-Israel administration claimed they got us into this war. Israel manipulating an ally is completely unsurprising.
But it doesn’t stop at Israel. I think every single ally we have in the Middle East would do the same thing. Everyone they’re fighting already does.
csmpltn 14 hours ago [-]
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cedws 13 hours ago [-]
The US under Trump is behaving exactly like a country with intentions of damaging the Western order and antagonising enemies to open new front lines. I think writing off Trump's actions as stupid is wrong, he's malicious.
herbst 1 hours ago [-]
Also making new enemies in their own row of allies. That can't be a side effect on how efficient he is doing it.
teleforce 9 hours ago [-]
Here it goes....
Palantir is the designer of the lethal US missile targetting system that has ten years outdated data information [1],[2],[3].
For the love of God, who's the Palantir design architect that approved and relied on a single (outdated) database information system for mission critical missile operation?
[1]>In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.
[2]> A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude.
[3]>The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest.
01100011 13 hours ago [-]
The west should have just used cluster munitions in ballistic missiles. Apparently you can target civilians with those and no one will accuse you of war crimes. Drones hitting residential buildings, airports and critical energy infrastructure? No problem. If you use an F-35 and smart munitions we expect perfect accuracy though.
This war is stupid, poorly planned, and likely to kick off a global recession. Trump and his cabinet lacks intelligent people. All of that is true. But there is also a shocking moral relativism going on that is embarrassing and disheartening to watch.
wiseowise 53 minutes ago [-]
> The west
US, let’s not try to drag the West into this.
jLaForest 8 hours ago [-]
The US is currently threatening to bomb power plants across Iran, which is a war crime. Yesterday the US spread land mines across a city that have already killed civilians. These are the actions of my government and it's my duty to stand up and be critical of war crimes being committed by my government. The idea that I am also obliged to criticize irans actions is bullshit. I hold my government to a higher standard, that's surprising to you?
amarant 17 hours ago [-]
>The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.
Would it be poor taste to make joke about gradle being superior here? The dad in me really wants to make that joke...
20after4 16 hours ago [-]
Replacing one java tool with another doesn't solve anyone's problems. If they'd only used Rust then lives would have been saved.
amarant 16 hours ago [-]
Meh, that sounds like a cargo-cult to me ;)
kevin_thibedeau 16 hours ago [-]
Don't go there.
esseph 16 hours ago [-]
Telling my children that "cargo cults" happened because of Rust :)
ck2 17 hours ago [-]
You know how that was done with a Tomahawk
They've now burnt though almost ONE THOUSAND of those
They cost $4 million each, so that's another $4 BILLION that has to be replaced too
Imagine several more months of that or even through 2029
O3marchnative 16 hours ago [-]
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) has an updated tally on defensive and offensive munition expenditures. It's likely not 100% accurate due to the sensitive nature of those figures.
> 11,294 munitions in the first 16 days of the conflict, at a cost of approximately $26 billion.
Incidentally, $26B is a sum in the same ballpark as the cost of eradicating homelessness in the US, ending large-scale hunger worldwide or making significant progress towards safe drinking water for all or the eradication of malaria.
michaelteter 13 hours ago [-]
But how would any of those activities increase the wealth of the decision makers (in the short term)?
tomasphan 16 hours ago [-]
It’s a tale as old as time: start a war to support the military industrial complex. Imagine a $4 billion investment into public transportation or parks. Every 10 years we can invest into a new city instead of bombing some kids overseas (whose siblings, fueled by hatred, then commit terror attacks on the west).
ceejayoz 17 hours ago [-]
We'll run out long before 2029. The 850 fired so far is about a quarter of the entire supply.
So far, they are not funded to do this for that long. They have floated a $200B bill to congress, which made national news coverage. It would start a huge, prolonged fight over the war and actually force them to ask permission from congress to fight it (barring totally disregarding the constitution which is still a possibility).
Unfortunately I can very well imagine several more months and years of this. We are still fighting a forever war that started in 2001. This is all a generation of Americans will know, and that is sad.
Tostino 16 hours ago [-]
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gambutin 16 hours ago [-]
Don’t worry. The Saudis and UAE will happily pay all costs of the war.
thrawa8387336 15 hours ago [-]
I think more than one. One and then another 1 hour after
jameskilton 17 hours ago [-]
Something that a lot of tech people, especially in Silicon Valley, seem to want to forget, is that at every level you still have people making decisions. AI is suggesting but someone, somewhere, still has to make the decision to act on that suggestion.
It's still people doing people things.
idle_zealot 17 hours ago [-]
The immediate concern isn't really fully autonomous systems, it's that the nature and design of recommender/suggestion systems prompt humans to sleepwalk through their responsibilities.
Not sure how you could live with yourself if you were building software that was used to kill children. I know tools can be used in ways you can't anticipate but if you're actively supporting the military in their use of it which in my eyes makes you responsible.
Are Americans not even aware of their own history? The US carpet bombed the SHIT out of Korea and Vietnam. All it did was convince their enemies to fight.
And then in Afghanistan and Iraq the US terrified of every shadow blew up anything that looked suspicious- again only serving their enemies.
It is all just so damn tiresome and America never learns because it literally cannot go 5 years without starting some unnecessary and ultimately futile conflict.
Imagine how much money China is saving.
albatross79 16 hours ago [-]
Had Iran done anything to the US as heinous as this one "mistake" in the last 50 years that compares? Imagine if some country did this to us and just brushed it off as a mistake.
shykes 10 hours ago [-]
Where do I start...
In 1979–1981, Iranian revolutionary forces and aligned militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage during the Iran hostage crisis.
In 1983, IRGC-backed proxies carried out the Beirut barracks bombing, a suicide truck attack that killed 241 U.S. service members in Beirut.
In 1983–84, IRGC-backed proxies bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing dozens of Americans and local staff.
In 1984, IRGC-backed proxies kidnapped CIA station chief William Francis Buckley in Beirut, held and tortured him, and he died in captivity in 1985.
In 1984, militants linked to IRGC-backed Hezbollah hijacked Kuwait Airways Flight 221, holding multiple passengers including Americans hostage.
In 1985, Hezbollah operatives hijacked TWA Flight 847, during which U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was murdered.
In 1996, a truck bomb destroyed the Khobar Towers, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel; U.S. authorities later linked the attack to Saudi Hezbollah backed by Iran.
From 2003–2011, IRGC-backed militias in Iraq used EFP roadside bombs and other attacks that killed and wounded hundreds of U.S. troops.
In 2011, U.S. authorities disrupted an alleged IRGC-directed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, which could have caused American civilian casualties.
In 2007, IRGC-backed militants carried out the Karbala provincial headquarters attack, killing five U.S. soldiers.
In the 2010s–2020s, IRGC-backed groups have been linked to attempted or foiled plots against U.S. individuals abroad, including dissidents and officials.
In 2019, IRGC-backed militias attacked the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad.
From 2019–present, IRGC-backed groups have conducted repeated rocket and drone attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.
In 2024, IRGC-backed militants carried out the Tower 22 drone attack, killing three U.S. service members.
dthtoburgers 3 hours ago [-]
>Where do I start...
>In 1979–1981
ah, the damned burgers and their inability to remember their own actions
where you destroyed a democracy for the sake of protecting the oil interests of britain
hatred toward burgers isn't something that spawned out of nowhere and the islamic regime benefited from the hatred that was fostered by your previous interventions that disregarded the will of the people to steal the resources of their country
darkoob12 3 hours ago [-]
With exception of embassies, most of what you mentioned are military targets and those proxies are native citizens who are attacking hostile aliens. When you send soldiers to other countries what do you expect?
Why US has military presence in every other country? Be more MAGA
csmpltn 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
albatross79 13 hours ago [-]
Unsanctioned flights between Iran and a third country is tantamount to waging a war on the US in your view?
csmpltn 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lejalv 13 hours ago [-]
Yes please, but start a bit earlier and tell me the white house version of how the US staged a coup against Mossadegh in 1953 to install the Shah regime and control oil (ring a bell?)
stale2002 13 hours ago [-]
That just means that you agree that there has been a war going on for 50 years which was the OPs point. You are agreeing with the person you responded to.
lejalv 13 hours ago [-]
No, an unilateral aggression is not a war.
stale2002 12 hours ago [-]
I am not sure why you are operating on such a weird definition of "war" that because 1 thing happened 50+ years ago that changes whats happening now.
Just look at whats happening now. Iran is shooting missiles at all sorts of countries all over the place. (not just the US or israel). Its clearly in a war with a lot of groups right now. It is a silly handwave to pretend like a war isn't going on now, because of something that happened 50 years ago.
Its clearly not unilateral, given how many other countries, that are not the US, have had missiles shot at them by Iran.
As a similar example Russia invaded Ukraine. There is a war going on between them and Ukraine. And when there is a war, countries attack each other. "Who started it" doesn't change the fact that a war is happening.
csmpltn 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
csmpltn 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lejalv 12 hours ago [-]
I am white and non religious, but you write like a racist.
> The US did not murder tens of thousands of innocent Iranian civilians around the world
No, not just Iranians. You gotta learn the history of your country and spend less time singing anthems
csmpltn 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
albatross79 13 hours ago [-]
Your strongest example should be good enough. So far you've got 1) flights between Venezuela and Iran 2) whitehouse.gov.
Even if Trump's Whitehouse was a good source and you took it at face value, most of the items in that list are by Iranian proxy, i.e. Iranian intelligence involvement. So by comparison you'd have to include Israel and CIA actions and then it's just a mess to figure out who's worse.
But even then, I don't see anything in there that's as evil as blowing apart dozens of school children in one blow, mistake or not.
csmpltn 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
albatross79 12 hours ago [-]
Not true, but I am skeptical that a one sided account would be adequate. Take care.
buttersicle 14 hours ago [-]
Yes. They funded Hamas' invasion of Israel, a close ally of the US, which intentionally killed over 1000 civilians.
They have also repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons on Israel and were in the process of developing such weapons.
albatross79 14 hours ago [-]
>> has A attacked B?
> Yes, C attacked D
platevoltage 13 hours ago [-]
I've never seen anyone with negative karma on HN. Who decides who gets to have nukes? Why doesn't Israel lead by example?
shevy-java 13 hours ago [-]
> Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.
I don't buy into that story. While in theory many possibilities may exist, I think this was a targeted hit by the decision-makers in the US military. There are some reasons as to why I think this is the case - for instance, under Hegseth and Trump the lies amplified in general, and truth dies first in war. Fishing boats were claimed to be drug boats. Or the iranian ship that was taken down by a torpedo - that was also deliberate. So, all of what the current mafia in charge does, has a purpose: an evil purpose, but a purpose. I could list some more reasons I think this was not an accident, but I believe the most convincing one is actually that there is a prior incident to this. Not of a school (or, at the least perhaps there was, but I don't quite recall it), but of the chinese embassy.
This happened in 1999. The USA initially also claimed it was an accidental hit. Various other sources then pointed out that this explanation made no sense; a simple one I remember is that a statistics scientist pointed out that the "random hit" theory made no sense. There were others who came to the same conclusion but from a different angle; the statistics example I remember because I read it in a book about statistics a few years after that (that is, I read the book a few years lateron, the initial writing happened much closer to 1999).
