Today a boy's school in Iran was affected by an explosion. The intelligence received by the US chronically seems troubled.
Is that true? I can imagine it's true at first, going from zero bits of information to 1, etc. But information rots over time, and eventually a collection of old information may rot faster than new information improves the world view.
Also, the overall world view isn't especially important, at least not in this case. Each element's accuracy is what's important.
Hopefully each tag is accompanied by a date, at least.
Israel definitely has a lot of moles in Iran. They weren’t bothered to confirm whether the target is a school. US earlier tried to turn it on Iran’s failed defense launch.
US Military: investigating whether it's responsible.
"Mandeep": rants about Israel.
The explanation is simpler. They want death, so they are bombing shit indiscriminately
Hitting a school was not a mistake, it was the point.
The NYT had some good reporting on this, and you can see how the mistake was made. The elementary school used to be part of the IRGC base until 2016. Then it was fenced off and made an elementary school. The “shooter” (in this case, the USA) had a duty to check that the target was currently a valid military target. This verification, if it was done at all, was clearly the problem.
I’m sure you have someone directly responsible for this mistake who is going to have a hard time living with themselves. But like I said, starting a war leads to inevitable tragedy, and I doubt the people who are indirectly responsible will ever recognize their culpability in this.
It does matter if people go around saying that “they want death, so they are bombing shit indiscriminately.”
It's still the most probable explanation
"No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don't waste time or lives," Hegseth said.
Words of your Secretary of War, not mine.
This is not a woke war. This is a war where you bomb schools and kill children.
I mean, to be fair, the US always has been the instigators, but it's now official, something this administration is proud of.
What on earth makes you assert the USA just 'wants war'? If this war goes on for too long Trump is cooked. He'll lose the election and might even be unpopular enough to cop the persecution he deserves.
I don't think whoever was responsible for this gives many fucks about the lives of Iranians.
If a foreign power bombed anything in the US and children died people would just consider them monsters, without further considerations. No one would be pondering about faulty intel.
I refuse to launder the vileness of the aggressors here.
Hegseth said to your face "No stupid rules of engagement", "This is not a politically correct war"
These are the people who have been purposely and loudly defending Israel bombing innocent people. They genuinely believe, as they say to your face, that it is important and necessary to be brutal and extreme to win war.
Intentionally disregarding rules of engagement and protecting innocent life IS intentionally bombing that school. Civilian casualties are a reality of war and the best you can do is work your ass off to reduce them, so openly advocating for NOT doing that is intentionally killing people.
Both sound like war crimes to me, but the latter sounds implausible given the known facts. Let’s not redefine words like ‘intentional’ just because we are appalled. Giving something awful an “awfuller” name is not going to help.
I think it's more likely that the US was going off of outdated intelligence.
The ultimate hubris is launching a multi million dollar missile to kill civilians because you couldn’t be bothered to check Google street view (or whatever).
Shame on you.
What people don’t seem to understand is the word “targeted”.
They see some obviously civilian target in ruins with screaming parents outside and they have an instant visceral emotional reaction: “What kind of monster would do something like this on purpose!?”
Practically nobody targets civilian building with expensive precision munitions! They’re expensive! There’s limited supply! Targets are chosen to maximise the military effect.
The problem is that the victims and journalists have “boots on the ground”. They’re right there and can clearly see the civilian nature of the target with their own eyes.
The person doing the targeting from som bunker thousands of miles away can see only blurry rectangles on an outdated map, has sparse intelligence reports, and targets coordinates. They’re not walking up to the missile like it’s some sort of intelligent war animal and whispering “kill civilians!” in its ear.
Similarly, they’re not on the ground standing outside the civilian target waving the missile in with light sticks like some airport tarmac staff.
I repeat: they’re thousands of miles away and have to target hundreds of buildings that all look the same-ish from space and aren’t magically labelled by God as “no longer valid under the Geneva conventions” or whatever.
I’m not saying that this makes war good or in any way ethical, but you can see how a mistake is made that doesn’t require cartoonish evil people to explain.
This was clearly a horrific mistake, especially obvious since the girls school used to be a military building.
Note that 1991 was the year Ukraine and Russia split and Russia stopped getting a "direct feed" of things like urban planning information from Kiev.
The Russians have bombed multiple children’s hospitals.
We're not dealing with a rational or competent military chain of command. We're dealing with people who believe they're bringing about the Biblical Second Coming and that rules of engagement are "woke." These are literally cartoonishly evil people. They probably chose targets by asking Grok.
That's absurd on its face, and if you honestly believe that, then your mental model of how the world (and people in general) function is fundamentally broken.
I'm not talking about the world or people in general, I'm talking about about the Commander in Chief Donald Trump and "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth, the people who set the tone and make the decisions. And if you listen to either one of them, especially Hegseth, you'll realize it isn't absurd on its face at all.
Even if no one gave a specific order to "mix some schools into the target list" this administration clearly and explicitly - as in, has literally stated on the record - does not care about morality, ethics, rules of engagement or anything of the sort. It's not out of the question that they would intentionally target civilian infrastructure just as a show of force and aggression, or simply not care because their goal is and I'm quoting here "killing people and breaking things."
As for whether it was AI - the US DOD Ethic's first tenent is Responsible - personnel remain responsible...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab...
"It can be said with a degree of confidence that, in 2013, the site was used exclusively as a military barracks with a strict security character, as there was no indication of an independent civilian use of any part of the complex.
But this changed radically in 2016. Satellite images dated September 6, 2016 capture the main turning point, when new internal walls were created and built, fully and tightly separating the school building area from the rest of the military block."
If they work with intelligence data older than 10 years, then this would still account to gross negligence, possibly counting as a war crime. But misstakes happen and they did used AI for target tracking.
But the other interpretation is more dark. Because it was not just some school, but a school where the children of the IRGC go, the elite of the system. And Trump said he does not want a regime change, but rather someone from the current system who just bows to US demands. So the threat of killing all the leadership, anyone could be next - but also the threat to kill also their children and familiy until they surrender.
To quote Hegseth:
"no stupid rules of engagement,” “no politically correct wars,” and “no nation-building quagmire.”
Threatening to kill also their families makes sense with this kind of language and logic. At some point you will find someone who values the life of his family higher than that of the nation and religion.
But I do hope my theory is wrong.
I don't really know how these systems work, perhaps I shouldn't speak without research.
But it seems like a pretty basic error.
The base has looks like 5 buildings in an L shape. 4 buildings where hit in an L shape.
I can imagine the sites were picked from a satellite image and the wrong building was marked.
Or in flight from the camera the wrong buildings were marked.
It is our arrogance that we can blow up hundreds of buildings that makes us try and see meaning behind these mistakes.
Instead we should just be far more cautious about blowing buildings up because these mistakes are inevitable.
The perfect just war simply does not exist.
They are the worst of the worst! Always projecting!!
Republicans spread hatred about trans people during the day, but at night, they thirst for them and get caught fucking them.
Their voters are just next level dilusionals!!
It will be forgotten soon.
A majority of Americans are completely unconcerned by the suffering of victims of the empire abroad.
it won't. Opposing US political side will weaponize this incident in their interests.
Teever•5h ago
readthenotes1•5h ago
Teever•5h ago
waffleiron•5h ago
Just a single example of Russia, hundreds of votes and more than a thousand comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30458277
Edit; just search for Russia, China or Iran on https://hn.algolia.com/ and you’ll find plenty of non tech stories.
readthenotes1•3h ago
enronmusk•3h ago
pinkmuffinere•4h ago
...
Teever•1h ago
After seeing this article flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47273698 I assumed there was no hope for this one.