The U.S. Errors That Led to the Airstrike on an Elementary School

In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family.

Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even

call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen.

But it's one thing to know, and another thing to understand.

Alan, murder, me?

What the hell was Alan thinking?

From serial productions and The New York Times, I'm Em Gesson, and this is The Idiot,

out March 26th, wherever you get your podcasts.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro.

This is The Daily.

On Wednesday, American officials conceded what's become increasingly clear from investigator

reporting by the Times that the United States military was responsible for the air strike

that destroyed an elementary school in Iran.

Having at least 175 people, most of them, small children.

Today, my colleagues, Maliki Brown and Julian Barnes, on what led to one of the most devastating

military errors in decades, it's Thursday, March 12th.

Maliki, it feels like in a very real sense, you were among the first people in the world,

perhaps outside the military, to understand that this devastating air strike was likely

carried out by the United States, a determination that has now been confirmed preliminarily

by an American military investigation.

Well, Michael, I'm not sure about that, but we suspected that something went terribly

wrong as soon as we started looking at it.

Well, now that this is no longer a suspicion, but something that feels so more or less firm,

I want to go back to when this all happened, because the timing is important.

It happened around the same moment that the U.S. and Israel killed Iran's supreme leader,

and all the world's eyes were on that.

And this other air strike was more or less in parallel, but getting a lot less attention

at first.

But once we all realized what had happened, it was shocking.

This was a elementary school blown up by a missile and 175 civilians, mostly children

were killed.

So I just want to talk for a moment about the scale of this.

Yes, it has devastated Minab, the town where this school was located.

Saturday morning is the start of the week and the school week in Iran.

So school was in session.

The teachers union there said that over 260 students were in the school at the time.

And most of these kids are 8, 7 to 12.

And according to health officials and the local governor there, most of them were killed

in the strike along with teachers, and it really is absolutely horrific what has happened.

Right, it's kind of hard to fathom just how many lives were affected by this.

It's just an enormous tragedy.

It's absolutely hard to understand and to put yourself in their position.

I mean, Minab is a small town in southern Iran.

This has affected the entire community there, obviously the direct relatives, but just

the pictures coming out of there of the streets thronged for the few inroads of these children

and their teachers are really heartbreaking.

You know, there are pictures of mothers throwing themselves over the open coffins of their children

as they're saying goodbye to them.

Scores of coffins brought in a procession through the streets.

You know, people throwing rose petals at them, sharing them with sweets.

There were thousands of people out there.

And of course, that aerial photograph that many listeners may have seen of the freshly

dug graves, a hundred of them in a plush in a cemetery just five miles away from the

school.

It kind of spoke to the scale of the loss for the community there.

And whatever happened here, it was clearly one of the most devastating incidents in an

American war in decades, which is why you and a team of people on the visual investigations

desk here in our newsroom said about trying to get to the bottom of what happened and

why it happened and who was responsible.

Can you talk us through what you did from the very beginning to figure that out?

Well, the incident was flagged to us by our colleagues on International.

There was a video circulating showing the immediate aftermath of the school building,

reportedly struck and people rummaging through the rubble outside, smoke billowing from

it.

So the first challenge was to verify that the building that we were seeing in videos of

the aftermath of this strike was in fact a school and then where it is in the video, you

can see, you know, bright pastel colored walls with paintings drawn by children.

Other images were taken from the inside of the building that showed classroom settings

and also colorful drawing.

So it looked like a school from the outset.

And then secondly, where is it?

You're not in Manab and I never have been there.

You're in fact in Ireland.

Yeah, I'm in outside Limerick in Ireland, but we've access to satellite imagery, recent

satellite imagery of Manab.

And I'm able to look around the area and see, you know, find schools that are identified

in Google Earth and whatnot.

This one actually wasn't marked on Google Earth, but we had heard that it was near a military

base.

And so by finding the military base, we were able to identify building and then compare

the contours of that building, the size of it, the trees around it with what we were

seeing in the video and the video was clearly taken at that location and showed the school.

And then in the satellite imagery, there were all other details that suggested to us that

this was a school.

You could see a hopscotch area, other play areas marked in the asphalt, there's sports

fields beside it.