The current invasion Trump is doing also carries a strong "contain China" attempt with it. To me, I think it is much more likely that the hit on the school was deliberate. The tactic that is being employed here is to commit to the invasion. This is why you can not buy anything Trump says - you'll see that there is a step-wise escalation path coming from the USA right now. Trump is just the decoy on top; the commitment already happened. You'll see more ground troops being committed as the next step.
People really should not buy into ANYTHING that is coming out of the current US administration. Hegseth also recently went for a copy/paste job from the movie Pulp Fiction, when Samuel Jackson cites a bible verse before violence. Hegseth did not use the same words, of course, and the objective was more aimed on christian fanatics in the country, but they are really trying to push every button here. See also how they tried to sell this as a video game via ads. This government is a lost cause and dictators who want war, be it Putin or Trump, should never ever be trusted anywhere.
nailer 14 hours ago [-]
The school was located adjacent to (or on the border of) an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval compound/base. Evidence (satellite imagery, verified videos, missile fragments consistent with a US Tomahawk cruise missile, and geolocation) shows the area was targeted as part of strikes on that military site
> Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.
Really? Everyone thought the US had *missed*.
molszanski 9 hours ago [-]
This is how organizations like IRGC work. There is always a big campus like area where there is everything, including schools for indoctrination and new future recruits.
throwaway613746 16 hours ago [-]
AI isn't an excuse for war crimes. Remember this at, and after, election time.
By your logic it's the federal government's fault those 3000 people died on 9/11, they were being used as human shields.
Ylpertnodi 16 hours ago [-]
American bases in europe have schools on them.
Fair targets?
csmpltn 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 12 hours ago [-]
You can't post slurs here. We've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(p.s. I'll add, since this always come up, that yes this standard applies regardless of who is being slurred.)
12 hours ago [-]
csmpltn3 12 hours ago [-]
Could not care any less. Who else have you banned here?
How about you also ban the rest of the Christian/Jew-hating regalia that's on this thread? Or are you too woke for that?
We need specific links, though. People always assume that we see the same posts they do—in fact we don't come close to seeing everything (even in the same thread) and rely on users to tell us about the worst comments.
They (the Americans) should have also marked the schools on said military maps of theirs, and hence they could have made a value judgment of "is it worth killing some IRGC men in the middle of nowhere vs. the international backslash of killing school-going children?". It looks like they most probably didn't do that, probably because their "advanced" AI systems didn't bother with marking schools on their military maps.
jmye 16 hours ago [-]
> This was a choice to use children as human shields
Perhaps we should have, you know, just not bombed that particular fucking site until the end of the fucking school day if it was such a vital target. God forbid we act like a vaguely intelligent country, instead of drunkly screaming "maximum lethality" at every conceivable opportunity.
"As we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we come across a street painted in the colours of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as an Iranian headquarters." "On the wall at the entrance of the toilets, slogans read: "Down with Israel" and "Down with the USA".
It was evident that these headquarters were also evacuated at short notice. We found documents classified as "highly sensitive"."
This is a BBC reporter reporting from Syria after the fall of Assad.
It is strategy for the IRGC and Hamas to operate from civilian infrastructure like schools to gain immunity. That's what's "not a human error".
nahuel0x 14 hours ago [-]
I think nobody with a couple of neurons still buys the "every school and hospital in Gaza were Hamas, so we bombed them" nazi-zionist rhetoric.
nailer 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lejalv 13 hours ago [-]
The Israeli state leaders is proudly declaring superiority of their people, the need for vital space (Lebensraum, the great Israel), segregating their own citizens, conducting pogroms, you have all the doctrine there. Go find out where this book played before and how it all ended up.
nailer 12 hours ago [-]
> The Israeli state leaders is proudly declaring superiority of their people
The multiracial Israeli people that are 20% arab? Where arabs have equal rights to Jews and more rights than in any Arab country?
> segregating their own citizens
No. Unless you mean segregating them from Hamas and Hezbollah, in whichcase 'segregating' is a strange term to use.
You have demonstrated that you have very little practical knowledge of Israel, certainly not enough to participate in a discussion.
csmpltn 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bigyabai 16 hours ago [-]
Help me understand how this justifies the collateral damage.
YZF 16 hours ago [-]
I am countering the parent's statement that seems to indicate the US and Israel are intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure systematically for no reason. A lot of this infrastructure is targeted for good reason because it is used for military purposes.
This is totally unrelated to the topic where it seems the one school in question was incorrectly targeted based on what we know today (though not intentionally).
The general framework for justifying collateral damage is that enough care has to be taken to minimize it vs. the value of the military objective being achieved. Attacking an IRGC headquarters intentionally based in a school (e.g. if the example in Syria was to be attacked by Israel for example) still needs to pass this test. I.e. Israel would have to take measures to minimize collateral damage which would be proportional to the military value it gains by hitting the IRGC. But the (Syrian) school would have been considered a legitimate military target and the outrage should be towards the IRGC setting up camp there.
Hikikomori 13 hours ago [-]
To anyone responding to this be aware that this is one of the worst zionists we have on this website.
YZF 11 hours ago [-]
Personal attacks are ofcourse now normal on HN in this new world you like to live in. I'll wear this as a badge of honor from you. Maybe I'll have a T-shirt printed with "One of the worst Zionists we have on this website - Hikkomori".
Hikikomori 3 hours ago [-]
Just letting people know so they don't have to go through your usual hasbara spiel.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
bigyabai 10 hours ago [-]
It would be easier to call you something else if the majority of your comment history wasn't exclusively focused on Israeli politics for some reason.
nailer 14 hours ago [-]
> This is intentional genocide
Do you think it's genocide when the IRGC kill 30-40K Persian civilians? Or only when Americans missiles aimed at a military base miss their target?
csmpltn 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lukifer 17 hours ago [-]
Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.
This is not to say that this administration is definitely not targeting civilians or infrastructure on purpose; just that the end result, and the moral culpability, are the same in either case.
indubioprorubik 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
squibonpig 11 hours ago [-]
Buddy
EtienneDeLyon 16 hours ago [-]
Isn't it a more reasonable explanation that the IDF deliberately had this school bombed because those schoolgirls were the children of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers?
The intentional murder of enemy children is a tactic of the IDF. They've done it for decades.
thomassmith65 13 hours ago [-]
That theory seems unhinged to me. Somebody is divorced from reality. Hopefully not me.
There are rumors that the IRGC has started to recruit adolescents (again). I'd have an easier time believing that, but where the Middle East is concerned, there is an endless amount of propaganda and hyperbole, so I don't automatically believe what I read. Pardon my condescension, but it would make the comments sections better if everyone did likewise.
kakacik 15 hours ago [-]
kakacik's razor - Never attribute to incompetence of IDF/Mosad that which is adequately explained by laser focus intent to murder and exterminate enemy at all costs, via all avenues, all is allowed.
sessionfs 15 hours ago [-]
Ai makes mistakes, we all know that.
pimlottc 15 hours ago [-]
That is not what this article is about at all.
platevoltage 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah no big deal right?
shykes 17 hours ago [-]
You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened. Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press.
IRGC is making claims that no other party can verify first-hand. Everything from the number of explosions, the extent of the physical damage, the number of wounded and dead, the number of civilians wounded and dead - these are all unverified claims and should be treated as such. Not only is the IRGC obviously biased and incentivized to maximize media pressure on the US and Israel: they are known for information warfare of exactly this nature. To take their statements at face value, and present them as established facts in the opening paragraph, as this article does, is journalistic malpractice.
Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known, yes all parties are projecting narratives with a certainty that we should all be suspicious of.
Without this stable foundation of knowing what actually happened, and why, the very premise of this article collapses on itself.
EDIT: the flurry of responses to this post illustrate the problem. It's difficult to even have a respectful, fact-driven discussion on this topic, because everyone is tempted (and encouraged) to rush to their political battle stations. Nobody wants to discuss information warfare, because they're too busy engaging in it. I think that's worrying and problematic. No matter which "side" you're on, it should be possible to distinguish what is known and what is not; and implementing basic information hygiene. Or do you think you are uniquely immune to disinformation?
YZF 16 hours ago [-]
You're not wrong but what we can tell from open sources is:
- The building does seem to have actually been a school and "detached" from the rest of the military complex.
- The school the Iranians claim it was does seem to exist even if it's not 100% clear that's the identical location.
- At the time of the attack school would have been in session.
- The signature of the attack seems similar between all the buildings attacked and we have footage showing a Tomahawk hitting the area.
Another thing we can tell is that the US has to know the truth here and isn't coming out with an official statement.
And I'm saying this as someone who thinks the Iranian regime is evil, needs to be struck down, was trying to acquire nuclear weapons etc.
As to the numbers I agree they are to be treated with suspicion. The Iranians are obviously motivated to lie, inflate them, and treat all casualties as civilians. But we can still try and estimate given the size of the building what would be the number of students. We can also estimate the outcome of the missile hitting the building and correlate with the photos and satellite imagery, and until we have better data use those estimates.
shykes 16 hours ago [-]
I agree with all of that. My worry is that the Guardian article is not doing any of it, and in fact is damaging the framework for even having such a conversation.. Instead they are repeating IRGC statements without attribution, and establishing them as background truth in the first paragraph. Then building an entire article on that flawed premise. Essentially, their article exists in the narrative universe create by the IRGC. I find that incredibly worrying.
YZF 16 hours ago [-]
My bar for present day journalists and the Guardian specifically is pretty low. The goal for the Guardian is apparently to get clicks and advance their agenda. Journalism and real news reporting is apparently dead. My commentary is more on the specifics of the incident.
Agree the first paragraph is garbage journalism.
20k 17 hours ago [-]
Everyone acknowledges that the US killed a whole bunch of kids, including the US
herbst 1 hours ago [-]
I don't know about the US internal propaganda, but international media seems pretty certain on this war crime
TaupeRanger 15 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why the other reply here was flagged and killed. The US absolutely has NOT acknowledged that they killed school children. The DoW and other government officials have only publicly stated that an investigation is taking place.
shykes 16 hours ago [-]
This is incorrect. The US government (via Secretary Hegseth) has only confirmed that they are investigating the incident.
What the US has NOT confirmed:
- that they are responsible for the bombing
- who hit the school
- whether the school was an intended target of US strikes
- whether it was struck intentionally
- that it was mistaken for a military site
- any casualty count
- whether there were civilians or children in the casualty count
The US has explicitly DENIED:
- That they deliberately target civilian targets
These are the facts about what the US has actually confirmed. We are all entitled to our opinion of what happened. But we should be able to acknowledge that they are just that: opinions. We don't actually know what happened. And I find it scary and dangerous that so many people, on hacker news and elsewhere, are acting like they do.
Constant lies, incompetence and corruption. Why would anyone trust anything they have to say or any investigation they might conduct?
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
> To this day we don't know what actually happened.
I feel like we know enough already. A school was bombed, the ones who did it sucks big time and should be held responsible. Currently, the US and Israel is waging a war against Iran, and one of them dropped the bomb(s), unless suddenly Iran got their hands on American weapons, then that needs to be investigated too, because someone surely dropped the ball at that point.
