In December a satellite passed over Minab, a town near the Strait of Hormuz, and photographed dozens of children playing in a schoolyard. Two months later a Tomahawk missile hit that schoolyard. The file used to aim it listed the building as part of an Iranian naval base.
The UN fact-finding mission on Iran confirmed 157 dead at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school, 123 of them children aged thirteen and under. Iranian counts run higher. It was February 28, the first day of the American and Israeli war on Iran.
This week Bloomberg obtained the account of what happened from officials who worked on the Pentagon’s internal review, which describes a cascade of preventable failures. The review was finished months ago and has never been released.
The wall dividing the school from the base was painted with murals, visible in commercial satellite imagery since 2018. The school had a website, archived as recently as 2025, with photographs of the students and drawings they made. It was tagged in a local business listing. The Pentagon declined to comment to Reuters on any of it.
The story is a sobering foreshadowing of the full impunity the powerful seem to enjoy, assisted greatly by unregulated AI.
An analyst noticed in 2019 that the compound had been split and entered it into a system that does not feed the database CENTCOM uses to build targets, so the coordinates kept their old label for seven years. Pete Hegseth spent his first year as defense secretary taking apart the offices that assess civilian harm, dropping the program from just under 200 people to roughly two dozen.
CENTCOM, the command that fired on Minab, went from sixteen positions to one. The White House ordered more than a thousand strikes in the first 24 hours. Target lists that used to take hours and pass through analysts, imagery specialists, lawyers, targeteers, commanders and launch crews went through Palantir’s Maven Smart System in minutes instead, on a contract worth $1.3 billion. The people who remained assumed Maven would catch stale intelligence.
Nobody from the civilian harm offices looked at the school, partly because almost no one was left and partly because the planners did not include them. The commander who authorized the launch was told reasonable precautions had been taken.
The Pentagon’s investigators call this an over-reliance on AI. Let us be clear: A cabinet secretary abolished the staff who check targets for the presence of children. A president’s office ordered a thousand strikes in a day. Planners shut the survivors of that purge out of the room. All of those are decisions. Decisions have authors. A malfunction does not, which is why the Pentagon reached for one.
The office Hegseth abolished was called civilian harm mitigation. The department had already worked out how to say not killing children without saying it. Because even that was too much.
Palantir says it bears no responsibility for the underlying data or for identifying intelligence deficiencies. The Pentagon says its people leaned on the software too hard. Both are true and neither is an answer.
Whenever this happens, people post a page from an IBM training deck whenever a machine gets blamed for something. A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision. It is dated 1979 and the original surfaced in a man’s father’s work papers, was lost in a flood, and IBM’s archivists say they cannot find another copy.
The sheet behind it shows through in the photograph, setting out what it calls the computer’s mandate.
Authority:
whatever authority is granted it by the social environment within which it operates.
Responsibility:
to perform as pre-directed by the programmer.
Accountability:
none whatsoever.
Someone in Washington granted Maven the power to collapse six stages of verification into a few minutes, in the same period the same building fired the people who were the verification.
The United States gave the UN mission nothing. No documents, no briefings, no version of events. The investigators worked from satellite imagery, munition fragments and survivor testimony, identified the weapon as a Tomahawk that only American forces fired in that war, and reached a conclusion the Pentagon’s own language is built to avoid. The failure to verify the target went beyond negligence.
The U.S. directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.
The mission found reasonable grounds to believe this was a war crime, along with a second strike the same day on a sports complex in Lamerd that killed 22 people, among them a two-year-old girl playing outside her house. The White House rejected the report without addressing a single finding in it.
A group of former senior American military lawyers wrote in April that calling the strike a war crime was premature and speculative, and that such a claim requires a credible factual foundation from a rigorous investigation. The rigorous investigation exists. The administration is sitting on it.
The mission found reasonable grounds to believe this was a war crime, along with a second strike the same day on a sports complex in Lamerd that killed 22 people, among them a two-year-old girl playing outside her house. The White House rejected the report without addressing a single finding in it.
A group of former senior American military lawyers wrote in April that calling the strike a war crime was premature and speculative, and that such a claim requires a credible factual foundation from a rigorous investigation. The rigorous investigation exists. The administration is sitting on it.
Two days after the school came down, Hegseth told reporters that America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, was unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. In July the president sat down with Fox News and was asked whether he would release the findings. He said he didn’t think anybody would ever be able to say what happened there. When the anchor noted that fragments recovered at the site appeared to come from an American Tomahawk, Trump offered that the images themselves might be AI-generated. His own probe had been complete for months.
So this is where we are landing? A government can kill 123 children in one building, withhold every document from the body investigating it, have its own reviewers file the cause under software error, and take no consequence? And of course the only states that will be told they cannot do this are the ones without the software.
Scrutiny at least exists … on paper. More than 120 House Democrats wrote to Hegseth in March, 46 senators sent a letter of their own, and Van Hollen and Warren opened an inquiry in April into the dismantling of the civilian harm programs. The department is investigating itself and decides when its findings surface, the inspectors general who might have forced the question have been fired, and no American has been named in connection with 157 deaths, which leaves no one for a committee to call.
Officials who worked on the investigation told Bloomberg that Hegseth’s advisers have one worry at this stage. They are concerned that political scrutiny of Maven could disrupt the benefits they expect from rolling it out further. The Pentagon is protecting Maven.
In the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, American forces struck more than a thousand targets, which is the rate the Army has said it wants as a standing capability. Minab is the record of what that rate produces, and the program that produced it is being expanded despite it killing so many children.
So they blame the software? OK, let's take it from there.
Then if Maven caused failures, twice, it clearly is nonperforming. Sue the manufacturer and demand full restitution, and support Iranian survivor and family claims against the company.
Further, the software must be removed form all government services. That's how it works in corporate America, so do it.
They can blame the AI for choosing the wrong target. But the AI doesn't operate the equipment that did this. And we know "double-tap" has become the norm in US warfare also. If not triple tap. Meaning someone saw this happen. Someone saw the damage it did. And the lack of imediate military response. We know when it came to the all-girl school, that was hit atleast 3 times. That the operators saw the children on the ground between the 1st and 2nd attack, and we know they then bombed the building the children took shelter in. And later they bomed the parents and first responders.