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Maven is a tool for use in the middle of a war. When both sides are firing, minutes saved can mean lives saved for your side. Those lives, at least partly, balance the risks of hitting a bad target.
This was not a strike made in the middle of a war. If Maven was used in the strike that took out a school, it was being used as part of a sneak attack. Nobody was shooting back while this was being planned. Minutes saved were not lives saved. There should have been a priority placed on getting the targets right. Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means. This clearly didn't happen. The school was obviously a school that even had its own website. Humans would have spotted this if they had done more than make their three clicks and move on to the next target.
Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it. Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse, they are directly responsible for the deaths of those little girls. I sincerely hope there are (although I doubt there will be) consequences for this person beyond taking that guilt to their grave.
it could be both, but we know no. 2, the complete disregard for the lives of civilians, is in play because, whatever else was going on, america was initiating war for the purpose of destabilizing a country, afaict at least, the reasoning has been unclear. destablize means to try to make things fuck up, and that tends to kill people. what people? how? who knows? things fucking up means out of control. at that point it's up to physics, not people.
it's like, if i set a house on fire, then later defended that action by claiming to have not known where i started the fire was a nursery.
back in the war on terror days america had a habit of blowing up weddings, and then claiming it was an accident. and i would think, accident how? did the missile fire itself?
Strikes on civilian gatherings are more likely when the only intelligence used to make the decision are IMINT and SIGINT.
SIGINT would typically be radio activity of interest. This could be: - Known hostile entity using the radio (example: Taliban member known to US intelligence) - unidentified entities using a known enemy radio frequency (some non-state actors used particular channels for certain communications) - unknown entities communications indicated hostile association/intent. (example: members of ISIS-K discussed direct involvement in the bombing of a children's hospital)
So an analyst has determined SIGINT of interest. The signal is then geo-located to an accurate enough place in the AOR to warrant additional collection, typically a drone feed.
A reaper or predator is sent it get a direct visual of where the signal was geo-located.
Back in the day, the feeds weren't super high definition. Thus, a wedding or funeral just looks like a bunch of potentially military aged males gathering in one place.
Some things that could cement a strike authorization is seeing somebody a the wedding with a hand held radio, or collecting more SIGINT in the immediate facility. Someone attending the wedding/funeral is talking on the radio again, maybe the person previously identified as associated with the hostile group.
Depending on the conflict, that's more than was needed to authorize a strike and how we wind up reading about these gatherings getting drone striked.
Incomplete intelligence and lax rules of engagement
The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage.
I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school).
It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence.
In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.
Feels like we're talking here about whether rapist should have known that the rapee was a child or an adult, and they had a good reason to believe it was an adult person (there was mother of the girl standing next to it, so, hard to distinguish...), so yeah, obviously a tragedy they raped a child instead, but it happens sometimes when you rape a lot of people at once. A tragedy, but let's get on with raping more...
From Israel's perspective there's an even stronger self defense argument given the amount of missiles aimed at Israel from Iran and the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel. So the US argument that they knew Israel was planning the attack and they knew Iran would retaliate against US interests seems at least on the surface to bad valid.
You might be overestimating how much satellite capacity there is to do this level of analysis for every target.
"we couldn't tell whether it was a legit target" does not fly as a reason to continue.
The fact is that the US routinely commits acts of perfidy. This was the second time they attacked Iran during negotiations.
I've said before that I'm no fan of the Iranian mullah regime, but the US is basically run by war criminals.
And they're proud of it. Albright and her "murdering 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it," Hillary and her "we came we saw he died," and Nobel Peace Prize Barack Hussein Obama with his targeting US citizens via drone + 28000 bombing attacks, to this orange monster demolishing the White House (literally and figuratively) and any pretence at being trustworthy or civilised.
I think the comment section here would look different.
There are very recent images from the current war of Israel, Israeli mothers commenting on the fact that their children schools have been taken over by the IDF. She walks past the playground and it’s full IDF trucks.
This is in a country that claims it’s legitimate to strike schools and hospitals because they’re being used as cover for the military. Yet what would the response be if Iran was to target is ready children?