The basics remain the same, investigations have to be launched to figure out where exactly in the chain of command, someone made a mistake, and then hold that person(s) responsible for their fuck up.
Have those investigations been launched?
shykes 16 hours ago [-]
I think it's likely that the explosion was caused by a US strike. But we don't actually know for sure that that's what happened - the US government has not confirmed it.
We also don't know anything about casualties - we only have the IRGC statements, and they are not reliable.
> Have those investigations been launched?
Yes, according to the US government, an investigation is underway. But its starting point is determining what caused the explosion.
YZF 16 hours ago [-]
How long does it take to look at the coordinates programmed into the cruise missiles? Or to review existing satellite imagery for the location and other intelligence sources?
If this was a school (which seems likely at this point) and if this was a US TLAM that hit it (which also seems likely at this point) then we should expect a lot of casualties when it's hit during school time (which also seems likely). And yes, we shouldn't trust what the IRGC is saying.
I think I'm on your side but in this case the correct course of action for the US would have been to quickly own up to the mistake. There is really not a lot of ambiguity here. This doesn't seem to be a case like "shots were fired from the school window" or some sort of dual use with IRGC having offices in the school. If there was a reason for the targeting then presumably we'd have a statement about it already.
Mistakes can be made and are always made in war. Leaving this open like this is damaging to the war effort.
jLaForest 8 hours ago [-]
I saw the video of men pulling children's severed body parts out of the rubble.
What caused the explosion? Again there's a video showing an American tomahawk middle hitting the building... Why so much equivocating? It's shameful
shykes 8 hours ago [-]
Are you familiar with the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza? We've been through this sort of circus before... Those of us who paid attention learned to not rush to conclusions, and never, ever trust social media or the western press to overcome or even understand information warfare.
DoctorOetker 5 hours ago [-]
> Are you familiar with the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza?
I am not
> Those of us who paid attention learned to not rush to conclusions, and never, ever trust social media or the western press to overcome or even understand information warfare.
Since you highlight western press can't be trusted to overcome / understand information warfare, would you care to provide some write-ups detailing the viewpoints you hint at, in the context of this Al-Ahli hospital incident?
The Al-Ahli hospital, the one that Israel tried to say was a PIJ missile that misfired?
The Israeli propaganda was false in that case, and they probably hit the hospital. The PIJ missiles' ballistic trajectory did not match with the hospital, and most or all their fuel had burned [1]. I recommend you read the whole text, it's quite short.
But I don't see what you mean here, if the takeaway from Al-Ahli is not to trust the US/Israel when they shift the blame for hitting civilian targets... then applying that lesson here means that we should not trust the US/Israel when they try to shift the blame in this case. The US hit the school. That much is beginning to be obvious.
Congratulations, you found the one fringe publication that contradicts the overwhelming consensus from OSINT and official investigations alike. You wanted so badly Israel to be responsible, that you decided to trust the least credible source possible.
tovej 22 minutes ago [-]
Least credible? Fringe? Forensic Architecture is a very respected source that has done in-depth technical analysis of many, many accidents and incidents, e.g. the Beirut port explosion. Articles from Forensic Architecture are often featured on HN.
It received the Peabody award in 2021. It received the Right Livelihood award in 2024. It is a research unit under the university of London. Its reports have been used as evidence in cases in the Israeli supreme court and in the UN. The project has gotten numerous grants from the European research council, collaborated with Bellingcat, Amnesty international, and ACLED [1]
Your kneejerk reaction to information that contradicts your priors is obvious. If you had bothered to do even a small google search you could have checked what FA actually is, rather than just lash out.
What have they done to deserve your trust? They started a war that they deny is a war. They told us a year ago they set Iran back a decade. Then they tell us 9 months later they're weeks from a nuclear bomb. I wouldn't trust the warmongers to admit they're child killers.
shykes 13 hours ago [-]
I haven't said anything about trusting them. I am simply correcting statements about what the US has supposedly "admitted".
It's one thing to say "I think the US did XYZ".
It's quite another to say "It is an objective truth that the US did XYZ, in fact they even admitted it".
Transposed to the Guardian, if they want to write "we think the US did XYZ", they should clearly frame it as an opinion piece. Instead they are writing "it is an objective truth that the US did XYZ" - which is false. That is journalistic malpractice.
istjohn 11 hours ago [-]
It would be journalistic malpractice to avoid reporting on anything that the government does that the government isn't willing to admit publically to doing. It's possible to ascertain facts, even of the actions of the US government, to a level of certainty sufficient to report them as facts, even when the government disputes the facts.
shykes 10 hours ago [-]
Repeating the IRGC claim that "American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12" without attribution or scrutiny, is not "reporting".
It's fine to be skeptical of the claims of the US government. But the IRGC is also a government - more specifically a totalitarian government built on lies and aggression. To distrust the former while blindly trusting the latter is inconsistent and foolish.
wiseowise 51 minutes ago [-]
> To this day we don't know what actually happened.
US adopted Russian playbook in more than one way?
basisword 13 hours ago [-]
>> Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known
Think for a second WHY that is! They can find and kill the Iranian leaders who will be doing the utmost to conceal their location and yet that can't tell us whose bomb blew up a specific building? Of course they can. They're waiting until people forget and they can final release the result of their 'investigation'.
shykes 13 hours ago [-]
That's your opinion and you're entitled to it.
But I'm noticing that you are only interested in guessing the motives and actions of the US.
Does the IRGC not have motives and agency of their own? Perhaps the explosion was caused by a malfunction of their own missile? Perhaps they lied about children being present? Perhaps they intentionally placed children in a location they knew would be struck? Based on their incentives, doctrine and past behavior, you could make a reasonable case for all of those scenarios.
It's fine to speculate on who did what, and why. But that methodology can be applied in both directions, not just the one that suites your political preference.
basisword 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, I'm more concerned with the motives and actions of the aggressors.
ElevenLathe 17 hours ago [-]
I think its fair to treat things that the Trump administration and the Iranian military agree on as facts. If they were distortions that favored one side, we would see pushback from the other. Maybe there are distortions that somehow benefit both of these parties, but it seems unlikely. At minimum, then, this was a school, the Americans bombed it, and children died as a result.
> An ongoing [United States] military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.
shykes 15 hours ago [-]
That article is based on anonymous sources ("according to [people] familiar with the preliminary findings").
It doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's not an official confirmation by the US government, and it only speaks to the responsibility of the strike, not the various claims of "killed children".
Those sources don't say anything about casualties, or the presence of children. The NYT does its best to make it sound like they do ("responsible for a deadly strike"), but so far the only source for how deadly it is, remains the IRGC. And the NYT happily quotes their claim that the death toll was "at least 175 people".
For what it's worth, I personally believe the US is responsible for the strike. I also think the IRGC is lying about casualties, but there's no way to know for sure, and a US investigation probably won't tell us more on that point.
Denzel 7 hours ago [-]
You’re acting like the U.S. government is a monolithic good faith actor right now. The current administration’s behavior is qualitatively different than past administrations.
Do you also believe this administration will ever officially confirm Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not domestic terrorists?
It’s hard to interpret your points charitably here.
dede2026 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gambutin 16 hours ago [-]
How is this a useful comment?
dede2026 15 hours ago [-]
Because it points out the obvious glaring issues with GP's post in a succinct manner.
applfanboysbgon 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gambutin 16 hours ago [-]
I feel very bad for the children and their relatives. What happened is really terrible.
I wish there was the same level of rigour and energy applied to investigating the 40,000 deaths in early January. There are countless videos online.
I simply don’t understand why 150 people receive so much attention while 40,000 don’t.
This saddens me because it feels like the focus is on who was responsible rather than who lost their lives.
buttersicle 14 hours ago [-]
Nobody in the western world cares about either group of dead civilians. They only pretend to care because they think it might benefit their preferred tribe of politicians.
gambutin 12 hours ago [-]
Which makes me even more sad to be honest.
esseph 16 hours ago [-]
> I simply don’t understand why 150 people receive so much attention
It's called motherfucking *accountability*
gambutin 15 hours ago [-]
You conveniently deleted the second part of that sentence.
esseph 11 hours ago [-]
Braindead dumbass take.
Accountability means everyone not just the ones we like, that's why we're still stuck in Epstein hell.
One of the assholes alluded to in killing people is dead.
The other is still alive.
Accountability.
shykes 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
WarmWash 16 hours ago [-]
I feel like an intellectual god to have been gifted the brain power to recognize that 150 kids being killed is a awful tragedy, and that converting a building on a military base to a school is recklessly stupid and borderline purposely done as a trap. It's like letting your child play in the road at night, and then being upset when a drunk driver hits them.
Anyone can look at the satellite images from the bombing and see how ridiculous whatever Iran was doing was.[1]
"I understand that the officer killed your unarmed teen son. But you have to understand, in the dark, he appeared to be reaching for a weapon, and the officer feared for his life."
"It's a tragedy that she was raped. But you have to understand, the way she was dressed, she clearly wanted it, she was sending mixed signals, you see."
Anyway. Here's a preschool right next to a military base, it took me about 3 minutes of scrolling around on google maps to find this.
Are the children in that school a legitimate military target? Is putting that school on Joint Base Andrews "recklessly stupid?"
Why is it perfectly fine for the United States to do this but "recklessly stupid" for Iran to do it?
WarmWash 14 hours ago [-]
Because the US military publishes maps of the base. Anyone who bombs a school on a US military base is doing it intentionally. China could probably call up the DoD and ask for maps of every base, and they would get it.
If your force your enemy to decide what is and isn't a civilian target, you are the deranged one.
yosamino 16 hours ago [-]
I'm just gonna assume you are an American, just because this is a website who's audience is in large part American. But I might be wrong. Anyway, as such you must at least in passing be familiar with the concept of a "military base" as it is practiced by American society.
> Everything that the average family needs is there; a grocery store, shopping mall, bank, post office, theatre, religious centers, outdoor activities, community center, clubs, dining facilities, gas station, quick stop markets, and, if not a full size hospital, medical clinics. The majority of bases do not have schools physically located on the installation, but the children are educated in the neighboring school systems.
I just googled that so I don't have to write the text myself.
So while you might be technically correct about schools, do you think housing on a military base for personnel and their families is akin to playing on the road at night ?
> I feel like an intellectual god
HN rules prevent me from writing anything snarky here.
WarmWash 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, you are correct. Military bases even have schools and kids!
But do you know what else the US does?
The locations of military and non-military buildings is public information, and even intentionally made obvious to anyone. You can get maps of the bases from their websites. You can even go on google maps and see what most of the buildings are. To avoid exactly this situation. And even beyond all that, in the event of military escalation where their is real threat of the bases being hit, the civilians would be evacuated anyway.
(Legitimate) countries at war aren't trying to massacre civilians. They all agreed to that and all take agreed upon steps to stop it. Like at the most basic level issuing uniforms to soldiers so you can clearly see who is a civilian and who is a fighter.
