So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.

> 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?

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jvanderbot 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once.

> . “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.

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xrd an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation."

I think you and I disagree on what the situation is here. I don't think it was necessary to bomb Iran and it feels like you are saying we did.

	▲	tunesmith 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It feels like an appreciation for hypotheticals or givens is missing here. One can simultaneously be against the war and the bombing in general, and also accept it as a given and then think about a certain situation being understandable within that given.

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burkaman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If you do - how can you? Why would they?

I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.

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pegasus an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.

	▲	burkaman 42 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The claim I'm responding to is "I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed." I agree it's unusual for anyone in the US military to drop a bomb primarily because they want to kill some children. I think it is not unusual for people involved in bombing campaigns to anticipate killing children and move forward anyway.
	▲	cyberax 10 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Ask yourself this: the 9/11 bombings damaged economically valuable targets for the US, and the Pentagon is a straightforwardly valid military target. Can your logic be used to justify these strikes?
	▲	ImPostingOnHN 35 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself Targeting a single person which might be a valid target had war been declared, while also intentionally striking many civilians around them, is the same as targeting those civilians. You knew the bomb you dropped was going to kill them, and you pressed the button. It makes no difference who the primary "target" is. Otherwise, countries would just bomb all the civilians and all their infrastructure with the excuse that they heard from an unnamed source that there was a combatant nearby, like israel does in Palestine.

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stickfigure 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No evidence has shown up suggesting there was some sort of compelling target in the school. As foul as Trump and Hegseth may be, they aren't cartoon character villains. The Occam's razor explanation is that this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.

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pasquinelli 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

just because you assume that trump and hegseth aren't cartoonishly evil, doesn't mean they aren't. looking at america's actions for a long time, the occam's razor explanation is that america is cartoonishly evil. the reason you struggle with that is about emotions, not logic. and i get it.

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worik 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is possible that two things are true

1. this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.

2. Trump and Hegseth are (like) cartoon character villains.

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pegasus an hour ago | parent [-]

There are no cartoon villains in general, that's the point GP is making by using the word "cartoon". Let's use some common sense, it's not like Trump and Hegseth got together and sneaked in the school on the list of targets just because they liked the idea of children being killed. It's naive to suggest this is a possibility worth considering.

	▲	tastyface 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Given their glee at droning unarmed fishermen in the Caribbean, I would argue they are much farther along this axis than you realize.

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sirfz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's incredible, after all the grotesque stories about rape, torture and murder of children, men and women during the Iraq war, active support of genocide (and 10s of thousands of children murdered by Israel, on purpose), prisoners rape and child imprisonment, a "secretary of war" and president publicly admiting to war crimes and saying things like "negotiate with bombs" you still "refuse to believe" that anyone in decision chain wouldn't do anything like this.

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jvanderbot an hour ago | parent [-]

our views of the world are probably irreconcilable, and I don't think your comment was written to try to fix that.

	▲	sirfz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		My comment is to say the US has proven how brutal they are consistently through all the wars of aggression they have waged in the past several decades. They do not see their "enemies" as human. I can't fix anything unfortunately.

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nostrademons 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just pointing out that this...

> 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.

...is a logical fallacy (false dichotomy). It presumes a level of intent that isn't necessarily present.

For an example of how these might coexist, I'd encourage The Toxoplasma of Rage, which is a long essay that frequently comes up here:

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...

The idea is that rage is its own, self-replicating emotion, and given the medium of the Internet, it's possible that some memes have no purpose other than self-perpetuation. A story about a girls' school being blown up is self-replicating: it gets people riled up enough to share it. A story about a random factory, or some dead person's house, or an empty patch of desert is not really. It's entirely possible that attacks on these happened hundreds of times in the Iran war, but if it did, I would never know about it. I probably wouldn't care about it. Those are not stories that go viral, they don't have enough emotional valence to make people care. And the media knows this, and so they don't bother to seek them out or run them.

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shadowgovt an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The terrorists that struck the World Trade Center targeted a building too.

If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.

	▲	shevy-java 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Which terrorists exactly though? If I recall we saw two planes. We did not see any individual as such in the planes, did we? We saw some passports; not sure that this proves much at all. We also had WTC 7 going down and the strike on the other building (was it in Washington) but not much aside from this. I am not saying the-cake-is-a-lie, everything was fabricated, mind you. What I am saying is that IF we are going to make any conclusions, we need to look at what we have, and then find explanations and projections to what is missing. For instance, any follow-up question such as damage to a building, can be calculated by a computer, so this is not a problem. The problem, though, is IF one can not trust a government, to then buy into what they show or present to the viewer. Hitler also used a fake narrative to sell the invasion of Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident That does not mean everything else is a false flag or fake, per se, but I do not automatically trust any allegation made by any government. You can look back in history and wonder about attempts to sell explanations, such as Warren Commission and a magic bullet switching directions multiple times. Again, that can be calculated via computers, so that's not an issue per se; the issue is if they made claims that are factually incorrect and/or incomplete.

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lovich 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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?

Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?

And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.

I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?

	▲	stickfigure 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody deliberately produces propaganda for their enemies. The people involved may be evil and stupid, but nobody is that evil and stupid.