In Israel, the double standard doesn’t exist because they see the people they’re fighting as less than fully human. The current administration in the US is moving America towards holding the same view because it’s being led by foreign policy experts, who are uniformly staunch Zionists, with a “Hebrew school“ level of understanding of the regions history.
I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground. However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.
> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties
How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.
> so this already is a low error rate
As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.
We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.
> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.
Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
TFA is from The Guardian while GP you responded to specifically called out the NYT analysis. These are different things. Maybe reading the GP's suggested source would leave you with a different set of questions?
> . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
> The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”
> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”
---
> Please reason through the implications now?
It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.
> 1000s
1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.
Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.
> we targeted and killed young children
We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.
Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?
Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them.
Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
And ask if we were trying to target people from group A or group B.
This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.
I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades.
Mapping enemy targets is basically one of the biggest tasks (in scope) intelligence agencies undertake, and can be done in peacetime.
There was no extreme time pressure here, this was just a lack of due diligence and operational sloppiness.
One of the key stated goals of this war, is to have the Iranian people topple their totalitarian government, thereby avoiding having to fight a ground war, and as such, goodwill is extremely important.
The damage this strike did to that goodwill outweighs any potential military advantage the US possibly could get out of it.
What a ridiculous take. What does "originally was" mean? Maybe you wanna say "previously was"? That building was converted to a school 10 years ago! The intelligence they relied on is 10 years old!!!!! It's recklessness and stupidity dressed as bravery and courage.
This is giving them too much credit.
Hegseth has already shown himself to entirely disregard the notion of War Crime, even by the US military's own already controversial standards. The double strike on the boats in the caribbean are literally the textbook example in US military textbooks of what not to do, and that it is a warcrime.
This was no mistake. It was the obvious outcome of a pattern of reckless action.
AI didn't do shit here. Stupid people built the AI and the weapons and applied them. Any other argument is intentional obfuscation.
You all are falling for propaganda.
A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.
It's how the Obama administration drone-struck a wedding before this and how a missile got dropped on a Chinese embassy before that. The doctrine itself is flawed.
The lack of comprehension some people have baffles me, as I’ve had the displeasure of reading several dozens of online posts asking why kids were at school during the strikes. Even giving these people the benefit of the doubt that they do not know that not all countries observe the same weekday/weekend split as in the case of Iran, how in the world is a teacher or a child supposed to know when to hide from a surprise attack?
The easier it gets to give people the tools and power of lethal force, the more preventable injuries and death happen to innocent people. The cover of military conflict should not protect from consequences in cases like this.
Knowing the demographics of this website, it will not make anyone here safer that there is credible proof of Israel using Whatsapp metadata to source location data of adult men, and executing strikes based on that information. Western media already shared stories of how ordinary cell phone metadata was used to conduct strikes that killed innocent civilians. 15-20 years later the exact same deadly inaccurate methods are being used to quench the leaders’ and planners’ thirst for any results. One day a bomb might fall on any of our homes purely based on some circumstantial proof that wouldn’t even be enough for a traffic violation…
Any chance of elaborating on that? I’m new here, so I don’t get it
Israel: Hey, we're gonna start bombing Iran in 15 minutes, so pick your targets! Time's a-wastin'!
US: We do not give a fuck who is meeting with who when. If you ever want to see another dime, or another spare part, or another kind word, let alone have us actually do anything, then you aren't gonna do jack shit unless and until we're goddamned good and ready. Otherwise, have fun with the blowback.
This certainly doesn't absolve the person implementing those parameters, but it is equally the responsibility of the very top of the decision-making structure.
Who said they had all the time in the world? You can't get most of Irans upper leadership in a single room every day when they were publicly trying to hide.
Nor do planes get maintained, armed, fueled and flown to the target zone in the matter of minutes.
In preparing such an operation, I'm sure the critical path even with traditional planning methods, is in other places.
While I agree, that there are certain scenarios where an important enemy commander or an expensive mobile launcher gets detected, and you only have a window of minutes to hours before its gone, this is not one of those cases.
I feel like the military bought some fancy new hammers, and wanted to show the purchase was justified.
https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlh...
> Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means.
How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only way you can actually verify stuff like this, not every place in the world is on Google Maps or have a web presence at all, so the only realistic way to verify this would be to visually inspect it in person, something neither parties who started this war want to do.