I can assure you that in a war between the US and China, there would be dramatically fewer civilian deaths, because both countries don't fuck around with "military/civilian ambiguity" as a war tactic. Because you or your enemy end up killing a bunch of innocents.
yosamino 14 hours ago [-]
Are you trying to tell me that you believe that the Iranians were under the impression that this school was a secret that the United States did not know about ?
Do you believe that these military buildings were a secret that the Iranians thought the US and Israel don't know about ?
> (Legitimate) countries at war aren't trying to massacre civilians.
You think Israel is not a legitimate country? Cause that just very openly happened and continues to happen.
And maybe you think that killing civilians is not the point, which I don't agree with but I can at least understand why one would come to that conclusion.
But you must at least remember that the US is kind of famous for Hiroshima and Nagasaki - an action based almost in it's entirety on killing civilians.
But even if you want to only defend that "legitimate" countries aren't trying to massacre civilians, you must be able to see that the threshold of killing them if they just happen to be in the way is very low.
The Secretary of Defense of the US recently called for removal of all these rules you alluded to
> We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement.
Look at what is happening even with this lose framework you are referring to in place. Do you think if China invaded the US, the US would not do everything it takes to defeat them, even if it means giving up conventional warfare. You think the US forces would give up a strategic advantage that could be gained by taking off their uniform and continue fighting without it ?
WarmWash 14 hours ago [-]
You don't seem aware that Japan armed and trained it's population (Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai), men and women including kids, and mandated them to attack invaders. Another example of deranged theocratic dictatorship. The US doing a land invasion would have almost certainly resulted in far more "civilian" deaths.
Also the Geneva conventions don't apply when fighting an enemy who doesn't abide by them. Its incredibly annoying to fight an enemy that has no problem using ambulances as troop and weapon transports. Or an enemy that refuses to issue uniforms to it's fighters. This isn't even necessarily referring to Israel and Hamas, it was rampant with al qaeda and ISIS.
As for China invading the US? Well Ukraine has managed to keep it above board. It's only these shit head theocratic lunatics that have no problem shoveling civilians into the fire to keep their ass in power. Maybe you aren't aware, but Hamas consoles it's civilians by telling them they are dying for God. Just like Japan trained it's civilians during WWII to die for God (who happened to be the emperor.)
yosamino 9 hours ago [-]
Sure, the easiest way out of your dilemma is to just declare everyone killed to not be a civilian, and define every enemy to be out of scope of any restraint.
By that metric there are never any dead civilians and no rules apply.
Kinda sounds as if you are looking for excuses to make these rules you yourself brought up not apply to any real situation.
I really, really wanted to avoid making fun of of your "gifted brain power".
Your argument is so lazy, I am starting to doubt your godlike intellect.
lljk_kennedy 15 hours ago [-]
Source for it being a "trap"? Got some evidence to share?
WarmWash 15 hours ago [-]
There is no source, that's why I said borderline. It's that its so painfully negligent that it almost must be malice.
mrguyorama 14 hours ago [-]
Uh no, the onus is always on the one doing the attack FFS what's wrong with you?
You are bending over backwards to shift the blame away from an administration that was utterly negligent and reckless and caused an obvious and expected outcome of having "No rules of engagement"
You don't get to blow up a school and say "But a decade ago it was part of the military base!". That's Russia's SOP
It's stupid, lazy, unacceptable, and indefensible in a war of choice. This administration had years to vet targets, and instead eschewed all preparation and fired the people who had been working on preparation.
expedition32 14 hours ago [-]
And the Americans walked right into it.
If only anyone in Washington was capable of feeling shame they'd be committing sepuku about now.
sophacles 16 hours ago [-]
The US maintains over 150 elementary schools on military bases around the world.
Although it does make sense that the land of school shootings would use the children of it's military as bait.
sva_ 16 hours ago [-]
Turning a military building into a girl's school, and then having this school right next to other military buildings - is this something that happens often? Or were there ulterior motives behind it?
This unknown Guardian contributor writes a missive against "Luddites" while using the typical AI booster arguments that always turn around anti AI arguments.
Just like two five year olds: "You have a big nose." "No, you have a big nose."
We learn from this clown that anti AI people suffer from AI psychosis because they are reading WaPo and Reuters.
simonw 17 hours ago [-]
Both the Washington Post and the Guardian articles agree that the system used here was Maven.
The key sentence in that Washington Post article appears to be:
> The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements.
> Anthropic and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) today announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS. This partnership allows for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP) while leveraging the security, agility, flexibility, and sustainability benefits provided by AWS.
491827-17182 16 hours ago [-]
We know that Palantir used AI for target selection in Gaza:
We know that it integrated Claude and Claude was deemed to be a supply chain risk just before the Iran war. So it is not a huge mental leap to assume what it is being used for.
You won't get an answer from Hegseth. This Guardian "article" is by a Substack blogger who also does not have answers.
simonw 16 hours ago [-]
That article you are quoting there is from April 2024. The Claude + Palantir deal was announced in November 2024.
The "supply chain risk" claims came from a deeply non-serious executive team who don't like "woke AI". They're not credible.
ognav 17 hours ago [-]
The Guardian carrying water for the AI industry. The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile. We get that Maven is Palantir, but it integrates Claude:
Going into a generic rant about anti-AI people after missing sources and believing the Department of War is just extremely poor journalism from the newspaper that destroyed evidence after a command from GCHQ.
I hope this is a single "journalist" and that the Guardian has not been bought.
phillipcarter 17 hours ago [-]
I assume you actually read the article and didn't just post this after a quick skim, yes? Because saying this:
> The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile
Doesn't make any sense at all when you read the article and understand what Claude actually does in this equation. From the article:
> Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem. In late 2024, years after the core system was operational, Palantir added an LLM layer – this is where Claude sits – that lets analysts search and summarise intelligence reports in plain English. But the language model was never what mattered about this system.
The whole point here is that whether an LLM is involved or not is immaterial to the system as a whole, and it's a disservice to the public to focus on LLMs here.
niam 17 hours ago [-]
The article you're responding to is making specific operational claims about Claude's (basically non-) relevance. I'd be interested to hear if you're directionally correct, but forgive me if I need more details than "but it integrates Claude".
sailfast 17 hours ago [-]
This is not a correct take at all given the contents of the article.
CamperBob2 17 hours ago [-]
Better than carrying water for people who blame inanimate tools for their own personal and professional failures.
----------------
Maven is a tool for use in the middle of a war. When both sides are firing, minutes saved can mean lives saved for your side. Those lives, at least partly, balance the risks of hitting a bad target.
This was not a strike made in the middle of a war. If Maven was used in the strike that took out a school, it was being used as part of a sneak attack. Nobody was shooting back while this was being planned. Minutes saved were not lives saved. There should have been a priority placed on getting the targets right. Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means. This clearly didn't happen. The school was obviously a school that even had its own website. Humans would have spotted this if they had done more than make their three clicks and move on to the next target.
Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it. Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse, they are directly responsible for the deaths of those little girls. I sincerely hope there are (although I doubt there will be) consequences for this person beyond taking that guilt to their grave.
it could be both, but we know no. 2, the complete disregard for the lives of civilians, is in play because, whatever else was going on, america was initiating war for the purpose of destabilizing a country, afaict at least, the reasoning has been unclear. destablize means to try to make things fuck up, and that tends to kill people. what people? how? who knows? things fucking up means out of control. at that point it's up to physics, not people.
it's like, if i set a house on fire, then later defended that action by claiming to have not known where i started the fire was a nursery.
back in the war on terror days america had a habit of blowing up weddings, and then claiming it was an accident. and i would think, accident how? did the missile fire itself?
The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage.
I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school).
It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence.
In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.
You might be overestimating how much satellite capacity there is to do this level of analysis for every target.
"we couldn't tell whether it was a legit target" does not fly as a reason to continue.
Feels like we're talking here about whether rapist should have known that the rapee was a child or an adult, and they had a good reason to believe it was an adult person (there was mother of the girl standing next to it, so, hard to distinguish...), so yeah, obviously a tragedy they raped a child instead, but it happens sometimes when you rape a lot of people at once. A tragedy, but let's get on with raping more...
From Israel's perspective there's an even stronger self defense argument given the amount of missiles aimed at Israel from Iran and the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel. So the US argument that they knew Israel was planning the attack and they knew Iran would retaliate against US interests seems at least on the surface to bad valid.
What the US claims is really not a strong source of anything, and I'm saying that as an American. The most compelling reasoning is that Israel was going to do something so US decision makers decided joining was the best worst decision, and I'm being very bend over backwards generous with that. Anything else is just excuses trying to cover it up. It seems obvious now that there was no stopping Israel from their strike on Iranian leadership. It was too ripe of a target, they have been emboldened by current US admin, so at that point it was in for a penny, in for a pound mentality.
If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets, then the world would possibly have some sympathy. No rational person could condone an outright first strike just because we thought something was going to happen. Yet the fact that in the "we think they will do something" spit balling never suggested shutting the down the strait seems very suspect as well.
A reasonable belief, because Iran in fact responded to the US+Israeli strikes by attacking US allies and even neutral nations like Qatar.
And why should we doubt that Iran would have closed the Strait of Hormuz even if the US had not attacked, leaving Israel to attack alone? The strategic calculation (threaten the world economy so other nations oppose the war) would have been the same.
This is isn't true in practice, even if you want to argue it's technically true. Iran has been participating in conflict through proxies continually for decades. US sabre rattling has done nothing to quell that violence.
The largest US base in the region is an air base in Qatar (which Iran has hit).
Iran has attacked the US base in Qatar before. When they did so in 2025, Iran's Supreme National Security Council issued a statement: "this action does not pose any threat to the friendly and brotherly country, Qatar, and its noble people, and the Islamic Republic of Iran remains committed to maintaining and continuing warm and historic relations with Qatar".
This time Iran attacked Qatar itself, including the Ras Laffan gas facility and Hamad International Airport.
An aggression is an aggression.
As in tribunals, to claim you acted in self defense, you need proof.
And the Pentagon itself admits there were no threats.
Iran has supported a treaty on elimination of weapons of mass destruction in the middle east, Israel has been the blocker of it, only actor in the region that has nukes, and isn't in the NPT.
As a non-signer of the NPT, military aid to Israel is also illegal under US law, so we play along with strategic ambiguity and pretend they don't have them.
On who?
In 1992 there was a deadly car bomb attack in Argentina, killing 29 people and injuring 250 more. Then again in 1994 a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 87 people. Eventually the investigation demonstrated conclusively that Iran was responsible.
Albeit Hamas has been largely propped by Israel itself and Qatar.
Yes but that was mostly covered already by the comment I was responded to. I was just filling a few gaps in the list.
> Albeit Hamas has been largely propped by Israel itself and Qatar.
Qatar has certainly financed and supported Hamas a great deal.
Israel has absolutely not "propped up" Hamas. I'm aware of the allegations to the contrary, but they are wildly inflated nonsense. Israel and Hamas have been enemies to the death for decades.
The fact is that the US routinely commits acts of perfidy. This was the second time they attacked Iran during negotiations.
I've said before that I'm no fan of the Iranian mullah regime, but the US is basically run by war criminals.
