The media blackout on this massacre and the accepting of the US’s government’s weak-ass response is the most rage-inducing thing. Nobody in seppoland even fucking cares beyond their gas prices.
Read the whole thing, thanks for sharing. I especially liked the half dozen “American targeting experts” who are shocked, SHOCKED that such an obvious war crime could have ever deliberately occurred and it must have been accidental, despite all the clear evidence and years of precedent of the US committing war crimes against civilians
Maybe I am being picky, but so many of the reports on this conflict have this framing of “Sometime in history, long ago, America did some bad things --> now under Trump, we are again doing bad things” and I find it really hard to read. For some reason, it seems even the so-called left-leaning journalists in the west constantly have to cope by acting like Trump somehow is the catalyst that brings imperial brutality to the helpless US military, repeating “mistakes” that were committed far back in history “dUe To hiS IncOmpETence”.
Why are we giving credence to analysts, CIA operatives, diplomats etc who worked for fucking Bush, Obama and Biden as if to characterize this as some sort of radical shift in US military targeting that would be unthinkable in previous contemporary administrations? It’s like doing a report on Franco’s bombing of civilians, and then interview “shocked” SS-soldiers who complains about him not following protocol. I absolutely HATE this narrative that tries to launder the image of the US military and pin the strikes on the fucking Trump administration(s). You can see it everywhere in the western “non-aligned liberal left” or whatever you’d call it.
The framing
…is one of the worst U.S. war crimes since Vietnam.
is obviously true, but you could just as well write “…is one of the worst US war crimes since Guatemala” or “…since the Bush Iraq war” or “…since the Obama ___ strike” or “…since Bidens genocide” and it would hold the same truth value, so why frame it this way in the first place? Well, obviously “one of the worst war crimes since our last administration” will he harder to spin as “poor US military analyst who are not allowed to follow proper protocol thanks to evil Trump” and might instead raise questions of why this keeps happening for 70 years straight.
More rant:
spoiler
Rharrit, the former U.S. diplomat who served under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden, said the narrative being shaped about the strike is that the school was collateral damage in a legitimate military operation aimed at eliminating a key IRGC missile facility. This explanation, she said, deserves intense scrutiny.
“It’s not complicated. The way strikes are approved—especially strikes of this caliber, of this significance, on Day One of a war—and the chain of command that it goes through, not just up and down, but side to side in terms of interagency, there are so many layers. It’s immense,” she said. “There is a clear structure to how targets are done and an investigation is not complicated as long as there’s the political will. But there’s clearly no political will to actually have an investigation. There’s political will for a cover-up.”
Oh look at this, what a fucking big changes the Trump administration put forward, famously there was “political will for investigations” during Bush, Obama and Biden. I remember so many military commanders and soldiers being tried and jailed for the 100s of warcrimes during their administrations.
Bryant, who helped lead U.S. targeting operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said he has not seen evidence that the U.S. knowingly bombed an active school. “I would be very, very surprised—but I guess even more horrified and angered—to ever find out that a targeting team, that Central Command actually knew this was a school full of children and teachers and made a decision to target,” he said, even if they thought bombing the school would achieve a military objective. “That’s an IDF, that’s an Israeli type of proportionality call.”
Based on Bryant’s knowledge of the targeting procedures and his understanding of changes made under Hegseth at the Pentagon, he believes that the military likely bypassed standard vetting of the target, relied on outdated maps, and ignored or eliminated basic reviews aimed at assessing potential civilian impact of bombing specific targets.
Early in his tenure as War Secretary in 2025, Hegseth dissolved the Civilian Protection Center at the Pentagon—where Bryant worked—and announced a policy of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” The Trump administration has staked out a public and internal posture that has dramatically loosened restrictions on the killing of civilians, and Trump has repeatedly stated U.S. intent to bomb civilian sites. “I think these are all sinking together. And then, of course, the rhetoric from not just Hegseth, but especially Trump himself about destroying an entire civilization, all of that filters into the culture,” said Bryant. These factors, he charged, combined with the drive to strike an unprecedented number of sites in Iran in a short amount of time—the Pentagon boasted of hitting more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the Iran war—created the conditions for the Minab strike.
“The U.S. meant to target that facility, that school, but per their own negligence and recklessness, did not know at the time what it was. And there’s no excuse. This is not fog of war stuff. This is very 101. We had plenty of time to prepare these targets,” Bryant said. “It’s incredible to me that they took all this data that was over 10 years old, and none of it was re-vetted and re-validated. It wouldn’t have taken very long to do that,” he added. “Every time I look at it, it is just incredibly, incredibly mind boggling. I’ve never seen anything like that in all my 20-plus years of doing targeting myself. But I think it speaks to the culture change that Hegseth has instituted.”
So he is saying that the hospitals, schools, weddings, and other 1000s of civilian targets before the Trump administration was deliberately targeted and vetted according to standard procedures? If the Pentagon is bombing civilian targets due to Trump abandoning protocol and rushing things, then the civilian targets bombed under previous administrations were due the them following protocol, taking their time, and deliberately targeting civilians? But then how can he be surprised that they continue to bomb civilians?
It is just a complete fucking slopjob to try and clean the US military, the Pentagon and others from their decades of warcrimes, by acting shocked and trying to pin this on fucking Hegseth’s idiocy. It is just as likely that Obama or Bush would bomb that school for fun, if you told Biden there were Palestinian children in there he might as well have fucking triple-triple tapped it, and in all three cases the US military wouldve happily obliged, not because it is a shift of military protocol since Vietnam BUT BECAUSE IT IS THE SAME FUCKING MILITARY THAT WAS IN VIETNAM.
Sorry I got angry the more I continued reading the article.
Apart from this the article is pretty good.