Even better, don't make attacks against other soverign nations that don't pose an immediately and critical threat to you, and this whole conflict could have been avoided in the first place.
But no, the president has to be involved in some sort of child-trafficking scheme, so pulling the country into a war seemed preferable to being held responsible, and now we're here, arguing about fucking details that don't matter.
https://x.com/clashreport/status/2029574288253026510 https://x.com/tparsi/status/2029555364262228454
If you asked AI to "list the top 100 police facilities in Tehran", this location would appear on the list. It's clear they're using AI to pick targets.
Fixed. US only has chutzpah to fight someone who can’t meaningfully fight back. If US was truly fighting evil regimes, it would go for Russia, China, NK and bunch of other autocrats.
At what point will the USA fight the evil genociding Israeli state?
This article is the first I have seen mention of Claude in relation to this specific incident. There's been plenty of talk about AI use in warfare in general but in the case of this school most of the coverage I have seen suggested outdated information and procedures not properly followed.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/01/claude-an...
Edit: Also, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
OK. The US probably also used telephones and Diet Coke.
Nothing cited said that Claude was selecting targets or informing target selection.
you, today, can use Claude in Amazon Bedrock, and the way that works is, if you want it to be this way: the piece of code and model weights and whatever other artifacts are involved, they are run on Bedrock. Bedrock is not a facade against Claude's token-based-billing RESTful API, where Anthropic runs its own stuff. In the strictest sense, Bedrock can be used as a facade over lower level Amazon services that obey non-engineering, real world concerns like geographic boundaries / physical boundaries, like which physical data center hardware is connected by what where / jurisdictional boundaries, whatever. It's multi-tenancy in the sense that Amazon has multiple customers, but it's not multi-tenancy in the sense that, because you want to pay for these requirements, Amazon has sorted out how to run the Claude model weights, as though it were an open-weights model you downloaded off Hugging Face, without giving you the weights, but letting you satisfy all these other IP and jurisdictional and non-technical requirements that you are willing to pay for, in a way that Anthropic has also agreed.
This is what the dispute with the Pentagon is about, and what people mean when they say Claude is used in government (it is used in Elsa for the FDA for example too). Anthropic doesn't have telemetry, like the prompts, in this agreement, so they have the contract that says what you can and cannot use the model for, but they cannot prove how you use the model, which of course they can if you used their RESTful API service. They can't "just" paraphrase your user data and train on it, like they do on the RESTful API service. There are reasons people want this arrangement ($$$).
The vendor (Palantir) can use, whatever model it wants right? It chose Claude via "Bedrock." I don't know if they use Claude via Bedrock. Ask them. But that's what they are essentially saying, that's what this is about. Palantir could use Qwen3 and run it on datacenter hardware. Do you understand? It matters, but it also doesn't matter.
It's a bunch of red herrings in my opinion, and this sort of stuff being a red herring is what the article is mostly about.
From a certain angle, the entire industrial and computer age looks like a massive effort to remove all responsibility for our actions, permanently.
They've now burnt though almost ONE THOUSAND of those
They cost $4 million each, so that's another $4 BILLION that has to be replaced too
Imagine several more months of that or even through 2029
> 11,294 munitions in the first 16 days of the conflict, at a cost of approximately $26 billion.
Several detailed tables are in the link below.
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-uses-h...
Unfortunately I can very well imagine several more months and years of this. We are still fighting a forever war that started in 2001. This is all a generation of Americans will know, and that is sad.
Palantir is the designer of the lethal US missile targetting system that has ten years outdated data information [1],[2],[3].
For the love of God, who's the Palantir design architect that approved and relied on a single (outdated) database information system for mission critical missile operation?
[1]>In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.
[2]> A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude.
[3]>The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest.
And, to an even larger extent, the organization that put a semi-automomous computer system in between an operator and a targeting system.
And then in Afghanistan and Iraq the US terrified of every shadow blew up anything that looked suspicious- again only serving their enemies.
It is all just so damn tiresome and America never learns because it literally cannot go 5 years without starting some unnecessary and ultimately futile conflict.