And they're proud of it. Albright and her "murdering 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it," Hillary and her "we came we saw he died," and Nobel Peace Prize Barack Hussein Obama with his targeting US citizens via drone + 28000 bombing attacks, to this orange monster demolishing the White House (literally and figuratively) and any pretence at being trustworthy or civilised.
I think the comment section here would look different.
Who said they had all the time in the world? You can't get most of Irans upper leadership in a single room every day when they were publicly trying to hide.
I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground. However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.
> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties
How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.
> so this already is a low error rate
As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.
We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.
> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.
Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
TFA is from The Guardian while GP you responded to specifically called out the NYT analysis. These are different things. Maybe reading the GP's suggested source would leave you with a different set of questions?
EDIT: The irony that GP then goes on the quote TFA and not NYT.
> . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
> The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”
> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”
---
> Please reason through the implications now?
It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.
> 1000s
1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.
Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.
> we targeted and killed young children
We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.
I think you and I disagree on what the situation is here. I don't think it was necessary to bomb Iran and it feels like you are saying we did.
Your first two quotes are about targeting in the Iraq War; specifically how the breakdown in careful analysis, precipitated by the new systems, led to the exact mis-targeting they were trying to solve. That’s what the entire article is about.
And your third quote is from an ex-official commenting on the event after the school strike happened.
These quotes contradict your original point, ie they show how careful analysis has been designed out of the system.
> We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
This sounds incredibly naive. For starters, plausible deniability due to diffuse responsibility is a thing.
“Of course we don’t target schools and kill children, this was a system error.” But the message gets sent regardless and meanwhile we have people arguing back-and-forth over grains of sand because they took an action with deliberate plausible deniability.
For a historical analog that involved killing US children “unintentionally”, you can read up on the Ludlow Massacre - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefe...
Of course they didn’t intend to kill the children, they only intended to disperse the strikers by setting their tents on fire. It was simply a mistake.
I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.
Targeting a single person which might be a valid target had war been declared, while also intentionally striking many civilians around them, is the same as targeting those civilians. You knew the bomb you dropped was going to kill them, and you pressed the button. It makes no difference who the primary "target" is.
Otherwise, countries would just bomb all the civilians and all their infrastructure and medical facilities and schools with the excuse that they heard from an unnamed source that there was a combatant nearby, like israel does in Palestine.
Can your logic be used to justify these strikes?
1. this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
2. Trump and Hegseth are (like) cartoon character villains.
It's a non-sequitur point anyway, these kids weren't families of terrorists.
If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.
If I recall we saw two planes. We did not see any individual as such in the planes, did we? We saw some passports; not sure that this proves much at all. We also had WTC 7 going down and the strike on the other building (was it in Washington) but not much aside from this.
I am not saying the-cake-is-a-lie, everything was fabricated, mind you. What I am saying is that IF we are going to make any conclusions, we need to look at what we have, and then find explanations and projections to what is missing. For instance, any follow-up question such as damage to a building, can be calculated by a computer, so this is not a problem. The problem, though, is IF one can not trust a government, to then buy into what they show or present to the viewer. Hitler also used a fake narrative to sell the invasion of Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
That does not mean everything else is a false flag or fake, per se, but I do not automatically trust any allegation made by any government. You can look back in history and wonder about attempts to sell explanations, such as Warren Commission and a magic bullet switching directions multiple times. Again, that can be calculated via computers, so that's not an issue per se; the issue is if they made claims that are factually incorrect and/or incomplete.
Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?
And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.
I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?
some of them believe that it is their religious duty to start this war and make it heinous enough to start ww3 and bring forth the return of jesus christ
I think you are ascribing a level of systems thinking and care about consequences which one cannot simply assume is there
if you were to, say, start with an assumption that some of the actors have the mental patterns and world model of an angsty, self-centered teenager, or younger, then you might draw different conclusions
> Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case.
...is a logical fallacy (false dichotomy). It presumes a level of intent that isn't necessarily present.
For an example of how these might coexist, I'd encourage The Toxoplasma of Rage, which is a long essay that frequently comes up here:
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...
The idea is that rage is its own, self-replicating emotion, and given the medium of the Internet, it's possible that some memes have no purpose other than self-perpetuation. A story about a girls' school being blown up is self-replicating: it gets people riled up enough to share it. A story about a random factory, or some dead person's house, or an empty patch of desert is not really. It's entirely possible that attacks on these happened hundreds of times in the Iran war, but if it did, I would never know about it. I probably wouldn't care about it. Those are not stories that go viral, they don't have enough emotional valence to make people care. And the media knows this, and so they don't bother to seek them out or run them.
They publish a breakdown of the damage each day. E.g. https://www.en-hrana.org/day-17-of-the-u-s-israeli-war-on-ir...
If you scroll down to the "Facilities Protected Under International Humanitarian Law", you will see a list of non-military targets. That part is never empty in these reports.
Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?
As a parent, even when cutting off most of the emotions related to this horrible war crime, I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
No, it's not whataboutism, it's moving the goalposts. Consider the following exchange:
Alice: "McDonalds mistreats its workers by paying them below the minimum wage"
Bob: "No they don't. They all get paid at or above the local minimum wage"
Charlie: "Well that doesn't matter, because McDonald's still mistreats its workers because it's a capitalist institution, which by definition means they're siphoning the fruits of the worker's labor"
Even if you agree with Charlie's point, at the very least it's in poor taste to bring it up in a conversation specifically talking about the minimum wage. Otherwise every discussion about some aspect of [thing] just turns into a plebiscite about [thing].
Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them.
Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
And ask if we were trying to target people from group A or group B.
This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.
false dichotomies are a common rhetorical method (and sometimes useful) to argue your way to a moral justification, but that doesn't make them reflect reality
There is no A and B. You want to force a situation where B is pure good intent and we either have to choose that or choose A where there is only bad intent. The reality is, this war is about ego, power and money as much as it is about any "good intent". The decisions to start the war were made with a full knowledge of the risks and costs it would entail, with almost all of those being externalised to other people than those taking the choices.
Nobody taking those choices should get to just opt out of moral responsibility with some easy "A / B" logic.
Also, remembe the CIA co-staged a coup in Iran in 1953. That's one fact, nor just opinion.
It most absolutely is not and I struggle to believe you can build a valid argument that links bombing school children as necessary for the fall of Iran’s government.
How you win a war, especially one as lopsided as this invasion is, is as important as winning. I cannot so easily sleep at night knowing we are committing horrific atrocities during an invasion we chose to launch against a country thousands of miles away with zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
The list of today's remaining colonies is short enough[0] that it is worth considering whether decolonization was "an idea that reached its time" in the late 20th century ; and given that there are examples of peaceful revolutions (eg India and West Africa) it is worth asking whether more places could have undergone peaceful transitions, and whether the cost in human lives and atrocities born within a decade of war doesn't outweigh the cost of the colonial system dying by itself within the same order of magnitude of time.
But then again, I think you're veering us somewhat off-topic as I'd consider a "colonial freedom war" to be a revolution (the people overthrowing their overlord) which is quite different from the topic at hand here, war between nation-states.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_list_of_non-sel...
Killing children is a war crime, and not an inevitable part of war.
> Parents are solely responsible for bringing their children on stolen land. There were indigenous children living there that were murdered.
And it's not about whether it's "okay".
For the rest of this post I'm assuming it's not your point of view.
I'm very much not trying to strawman you, I'm trying to improve your argument. If any wars are considered "worth it, morally speaking", then single mistakes can't be enough to invalidate the war. We need to talk about how many mistakes happen and how they happen. We need to say how much is too much, and "zero mistakes" is not compatible with "some wars are worth it". The idea that we could have both in the real world is self-deception.
2. Of course it would be better to not kill any kids, but thats just not how war works. Mistakes will be made, that doesnt mean eliminating the number one funder of terror in the world isnt worth it. Even if the next regime hates the US/israel just as much they will likely spend much less supporting terror groups because they know theyll just get bombed again.
3. Of course this is all if the bombing campaign actually worked. It didnt, and thats no surprise, which is why the whole thing is pretty clearly immoral imo.
> zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
The houthis harmed the US quite a bit by destroying American ships and harming global trade. In fact their actions were arguably far more harmful to the average american than any domestic terrorist attack could possibly be because of the economic impact that effected every single american.
Thats not the point though. There is no reason for either party to respond proportionally in a war. Going to war against an equal weight class as idiocy, sun tzu figured that one out forever ago.
Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics. Especially when discussing bombing a school.
I was responding to whether the "invasion" could have been accomplished without killing the kids. I dont think that's realistic.
The separate question of whether it's worth it morally to topple the regime given kids will die I think is pretty simply yes. Iran's funding of terrorism kills and will continue to kill far more kids than died in this strike. Iran's funding of Hamas has been partially responsible for the terrible conditions Gazans are subject to. Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off. Same with Yemen, if Iranian funding is cut off conditions for the 15 million children there will improve. So yea for me personally Ive got no problem with a bombing campaign that will undoubtedly accidentally kill some civilians if it means the Iranian regime is toppled.
Unfortunately for everyone, now the US and israel killed a bunch of kids, and reinforced that precedent for others with these sorts of flimsy justifications, *and* everything will be the same or worse in Iran, especially for civilians. So lose-lose-lose.
> Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that [conditions in the Gaza region of Palestine] I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off.
We can already see the outcome of that in the West Bank region of Palestine: no hamas, yet israel still exercises ultimate control via violence, and keeps oppressing and killing Palestinians and taking or destroying their stuff with impunity, especially as of late.
There's no indication israel would be more generous to Palestinians in the Gaza region of Palestine if hamas wasn't there. Palestinians in Gaza see what israel does to Palestinians in the West Bank, and want no part of it. Who can blame them? It's sick.
'The brutal apartheid ongoing in the West Bank isn't as bad as the brutal genocide ongoing in Gaza' isn't the best flex for israel, especially since they're perpetrating both.
obviously before the latest wave of israel's genocide in Gaza, the oppression, control, and lack of freedom in the West Bank region of Palestine were worse than Gaza. Plus the West Bank still experiences israel imprisoning and killing Palestinian civilians and taking or destroying their land and stuff with impunity
the observant reader might notice that the common factor behind the misery in both regions of Palestine is not hamas, but israel
also, consider reading the first half of the post to which you responded – we were talking about the wisdom and morality of killing kids to achieve your objectives, and then also miserably failing to achieve your objectives. Your thoughts? Still worth killing the kids when it was for nothing?
Which is better, leave the regime alone to continue murdering its own citizens, or run the risk of accidentally bombing a hundred schoolchildren?
It's a pretty classic trolley problem.
The problem with this simplistic utilitarianism is that assumes a degree of omniscience that doesn't exist. You can excuse any atrocity by claiming it's an unavoidable by product of a high-minded end. Life rarely presents neat classic trolley problems, and even if it did there are many unknowns; for example, are you sacrificing the life of one saint to save five serial killers? Absent this information I'd opt to save one person, but would be doing so with the awareness that I might be making a very bad decision for which I'll have to take responsibility.
In this case, the trolley is in a whole other country. Unilaterally attacking it (while negotiations were ongoing) is regarded by most experts as a blatant violation of international law and that's the primary reason nominally allied countries are refusing to assist.
Where do you think the kids of soldiers go to school?
