1. United States
2. Pa.
3. Letter

The strike on the school in Minab was the tragic culmination of a series of incompetent blunders. Those girls should be alive today.  March 2025: NPR reports Hegseth is closing the Pentagon's civilian-harm offices; a former CENTCOM commander says on air it will undermine missions.  April 2025: three senators write to him after a Yemen strike kills more than 70 civilians, warning that dismantling the safeguards will do exactly this. That spring's Yemen campaign killed 153 civilians by the Pentagon's own count.  And, ProPublica found last month, before any of it, he polled every combatant commander on cutting the program — and every one told him not to.  He'd expected them to agree it was "woke." They didn't.  He cut it to fewer than 20 people anyway; Centcom's team went from 10 to 1.  The Minab site was cataloged as an IRGC base on imagery seven years old.  The school built on it had a website and a Google Maps pin.  An analyst flagged the change in 2019 — into a system the targeting database couldn't see.  Target lists that used to take hours were compressed to minutes by Palantir's AI, which some staff assumed would catch stale intel.  Nobody from what remained of the civilian-harm team looked at the site.  Two Tomahawks later, and a father had to identify his 7-year-old at the morgue by his sock.  Trump's public position, in July: nobody will "ever be able to say what happened there."  I’ll say it. It was a war crime. Woefully preventable. Brought on by bigotry, spite, and incompetence. Impeach Hegseth for war crimes… yesterday!