Imagine how much money China is saving.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540422
The submission here is flagged dead though.
Our operational level of war is junk. We have forgotten how to create a task force that has has a clear mission with a clear duration, resources, battlespace, ROE and, most importantly, authority to act. McChrystal 'rediscovered' empowering small teams that every flag officer rediscovers eventually in war. If your supporting the commander's cycle means enabling them to make all the decisions then you have just decided to loose the war. They can't make all the decisions. They need to expand that decision making power. That is their job. Build teams that have the authority and resources. Let those teams, if needed, also build teams if the problem is too big. Most importantly though, let those teams act. If you can't trust those commanders to make decisions and act on them then you shouldn't have put them in the job. Divide and conquer is the only solution here and the JTS/AOC model of warfare is the antithesis of this.
But if you wanna look externally, you can’t rule out Israel. They have intentionally bombed a school to kill children in the past, well before Gaza.
Before you take out your pitch fork, remember what the US did in Vietnam. Ugly stuff happens in ideological wars. It is not controversial to say Israel has done similar things.
Also, someone in our very pro-Israel administration claimed they got us into this war. Israel manipulating an ally is completely unsurprising.
But it doesn’t stop at Israel. I think every single ally we have in the Middle East would do the same thing. Everyone they’re fighting already does.
Would it be poor taste to make joke about gradle being superior here? The dad in me really wants to make that joke...
This war is stupid, poorly planned, and likely to kick off a global recession. Trump and his cabinet lacks intelligent people. All of that is true. But there is also a shocking moral relativism going on that is embarrassing and disheartening to watch.
US, let’s not try to drag the West into this.
> Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.
Really? Everyone thought the US had *missed*.
It's still people doing people things.
I don't buy into that story. While in theory many possibilities may exist, I think this was a targeted hit by the decision-makers in the US military. There are some reasons as to why I think this is the case - for instance, under Hegseth and Trump the lies amplified in general, and truth dies first in war. Fishing boats were claimed to be drug boats. Or the iranian ship that was taken down by a torpedo - that was also deliberate. So, all of what the current mafia in charge does, has a purpose: an evil purpose, but a purpose. I could list some more reasons I think this was not an accident, but I believe the most convincing one is actually that there is a prior incident to this. Not of a school (or, at the least perhaps there was, but I don't quite recall it), but of the chinese embassy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_C...
This happened in 1999. The USA initially also claimed it was an accidental hit. Various other sources then pointed out that this explanation made no sense; a simple one I remember is that a statistics scientist pointed out that the "random hit" theory made no sense. There were others who came to the same conclusion but from a different angle; the statistics example I remember because I read it in a book about statistics a few years after that (that is, I read the book a few years lateron, the initial writing happened much closer to 1999).
The current invasion Trump is doing also carries a strong "contain China" attempt with it. To me, I think it is much more likely that the hit on the school was deliberate. The tactic that is being employed here is to commit to the invasion. This is why you can not buy anything Trump says - you'll see that there is a step-wise escalation path coming from the USA right now. Trump is just the decoy on top; the commitment already happened. You'll see more ground troops being committed as the next step.
People really should not buy into ANYTHING that is coming out of the current US administration. Hegseth also recently went for a copy/paste job from the movie Pulp Fiction, when Samuel Jackson cites a bible verse before violence. Hegseth did not use the same words, of course, and the objective was more aimed on christian fanatics in the country, but they are really trying to push every button here. See also how they tried to sell this as a video game via ads. This government is a lost cause and dictators who want war, be it Putin or Trump, should never ever be trusted anywhere.
In 1979–1981, Iranian revolutionary forces and aligned militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage during the Iran hostage crisis.
In 1983, IRGC-backed proxies carried out the Beirut barracks bombing, a suicide truck attack that killed 241 U.S. service members in Beirut.
In 1983–84, IRGC-backed proxies bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing dozens of Americans and local staff.
In 1984, IRGC-backed proxies kidnapped CIA station chief William Francis Buckley in Beirut, held and tortured him, and he died in captivity in 1985.
In 1984, militants linked to IRGC-backed Hezbollah hijacked Kuwait Airways Flight 221, holding multiple passengers including Americans hostage.
