Trump officials scrapped Pentagon blueprint to avoid civilian war casualties before Iran strikes, report says
Source: The Independent
Wednesday 11 March 2026 17:30 EDT
Before the Iran war, the Trump administration reportedly gutted a series of initiatives aimed at reducing civilian casualties, according to insiders.
The move is under new scrutiny now that the U.S. is accused of launching a February 28 missile strike that hit a girls' primary school near a military base and killed scores of people. The attack in the city of Minab left more than 165 people dead, most of them children under 12, according to Iranian officials.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Air Force veteran Wes J. Bryant, a member of the Pentagon’s Biden-era Civilian Protection Center of Excellence who was forced out in job cuts last spring, told ProPublica. “There’s zero accountability.”
The U.S. says the strike is under investigation, though President Trump has suggested Iran or “somebody else” might be responsible for the attack, which appeared to use an American Tomahawk missile. Internally, a Pentagon probe reportedly found that outdated U.S. targeting data caused American forces to hit the school.
Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-iran-strike-hegseth-civilian-deaths-b2936723.html
Link to ProPublica REPORT - The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Malice aforethought is the sine qua non of murder, a crime for which he and his gang of neoNazis who made this and other deliberate choices must be tried. 😡
We can't have that in the military these days.
"No stupid rules of engagement," Hegseth told us; "no politically correct wars," he added.
It is soooo PC to NOT kill civilians--especially little kids.
Beat your chest Pete and tell us how manly we are for doing this.
Meanwhile, Evil Turnip tries to tell us that somewhere along the line we sold Tomahawk missiles AND all of the launch equipment needed to use them to Iran so they could bomb their own school in a false flag attempt at making us look bad....
Apparently this was an abandoned IRG base that was slowly converted to civilian use with multiple buildings including at least one school, a clinic, and supposedly a housing development.
So it's possible that there were 2 school buildings close to each other (or one being used for both, with students segregated by gender, but designated as "the girls school" pending additional construction in the future) and/or there were boys engaged elsewhere near the location.
And when you are talking about a tomahawk missile (or "missiles" ), there WILL BE "collateral damage".
NPR did a story about that too - Satellite images show Iran school strike hit more buildings than earlier reported
The new images come from the company Planet and are of the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran. They show that a health clinic and other buildings near the school were also struck. Three independent experts confirmed NPR's analysis of the additional strike points.
The strike points "look like pretty clean detonation centroids," said Corey Scher, a postdoctoral researcher at the Conflict Ecology laboratory at Oregon State University. "These certainly appear like detonation sites," agreed Scher's colleague, Oregon State associate professor Jamon Van Den Hoek.
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College who specializes in satellite imagery, said the imagery was consistent with a precision airstrike. The images show "very precise targeting," Lewis told NPR. "Almost all the buildings [in the compound] are hit."
(snip)