Can you cite anything that says all iranian military bases are next to elementary schools? If they are on ALL bases, that makes hitting an elementary school on base less forgivable, not more, because if its a fact of every iranian military base, it's a lot harder to claim good intelligence and also that they didn't check that the part of base being bombed was the school.
Also, how is that relevant?
I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades.
Mapping enemy targets is basically one of the biggest tasks (in scope) intelligence agencies undertake, and can be done in peacetime.
There was no extreme time pressure here, this was just a lack of due diligence and operational sloppiness.
One of the key stated goals of this war, is to have the Iranian people topple their totalitarian government, thereby avoiding having to fight a ground war, and as such, goodwill is extremely important.
The damage this strike did to that goodwill outweighs any potential military advantage the US possibly could get out of it.
What a ridiculous take. What does "originally was" mean? Maybe you wanna say "previously was"? That building was converted to a school 10 years ago! The intelligence they relied on is 10 years old!!!!! It's recklessness and stupidity dressed as bravery and courage.
This is giving them too much credit.
Hegseth has already shown himself to entirely disregard the notion of War Crime, even by the US military's own already controversial standards. The double strike on the boats in the caribbean are literally the textbook example in US military textbooks of what not to do, and that it is a warcrime.
This was no mistake. It was the obvious outcome of a pattern of reckless action.
AI didn't do shit here. Stupid people built the AI and the weapons and applied them. Any other argument is intentional obfuscation.
You all are falling for propaganda.
Am aware content of media coming from either side is so normalized there is little value giving either my attention for free. I am not susceptible to Fox News fear mongering and already read 1984 among others. Neither are going to say anything novel. They're just engaged in barter for food and shelter.
I spent the time engaged in more useful endeavors to those around me and myself.
A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.
The lack of comprehension some people have baffles me, as I’ve had the displeasure of reading several dozens of online posts asking why kids were at school during the strikes. Even giving these people the benefit of the doubt that they do not know that not all countries observe the same weekday/weekend split as in the case of Iran, how in the world is a teacher or a child supposed to know when to hide from a surprise attack?
The easier it gets to give people the tools and power of lethal force, the more preventable injuries and death happen to innocent people. The cover of military conflict should not protect from consequences in cases like this.
Knowing the demographics of this website, it will not make anyone here safer that there is credible proof of Israel using Whatsapp metadata to source location data of adult men, and executing strikes based on that information. Western media already shared stories of how ordinary cell phone metadata was used to conduct strikes that killed innocent civilians. 15-20 years later the exact same deadly inaccurate methods are being used to quench the leaders’ and planners’ thirst for any results. One day a bomb might fall on any of our homes purely based on some circumstantial proof that wouldn’t even be enough for a traffic violation…
Any chance of elaborating on that? I’m new here, so I don’t get it
Israel: Hey, we're gonna start bombing Iran in 15 minutes, so pick your targets! Time's a-wastin'!
US: We do not give a fuck who is meeting with who when. If you ever want to see another dime, or another spare part, or another kind word, let alone have us actually do anything, then you aren't gonna do jack shit unless and until we're goddamned good and ready. Otherwise, have fun with the blowback.
This certainly doesn't absolve the person implementing those parameters, but it is equally the responsibility of the very top of the decision-making structure.
Nor do planes get maintained, armed, fueled and flown to the target zone in the matter of minutes.
In preparing such an operation, I'm sure the critical path even with traditional planning methods, is in other places.
While I agree, that there are certain scenarios where an important enemy commander or an expensive mobile launcher gets detected, and you only have a window of minutes to hours before its gone, this is not one of those cases.
I feel like the military bought some fancy new hammers, and wanted to show the purchase was justified.
It's how the Obama administration drone-struck a wedding before this and how a missile got dropped on a Chinese embassy before that. The doctrine itself is flawed.
https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlh...
> Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means.
How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only way you can actually verify stuff like this, not every place in the world is on Google Maps or have a web presence at all, so the only realistic way to verify this would be to visually inspect it in person, something neither parties who started this war want to do.
Even better, don't make attacks against other soverign nations that don't pose an immediately and critical threat to you, and this whole conflict could have been avoided in the first place.
But no, the president has to be involved in some sort of child-trafficking scheme, so pulling the country into a war seemed preferable to being held responsible, and now we're here, arguing about fucking details that don't matter.
I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire.
The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those buildings have it coming.
A nation state bombing US mainland bases sounds rather implausible, although I certainly would prefer that civilian infrastructure to have a minimum distance to military targets, even in the US, even if only to set the right example to the rest of the world.
I do believe there would be value in modernizing the statutes of Rome regarding human shields, which would force nation states to compile machine readable lists of school locations, so that non-existent reported childrens schools and secret childrens schools would be automatically screened.
Keeping the school secret, or reporting a school location too close to a military base would then activate the right of the international community to attack that nation, in order to prevent nation states from using elementary schools etc. as human shields.
IRGC wants nuclear ICBM's. Iran invests heavily in STEM education and physics. The whole population is aware of such goals, the whole population is aware of the adversarial relationship with the Western hemisphere. Imagine your child being allocated the school that was bombed in Iran, but before it was bombed: wouldn't you protest and ask for your child to be allocated to a different school? They risk being the first casualties when the inevitable escalation to war occurs. Clearly in this fun society of Iran, those parents didn't get a choice, and could only pray their kids get through elementary before such a foreign attack occurs.
IMHO, the most damning aspect is that proper, modernized international law clarifying the permitted action-reaction patterns around human shields could have prevented these deaths, by disincentivizing such nations from using kids as human shields.
I mean, you kind of are saying it was justified, given the entirety of your focus is on justifying it. The blood is solely on the hands of the useless, dumbshit military that couldn't identify a school and avoid bombing it. And that's the charitable interpretation of their actions.
I think sometimes people watch hollywood movies and get the impression that it represents a kind of cataloging of our military capabilities. A demonstration of what we can do to our enemies. With the underlying subtext being "don't mess with us."
I just want to gently suggest that not everything we see in movies is factual with respect to military or intelligence capabilities.
I'm an old timer. I got off the bus at Quantico in 1991. But even though I'm not in right now, I'd feel confident in betting that we don't have the capacity to surveil that many targets via satellite for, say, 1 week, prior to our attack.
(Of course, when I got off the bus at Quantico in '91 I also would have been just as confident in betting that the US would never engage in a first strike. So what do I know?)
https://x.com/clashreport/status/2029574288253026510 https://x.com/tparsi/status/2029555364262228454
If you asked AI to "list the top 100 police facilities in Tehran", this location would appear on the list. It's clear they're using AI to pick targets.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiriyah_shelter_bombing
Fixed. US only has chutzpah to fight someone who can’t meaningfully fight back. If US was truly fighting evil regimes, it would go for Russia, China, NK and bunch of other autocrats.
It's not china mass survelling the planet, the US is. It's not china starting wars, kidnapping foreign leaders, it's the US.
It's not china threatening their allies, not even going short of mentioning annexations, the US is.
This article is the first I have seen mention of Claude in relation to this specific incident. There's been plenty of talk about AI use in warfare in general but in the case of this school most of the coverage I have seen suggested outdated information and procedures not properly followed.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/01/claude-an...
Edit: Also, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
OK. The US probably also used telephones and Diet Coke.
Nothing cited said that Claude was selecting targets or informing target selection.
you, today, can use Claude in Amazon Bedrock, and the way that works is, if you want it to be this way: the piece of code and model weights and whatever other artifacts are involved, they are run on Bedrock. Bedrock is not a facade against Claude's token-based-billing RESTful API, where Anthropic runs its own stuff. In the strictest sense, Bedrock can be used as a facade over lower level Amazon services that obey non-engineering, real world concerns like geographic boundaries / physical boundaries, like which physical data center hardware is connected by what where / jurisdictional boundaries, whatever. It's multi-tenancy in the sense that Amazon has multiple customers, but it's not multi-tenancy in the sense that, because you want to pay for these requirements, Amazon has sorted out how to run the Claude model weights, as though it were an open-weights model you downloaded off Hugging Face, without giving you the weights, but letting you satisfy all these other IP and jurisdictional and non-technical requirements that you are willing to pay for, in a way that Anthropic has also agreed.
This is what the dispute with the Pentagon is about, and what people mean when they say Claude is used in government (it is used in Elsa for the FDA for example too). Anthropic doesn't have telemetry, like the prompts, in this agreement, so they have the contract that says what you can and cannot use the model for, but they cannot prove how you use the model, which of course they can if you used their RESTful API service. They can't "just" paraphrase your user data and train on it, like they do on the RESTful API service. There are reasons people want this arrangement ($$$).
The vendor (Palantir) can use, whatever model it wants right? It chose Claude via "Bedrock." I don't know if they use Claude via Bedrock. Ask them. But that's what they are essentially saying, that's what this is about. Palantir could use Qwen3 and run it on datacenter hardware. Do you understand? It matters, but it also doesn't matter.
It's a bunch of red herrings in my opinion, and this sort of stuff being a red herring is what the article is mostly about.
From a certain angle, the entire industrial and computer age looks like a massive effort to remove all responsibility for our actions, permanently.
Our operational level of war is junk. We have forgotten how to create a task force that has has a clear mission with a clear duration, resources, battlespace, ROE and, most importantly, authority to act. McChrystal 'rediscovered' empowering small teams that every flag officer rediscovers eventually in war. If your supporting the commander's cycle means enabling them to make all the decisions then you have just decided to loose the war. They can't make all the decisions. They need to expand that decision making power. That is their job. Build teams that have the authority and resources. Let those teams, if needed, also build teams if the problem is too big. Most importantly though, let those teams act. If you can't trust those commanders to make decisions and act on them then you shouldn't have put them in the job. Divide and conquer is the only solution here and the JTS/AOC model of warfare is the antithesis of this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540422
The submission here is flagged dead though.
But if you wanna look externally, you can’t rule out Israel. They have intentionally bombed a school to kill children in the past, well before Gaza.
Before you take out your pitch fork, remember what the US did in Vietnam. Ugly stuff happens in ideological wars. It is not controversial to say Israel has done similar things.
Also, someone in our very pro-Israel administration claimed they got us into this war. Israel manipulating an ally is completely unsurprising.
But it doesn’t stop at Israel. I think every single ally we have in the Middle East would do the same thing. Everyone they’re fighting already does.
Palantir is the designer of the lethal US missile targetting system that has ten years outdated data information [1],[2],[3].
For the love of God, who's the Palantir design architect that approved and relied on a single (outdated) database information system for mission critical missile operation?
[1]>In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.
[2]> A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude.
[3]>The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest.
This war is stupid, poorly planned, and likely to kick off a global recession. Trump and his cabinet lacks intelligent people. All of that is true. But there is also a shocking moral relativism going on that is embarrassing and disheartening to watch.
US, let’s not try to drag the West into this.
Would it be poor taste to make joke about gradle being superior here? The dad in me really wants to make that joke...
They've now burnt though almost ONE THOUSAND of those
They cost $4 million each, so that's another $4 BILLION that has to be replaced too
Imagine several more months of that or even through 2029
> 11,294 munitions in the first 16 days of the conflict, at a cost of approximately $26 billion.