In 1985, Hezbollah operatives hijacked TWA Flight 847, during which U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was murdered.
In 1996, a truck bomb destroyed the Khobar Towers, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel; U.S. authorities later linked the attack to Saudi Hezbollah backed by Iran.
From 2003–2011, IRGC-backed militias in Iraq used EFP roadside bombs and other attacks that killed and wounded hundreds of U.S. troops.
In 2011, U.S. authorities disrupted an alleged IRGC-directed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, which could have caused American civilian casualties.
In 2007, IRGC-backed militants carried out the Karbala provincial headquarters attack, killing five U.S. soldiers.
In the 2010s–2020s, IRGC-backed groups have been linked to attempted or foiled plots against U.S. individuals abroad, including dissidents and officials.
In 2019, IRGC-backed militias attacked the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad.
From 2019–present, IRGC-backed groups have conducted repeated rocket and drone attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.
In 2024, IRGC-backed militants carried out the Tower 22 drone attack, killing three U.S. service members.
Why US has military presence in every other country? Be more MAGA
They have also repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons on Israel and were in the process of developing such weapons.
> Yes, C attacked D
The intentional murder of enemy children is a tactic of the IDF. They've done it for decades.
There are rumors that the IRGC has started to recruit adolescents (again). I'd have an easier time believing that, but where the Middle East is concerned, there is an endless amount of propaganda and hyperbole, so I don't automatically believe what I read. Pardon my condescension, but it would make the comments sections better if everyone did likewise.
IRGC is making claims that no other party can verify first-hand. Everything from the number of explosions, the extent of the physical damage, the number of wounded and dead, the number of civilians wounded and dead - these are all unverified claims and should be treated as such. Not only is the IRGC obviously biased and incentivized to maximize media pressure on the US and Israel: they are known for information warfare of exactly this nature. To take their statements at face value, and present them as established facts in the opening paragraph, as this article does, is journalistic malpractice.
Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known, yes all parties are projecting narratives with a certainty that we should all be suspicious of.
Without this stable foundation of knowing what actually happened, and why, the very premise of this article collapses on itself.
EDIT: the flurry of responses to this post illustrate the problem. It's difficult to even have a respectful, fact-driven discussion on this topic, because everyone is tempted (and encouraged) to rush to their political battle stations. Nobody wants to discuss information warfare, because they're too busy engaging in it. I think that's worrying and problematic. No matter which "side" you're on, it should be possible to distinguish what is known and what is not; and implementing basic information hygiene. Or do you think you are uniquely immune to disinformation?
- The building does seem to have actually been a school and "detached" from the rest of the military complex.
- The school the Iranians claim it was does seem to exist even if it's not 100% clear that's the identical location.
- At the time of the attack school would have been in session.
- The signature of the attack seems similar between all the buildings attacked and we have footage showing a Tomahawk hitting the area.
Another thing we can tell is that the US has to know the truth here and isn't coming out with an official statement.
And I'm saying this as someone who thinks the Iranian regime is evil, needs to be struck down, was trying to acquire nuclear weapons etc.
As to the numbers I agree they are to be treated with suspicion. The Iranians are obviously motivated to lie, inflate them, and treat all casualties as civilians. But we can still try and estimate given the size of the building what would be the number of students. We can also estimate the outcome of the missile hitting the building and correlate with the photos and satellite imagery, and until we have better data use those estimates.
Agree the first paragraph is garbage journalism.
What the US has NOT confirmed:
- that they are responsible for the bombing
- who hit the school
- whether the school was an intended target of US strikes
- whether it was struck intentionally
- that it was mistaken for a military site
- any casualty count
- whether there were civilians or children in the casualty count
The US has explicitly DENIED:
- That they deliberately target civilian targets
These are the facts about what the US has actually confirmed. We are all entitled to our opinion of what happened. But we should be able to acknowledge that they are just that: opinions. We don't actually know what happened. And I find it scary and dangerous that so many people, on hacker news and elsewhere, are acting like they do.
Sources:
- https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4421...
- https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4434...