Several detailed tables are in the link below.
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-uses-h...
Unfortunately I can very well imagine several more months and years of this. We are still fighting a forever war that started in 2001. This is all a generation of Americans will know, and that is sad.
It's still people doing people things.
And then in Afghanistan and Iraq the US terrified of every shadow blew up anything that looked suspicious- again only serving their enemies.
It is all just so damn tiresome and America never learns because it literally cannot go 5 years without starting some unnecessary and ultimately futile conflict.
Imagine how much money China is saving.
In 1979–1981, Iranian revolutionary forces and aligned militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage during the Iran hostage crisis.
In 1983, IRGC-backed proxies carried out the Beirut barracks bombing, a suicide truck attack that killed 241 U.S. service members in Beirut.
In 1983–84, IRGC-backed proxies bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing dozens of Americans and local staff.
In 1984, IRGC-backed proxies kidnapped CIA station chief William Francis Buckley in Beirut, held and tortured him, and he died in captivity in 1985.
In 1984, militants linked to IRGC-backed Hezbollah hijacked Kuwait Airways Flight 221, holding multiple passengers including Americans hostage.
In 1985, Hezbollah operatives hijacked TWA Flight 847, during which U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was murdered.
In 1996, a truck bomb destroyed the Khobar Towers, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel; U.S. authorities later linked the attack to Saudi Hezbollah backed by Iran.
From 2003–2011, IRGC-backed militias in Iraq used EFP roadside bombs and other attacks that killed and wounded hundreds of U.S. troops.
In 2011, U.S. authorities disrupted an alleged IRGC-directed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, which could have caused American civilian casualties.
In 2007, IRGC-backed militants carried out the Karbala provincial headquarters attack, killing five U.S. soldiers.
In the 2010s–2020s, IRGC-backed groups have been linked to attempted or foiled plots against U.S. individuals abroad, including dissidents and officials.
In 2019, IRGC-backed militias attacked the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad.
From 2019–present, IRGC-backed groups have conducted repeated rocket and drone attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.
In 2024, IRGC-backed militants carried out the Tower 22 drone attack, killing three U.S. service members.
>In 1979–1981
ah, the damned burgers and their inability to remember their own actions
you should have started with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
where you destroyed a democracy for the sake of protecting the oil interests of britain hatred toward burgers isn't something that spawned out of nowhere and the islamic regime benefited from the hatred that was fostered by your previous interventions that disregarded the will of the people to steal the resources of their country
Why US has military presence in every other country? Be more MAGA
Just look at whats happening now. Iran is shooting missiles at all sorts of countries all over the place. (not just the US or israel). Its clearly in a war with a lot of groups right now. It is a silly handwave to pretend like a war isn't going on now, because of something that happened 50 years ago.
Its clearly not unilateral, given how many other countries, that are not the US, have had missiles shot at them by Iran.
As a similar example Russia invaded Ukraine. There is a war going on between them and Ukraine. And when there is a war, countries attack each other. "Who started it" doesn't change the fact that a war is happening.
> The US did not murder tens of thousands of innocent Iranian civilians around the world
No, not just Iranians. You gotta learn the history of your country and spend less time singing anthems
Even if Trump's Whitehouse was a good source and you took it at face value, most of the items in that list are by Iranian proxy, i.e. Iranian intelligence involvement. So by comparison you'd have to include Israel and CIA actions and then it's just a mess to figure out who's worse.
But even then, I don't see anything in there that's as evil as blowing apart dozens of school children in one blow, mistake or not.
They have also repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons on Israel and were in the process of developing such weapons.
> Yes, C attacked D
I don't buy into that story. While in theory many possibilities may exist, I think this was a targeted hit by the decision-makers in the US military. There are some reasons as to why I think this is the case - for instance, under Hegseth and Trump the lies amplified in general, and truth dies first in war. Fishing boats were claimed to be drug boats. Or the iranian ship that was taken down by a torpedo - that was also deliberate. So, all of what the current mafia in charge does, has a purpose: an evil purpose, but a purpose. I could list some more reasons I think this was not an accident, but I believe the most convincing one is actually that there is a prior incident to this. Not of a school (or, at the least perhaps there was, but I don't quite recall it), but of the chinese embassy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_C...
This happened in 1999. The USA initially also claimed it was an accidental hit. Various other sources then pointed out that this explanation made no sense; a simple one I remember is that a statistics scientist pointed out that the "random hit" theory made no sense. There were others who came to the same conclusion but from a different angle; the statistics example I remember because I read it in a book about statistics a few years after that (that is, I read the book a few years lateron, the initial writing happened much closer to 1999).
The current invasion Trump is doing also carries a strong "contain China" attempt with it. To me, I think it is much more likely that the hit on the school was deliberate. The tactic that is being employed here is to commit to the invasion. This is why you can not buy anything Trump says - you'll see that there is a step-wise escalation path coming from the USA right now. Trump is just the decoy on top; the commitment already happened. You'll see more ground troops being committed as the next step.
People really should not buy into ANYTHING that is coming out of the current US administration. Hegseth also recently went for a copy/paste job from the movie Pulp Fiction, when Samuel Jackson cites a bible verse before violence. Hegseth did not use the same words, of course, and the objective was more aimed on christian fanatics in the country, but they are really trying to push every button here. See also how they tried to sell this as a video game via ads. This government is a lost cause and dictators who want war, be it Putin or Trump, should never ever be trusted anywhere.
> Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.
Really? Everyone thought the US had *missed*.
By your logic it's the federal government's fault those 3000 people died on 9/11, they were being used as human shields.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(p.s. I'll add, since this always come up, that yes this standard applies regardless of who is being slurred.)
How about you also ban the rest of the Christian/Jew-hating regalia that's on this thread? Or are you too woke for that?
We need specific links, though. People always assume that we see the same posts they do—in fact we don't come close to seeing everything (even in the same thread) and rely on users to tell us about the worst comments.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Perhaps we should have, you know, just not bombed that particular fucking site until the end of the fucking school day if it was such a vital target. God forbid we act like a vaguely intelligent country, instead of drunkly screaming "maximum lethality" at every conceivable opportunity.
"As we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we come across a street painted in the colours of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as an Iranian headquarters." "On the wall at the entrance of the toilets, slogans read: "Down with Israel" and "Down with the USA".
It was evident that these headquarters were also evacuated at short notice. We found documents classified as "highly sensitive"."
This is a BBC reporter reporting from Syria after the fall of Assad.
It is strategy for the IRGC and Hamas to operate from civilian infrastructure like schools to gain immunity. That's what's "not a human error".
The multiracial Israeli people that are 20% arab? Where arabs have equal rights to Jews and more rights than in any Arab country?
> segregating their own citizens
No. Unless you mean segregating them from Hamas and Hezbollah, in whichcase 'segregating' is a strange term to use.
You have demonstrated that you have very little practical knowledge of Israel, certainly not enough to participate in a discussion.
This is totally unrelated to the topic where it seems the one school in question was incorrectly targeted based on what we know today (though not intentionally).
The general framework for justifying collateral damage is that enough care has to be taken to minimize it vs. the value of the military objective being achieved. Attacking an IRGC headquarters intentionally based in a school (e.g. if the example in Syria was to be attacked by Israel for example) still needs to pass this test. I.e. Israel would have to take measures to minimize collateral damage which would be proportional to the military value it gains by hitting the IRGC. But the (Syrian) school would have been considered a legitimate military target and the outrage should be towards the IRGC setting up camp there.
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.
Do you think it's genocide when the IRGC kill 30-40K Persian civilians? Or only when Americans missiles aimed at a military base miss their target?
This is not to say that this administration is definitely not targeting civilians or infrastructure on purpose; just that the end result, and the moral culpability, are the same in either case.
The intentional murder of enemy children is a tactic of the IDF. They've done it for decades.
There are rumors that the IRGC has started to recruit adolescents (again). I'd have an easier time believing that, but where the Middle East is concerned, there is an endless amount of propaganda and hyperbole, so I don't automatically believe what I read. Pardon my condescension, but it would make the comments sections better if everyone did likewise.
IRGC is making claims that no other party can verify first-hand. Everything from the number of explosions, the extent of the physical damage, the number of wounded and dead, the number of civilians wounded and dead - these are all unverified claims and should be treated as such. Not only is the IRGC obviously biased and incentivized to maximize media pressure on the US and Israel: they are known for information warfare of exactly this nature. To take their statements at face value, and present them as established facts in the opening paragraph, as this article does, is journalistic malpractice.
Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known, yes all parties are projecting narratives with a certainty that we should all be suspicious of.
Without this stable foundation of knowing what actually happened, and why, the very premise of this article collapses on itself.
EDIT: the flurry of responses to this post illustrate the problem. It's difficult to even have a respectful, fact-driven discussion on this topic, because everyone is tempted (and encouraged) to rush to their political battle stations. Nobody wants to discuss information warfare, because they're too busy engaging in it. I think that's worrying and problematic. No matter which "side" you're on, it should be possible to distinguish what is known and what is not; and implementing basic information hygiene. Or do you think you are uniquely immune to disinformation?
- The building does seem to have actually been a school and "detached" from the rest of the military complex.
- The school the Iranians claim it was does seem to exist even if it's not 100% clear that's the identical location.
- At the time of the attack school would have been in session.
- The signature of the attack seems similar between all the buildings attacked and we have footage showing a Tomahawk hitting the area.
Another thing we can tell is that the US has to know the truth here and isn't coming out with an official statement.
And I'm saying this as someone who thinks the Iranian regime is evil, needs to be struck down, was trying to acquire nuclear weapons etc.
As to the numbers I agree they are to be treated with suspicion. The Iranians are obviously motivated to lie, inflate them, and treat all casualties as civilians. But we can still try and estimate given the size of the building what would be the number of students. We can also estimate the outcome of the missile hitting the building and correlate with the photos and satellite imagery, and until we have better data use those estimates.
Agree the first paragraph is garbage journalism.
What the US has NOT confirmed:
- that they are responsible for the bombing
- who hit the school
- whether the school was an intended target of US strikes
- whether it was struck intentionally
- that it was mistaken for a military site
- any casualty count
- whether there were civilians or children in the casualty count
The US has explicitly DENIED:
- That they deliberately target civilian targets
These are the facts about what the US has actually confirmed. We are all entitled to our opinion of what happened. But we should be able to acknowledge that they are just that: opinions. We don't actually know what happened. And I find it scary and dangerous that so many people, on hacker news and elsewhere, are acting like they do.
Sources:
- https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4421...
- https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4434...
I feel like we know enough already. A school was bombed, the ones who did it sucks big time and should be held responsible. Currently, the US and Israel is waging a war against Iran, and one of them dropped the bomb(s), unless suddenly Iran got their hands on American weapons, then that needs to be investigated too, because someone surely dropped the ball at that point.
The basics remain the same, investigations have to be launched to figure out where exactly in the chain of command, someone made a mistake, and then hold that person(s) responsible for their fuck up.
Have those investigations been launched?
We also don't know anything about casualties - we only have the IRGC statements, and they are not reliable.
> Have those investigations been launched?