I feel like we know enough already. A school was bombed, the ones who did it sucks big time and should be held responsible. Currently, the US and Israel is waging a war against Iran, and one of them dropped the bomb(s), unless suddenly Iran got their hands on American weapons, then that needs to be investigated too, because someone surely dropped the ball at that point.
The basics remain the same, investigations have to be launched to figure out where exactly in the chain of command, someone made a mistake, and then hold that person(s) responsible for their fuck up.
Have those investigations been launched?
We also don't know anything about casualties - we only have the IRGC statements, and they are not reliable.
> Have those investigations been launched?
Yes, according to the US government, an investigation is underway. But its starting point is determining what caused the explosion.
If this was a school (which seems likely at this point) and if this was a US TLAM that hit it (which also seems likely at this point) then we should expect a lot of casualties when it's hit during school time (which also seems likely). And yes, we shouldn't trust what the IRGC is saying.
I think I'm on your side but in this case the correct course of action for the US would have been to quickly own up to the mistake. There is really not a lot of ambiguity here. This doesn't seem to be a case like "shots were fired from the school window" or some sort of dual use with IRGC having offices in the school. If there was a reason for the targeting then presumably we'd have a statement about it already.
Mistakes can be made and are always made in war. Leaving this open like this is damaging to the war effort.
What have they done to deserve your trust? They started a war that they deny is a war. They told us a year ago they set Iran back a decade. Then they tell us 9 months later they're weeks from a nuclear bomb. I wouldn't trust the warmongers to admit they're child killers.
What caused the explosion? Again there's a video showing an American tomahawk middle hitting the building... Why so much equivocating? It's shameful
Think for a second WHY that is! They can find and kill the Iranian leaders who will be doing the utmost to conceal their location and yet that can't tell us whose bomb blew up a specific building? Of course they can. They're waiting until people forget and they can final release the result of their 'investigation'.
But I'm noticing that you are only interested in guessing the motives and actions of the US.
Does the IRGC not have motives and agency of their own? Perhaps the explosion was caused by a malfunction of their own missile? Perhaps they lied about children being present? Perhaps they intentionally placed children in a location they knew would be struck? Based on their incentives, doctrine and past behavior, you could make a reasonable case for all of those scenarios.
It's fine to speculate on who did what, and why. But that methodology can be applied in both directions, not just the one that suites your political preference.
US adopted Russian playbook in more than one way?
https://www.militaryonesource.mil/education-employment/for-c...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
This unknown Guardian contributor writes a missive against "Luddites" while using the typical AI booster arguments that always turn around anti AI arguments.
Just like two five year olds: "You have a big nose." "No, you have a big nose."
We learn from this clown that anti AI people suffer from AI psychosis because they are reading WaPo and Reuters.
The key sentence in that Washington Post article appears to be:
> The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements.
As far as I can tell this is the public announcement - a press release from November 2024: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241107699415/en/Ant...
> Anthropic and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) today announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS. This partnership allows for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP) while leveraging the security, agility, flexibility, and sustainability benefits provided by AWS.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
We know that it integrated Claude and Claude was deemed to be a supply chain risk just before the Iran war. So it is not a huge mental leap to assume what it is being used for.
You won't get an answer from Hegseth. This Guardian "article" is by a Substack blogger who also does not have answers.
The "supply chain risk" claims came from a deeply non-serious executive team who don't like "woke AI". They're not credible.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/palantir-faces-challenge-...
Going into a generic rant about anti-AI people after missing sources and believing the Department of War is just extremely poor journalism from the newspaper that destroyed evidence after a command from GCHQ.
I hope this is a single "journalist" and that the Guardian has not been bought.
> The distinction between Maven and Claude is futile
Doesn't make any sense at all when you read the article and understand what Claude actually does in this equation. From the article:
> Neither Claude nor any other LLMs detects targets, processes radar, fuses sensor data or pairs weapons to targets. LLMs are late additions to Palantir’s ecosystem. In late 2024, years after the core system was operational, Palantir added an LLM layer – this is where Claude sits – that lets analysts search and summarise intelligence reports in plain English. But the language model was never what mattered about this system.
The whole point here is that whether an LLM is involved or not is immaterial to the system as a whole, and it's a disservice to the public to focus on LLMs here.