Yes, according to the US government, an investigation is underway. But its starting point is determining what caused the explosion.
If this was a school (which seems likely at this point) and if this was a US TLAM that hit it (which also seems likely at this point) then we should expect a lot of casualties when it's hit during school time (which also seems likely). And yes, we shouldn't trust what the IRGC is saying.
I think I'm on your side but in this case the correct course of action for the US would have been to quickly own up to the mistake. There is really not a lot of ambiguity here. This doesn't seem to be a case like "shots were fired from the school window" or some sort of dual use with IRGC having offices in the school. If there was a reason for the targeting then presumably we'd have a statement about it already.
Mistakes can be made and are always made in war. Leaving this open like this is damaging to the war effort.
What caused the explosion? Again there's a video showing an American tomahawk middle hitting the building... Why so much equivocating? It's shameful
I am not
> Those of us who paid attention learned to not rush to conclusions, and never, ever trust social media or the western press to overcome or even understand information warfare.
Since you highlight western press can't be trusted to overcome / understand information warfare, would you care to provide some write-ups detailing the viewpoints you hint at, in the context of this Al-Ahli hospital incident?
The Israeli propaganda was false in that case, and they probably hit the hospital. The PIJ missiles' ballistic trajectory did not match with the hospital, and most or all their fuel had burned [1]. I recommend you read the whole text, it's quite short.
But I don't see what you mean here, if the takeaway from Al-Ahli is not to trust the US/Israel when they shift the blame for hitting civilian targets... then applying that lesson here means that we should not trust the US/Israel when they try to shift the blame in this case. The US hit the school. That much is beginning to be obvious.
[1] https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/israeli-disi...
It received the Peabody award in 2021. It received the Right Livelihood award in 2024. It is a research unit under the university of London. Its reports have been used as evidence in cases in the Israeli supreme court and in the UN. The project has gotten numerous grants from the European research council, collaborated with Bellingcat, Amnesty international, and ACLED [1]
Your kneejerk reaction to information that contradicts your priors is obvious. If you had bothered to do even a small google search you could have checked what FA actually is, rather than just lash out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Conflict_Location_and_Ev...
What have they done to deserve your trust? They started a war that they deny is a war. They told us a year ago they set Iran back a decade. Then they tell us 9 months later they're weeks from a nuclear bomb. I wouldn't trust the warmongers to admit they're child killers.
It's one thing to say "I think the US did XYZ".
It's quite another to say "It is an objective truth that the US did XYZ, in fact they even admitted it".
Transposed to the Guardian, if they want to write "we think the US did XYZ", they should clearly frame it as an opinion piece. Instead they are writing "it is an objective truth that the US did XYZ" - which is false. That is journalistic malpractice.
It's fine to be skeptical of the claims of the US government. But the IRGC is also a government - more specifically a totalitarian government built on lies and aggression. To distrust the former while blindly trusting the latter is inconsistent and foolish.
US adopted Russian playbook in more than one way?
Think for a second WHY that is! They can find and kill the Iranian leaders who will be doing the utmost to conceal their location and yet that can't tell us whose bomb blew up a specific building? Of course they can. They're waiting until people forget and they can final release the result of their 'investigation'.
But I'm noticing that you are only interested in guessing the motives and actions of the US.
Does the IRGC not have motives and agency of their own? Perhaps the explosion was caused by a malfunction of their own missile? Perhaps they lied about children being present? Perhaps they intentionally placed children in a location they knew would be struck? Based on their incentives, doctrine and past behavior, you could make a reasonable case for all of those scenarios.
It's fine to speculate on who did what, and why. But that methodology can be applied in both directions, not just the one that suites your political preference.
> An ongoing [United States] military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.
It doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's not an official confirmation by the US government, and it only speaks to the responsibility of the strike, not the various claims of "killed children".
Those sources don't say anything about casualties, or the presence of children. The NYT does its best to make it sound like they do ("responsible for a deadly strike"), but so far the only source for how deadly it is, remains the IRGC. And the NYT happily quotes their claim that the death toll was "at least 175 people".
For what it's worth, I personally believe the US is responsible for the strike. I also think the IRGC is lying about casualties, but there's no way to know for sure, and a US investigation probably won't tell us more on that point.
Do you also believe this administration will ever officially confirm Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not domestic terrorists?
It’s hard to interpret your points charitably here.
I wish there was the same level of rigour and energy applied to investigating the 40,000 deaths in early January. There are countless videos online.
I simply don’t understand why 150 people receive so much attention while 40,000 don’t.
This saddens me because it feels like the focus is on who was responsible rather than who lost their lives.
It's called motherfucking *accountability*
Accountability means everyone not just the ones we like, that's why we're still stuck in Epstein hell.
One of the assholes alluded to in killing people is dead.
The other is still alive.
Accountability.
Anyone can look at the satellite images from the bombing and see how ridiculous whatever Iran was doing was.[1]
[1]https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop...
"It's a tragedy that she was raped. But you have to understand, the way she was dressed, she clearly wanted it, she was sending mixed signals, you see."
Anyway. Here's a preschool right next to a military base, it took me about 3 minutes of scrolling around on google maps to find this.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/2TP32tYqRZxthSFF8
The Navy even provides a map for people potentially targeting to know what is and isn't on base.
https://www.nepa.navy.mil/portals/20/Figure%201%20Letter.png
I'm sure you'll link to where Iran publicly shares the information about the base that was struck, right?
Are the children in that school a legitimate military target? Is putting that school on Joint Base Andrews "recklessly stupid?"
Why is it perfectly fine for the United States to do this but "recklessly stupid" for Iran to do it?
If your force your enemy to decide what is and isn't a civilian target, you are the deranged one.
> Everything that the average family needs is there; a grocery store, shopping mall, bank, post office, theatre, religious centers, outdoor activities, community center, clubs, dining facilities, gas station, quick stop markets, and, if not a full size hospital, medical clinics. The majority of bases do not have schools physically located on the installation, but the children are educated in the neighboring school systems.
src: https://militarybases.com/military-housing/life-on-a-militar...
I just googled that so I don't have to write the text myself.
So while you might be technically correct about schools, do you think housing on a military base for personnel and their families is akin to playing on the road at night ?
> I feel like an intellectual god
HN rules prevent me from writing anything snarky here.
But do you know what else the US does?
The locations of military and non-military buildings is public information, and even intentionally made obvious to anyone. You can get maps of the bases from their websites. You can even go on google maps and see what most of the buildings are. To avoid exactly this situation. And even beyond all that, in the event of military escalation where their is real threat of the bases being hit, the civilians would be evacuated anyway.
(Legitimate) countries at war aren't trying to massacre civilians. They all agreed to that and all take agreed upon steps to stop it. Like at the most basic level issuing uniforms to soldiers so you can clearly see who is a civilian and who is a fighter.
I can assure you that in a war between the US and China, there would be dramatically fewer civilian deaths, because both countries don't fuck around with "military/civilian ambiguity" as a war tactic. Because you or your enemy end up killing a bunch of innocents.
This the the school's website https://web.archive.org/web/20250912011638/https://shajaresc...
Do you believe that these military buildings were a secret that the Iranians thought the US and Israel don't know about ?
> (Legitimate) countries at war aren't trying to massacre civilians.
You think Israel is not a legitimate country? Cause that just very openly happened and continues to happen.
And maybe you think that killing civilians is not the point, which I don't agree with but I can at least understand why one would come to that conclusion.
But you must at least remember that the US is kind of famous for Hiroshima and Nagasaki - an action based almost in it's entirety on killing civilians.
But even if you want to only defend that "legitimate" countries aren't trying to massacre civilians, you must be able to see that the threshold of killing them if they just happen to be in the way is very low.
The Secretary of Defense of the US recently called for removal of all these rules you alluded to
> We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement.
https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318...
Look at what is happening even with this lose framework you are referring to in place. Do you think if China invaded the US, the US would not do everything it takes to defeat them, even if it means giving up conventional warfare. You think the US forces would give up a strategic advantage that could be gained by taking off their uniform and continue fighting without it ?
Also the Geneva conventions don't apply when fighting an enemy who doesn't abide by them. Its incredibly annoying to fight an enemy that has no problem using ambulances as troop and weapon transports. Or an enemy that refuses to issue uniforms to it's fighters. This isn't even necessarily referring to Israel and Hamas, it was rampant with al qaeda and ISIS.
As for China invading the US? Well Ukraine has managed to keep it above board. It's only these shit head theocratic lunatics that have no problem shoveling civilians into the fire to keep their ass in power. Maybe you aren't aware, but Hamas consoles it's civilians by telling them they are dying for God. Just like Japan trained it's civilians during WWII to die for God (who happened to be the emperor.)
By that metric there are never any dead civilians and no rules apply.
Kinda sounds as if you are looking for excuses to make these rules you yourself brought up not apply to any real situation.
I really, really wanted to avoid making fun of of your "gifted brain power".
Your argument is so lazy, I am starting to doubt your godlike intellect.
You are bending over backwards to shift the blame away from an administration that was utterly negligent and reckless and caused an obvious and expected outcome of having "No rules of engagement"
You don't get to blow up a school and say "But a decade ago it was part of the military base!". That's Russia's SOP
It's stupid, lazy, unacceptable, and indefensible in a war of choice. This administration had years to vet targets, and instead eschewed all preparation and fired the people who had been working on preparation.
If only anyone in Washington was capable of feeling shame they'd be committing sepuku about now.
Although it does make sense that the land of school shootings would use the children of it's military as bait.
https://www.militaryonesource.mil/education-employment/for-c...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
This unknown Guardian contributor writes a missive against "Luddites" while using the typical AI booster arguments that always turn around anti AI arguments.
Just like two five year olds: "You have a big nose." "No, you have a big nose."
We learn from this clown that anti AI people suffer from AI psychosis because they are reading WaPo and Reuters.
The key sentence in that Washington Post article appears to be:
> The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements.
As far as I can tell this is the public announcement - a press release from November 2024: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241107699415/en/Ant...
> Anthropic and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) today announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS. This partnership allows for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP) while leveraging the security, agility, flexibility, and sustainability benefits provided by AWS.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
We know that it integrated Claude and Claude was deemed to be a supply chain risk just before the Iran war. So it is not a huge mental leap to assume what it is being used for.
You won't get an answer from Hegseth. This Guardian "article" is by a Substack blogger who also does not have answers.
The "supply chain risk" claims came from a deeply non-serious executive team who don't like "woke AI". They're not credible.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/palantir-faces-challenge-...
Going into a generic rant about anti-AI people after missing sources and believing the Department of War is just extremely poor journalism from the newspaper that destroyed evidence after a command from GCHQ.
I hope this is a single "journalist" and that the Guardian has not been bought.
> The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile
Doesn't make any sense at all when you read the article and understand what Claude actually does in this equation. From the article:
> Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem. In late 2024, years after the core system was operational, Palantir added an LLM layer – this is where Claude sits – that lets analysts search and summarise intelligence reports in plain English. But the language model was never what mattered about this system.
The whole point here is that whether an LLM is involved or not is immaterial to the system as a whole, and it's a disservice to the public to focus on LLMs here.