And I suppose one of the things was that one of the most striking things for us was that

around the school, amid the rubble, you could see schoolbooks and small little school bags

and backpacks and bright shoes of children who attended the school and then parents rifling

through these books to see if it belonged to their loved one.

Well, from the images that you're describing, it's quite obviously a school with children

actively attending it.

And so in theory, that should be obvious to whoever struck it.

And the question is, why wasn't it obvious?

Why was it hidden and who did it?

That's right.

Well, we were also able to determine that it was located beside a naval base of the Islamic

Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is around the most powerful military.

And it was once a part of us.

We could see in historic satellite imagery that back in 2013, the building that the school

was in was once encompassed within that broader rectangular military base.

Yeah.

And then by 2016, it was walled off.

The area was cleared, watch towers were removed, public entrances were opened into it.

And the ground was cleared for playing areas, it was painted all these bright colors.

So it had become, you know, it looked like a school and definitely was used for civilian

purposes.

But it was sitting right beside a military site and they were being targeted in these

early hours of the war on Iran.

So knowing that at this point, you're still very early on in your investigation, what

does this suggest exactly to you, the fact that 10 years ago it was part of an IRGC military

complex?

It suggested that this might be a massive intelligence failure.

And somebody identified a school as being a legitimate military target because we could

see from other videos that we also verified that buildings inside in the base had been

hit.

And by time lining out all of those reports, we knew that the school and the base were

hit around the same time.

So it looked like that opening wave of attacks mistakenly hit the school alongside the military

targets in the base.

Just to get this out of the way, did anything suggest that even if this has been a school

for the past 10 years, that the IRGC was using any part of the building as a military facility?

No, there was no evidence of any military function in that school compounds.

So then how do you go about determining which one of the combatants in this conflict strikes

this quite clearly school?

Because it feels like there's two obvious candidates, the United States or Israel.

But of course, I'm guessing you can't entirely discount the possibility because this has

happened in previous Middle Eastern conflicts and all conflicts that perhaps Iran itself may

have misfired and been responsible for this.

Absolutely.

That was a possibility in the early stages of the investigation.

And part of it was trying to identify what was hit in the base, how it was hit, were

these precise strikes, were their craters littering the base?

We couldn't look inside it and it's not open to the public.

And so there were no videos emerging from there, but we have access to satellite imagery

providers.

And so we ordered a high resolution image that would give us a look inside the base and

see what damage was brought and how.

And what did that reveal?

So it showed that several buildings had been destroyed very tidally by precise strikes.

And you could even see that there were holes punched through right the center of these

large warehouses and buildings inside in the military base.

And the school also was hit.

You could see that more than half of it had been destroyed.

There was a wide gaping hole almost circular in shape.

And so that indicated that these buildings were hit with precision-guided missiles.

And that's characteristic of Israeli and U.S. capabilities, but it's also characteristic

of intelligence planning to take out infrastructure ahead of time in these early strikes hitting

the country.

God, so this was not accidental based on what you're seeing at that point.

And probably not a byproduct of some other strike.

It's not a case.

It seems of shrapnel from one strike hitting the school based on what you just described.

And so it feels like Iran in your mind is being taken out of the category of likely candidate.

And so now you're left with Israel and the U.S.

So how do you figure out which of those two are responsible?

Ask them questions.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said the day afterwards on the Sunday that

they weren't operating in the area at that time.

And my colleague Aaron Boxerman questioned U.S. Central Command, and they said their

investigation was ongoing, so we didn't get much information from them.

However, on Wednesday of last week, I turn it over to the chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Director.

And good morning, everyone.

There was a press conference with Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Cain, the joint's

chief's chairman.

Let me flip to the map here.

And General Cain held up a map showing the U.S. and Israeli operations in the first 100

hours of the conflict.

And using a laser pointer, he swung by the south of Iran, and he said the U.S. was primarily

striking targets in the south.

Ballistic missile capabilities, as well as integrated air defense capabilities along the

southern access.

During the northern access, Israel and the Israeli air forces predominantly been working

in a great way.

And Israel was operating in the north and the west.

And even on that map, there was a strike location, and that strike location is in the area

around Minab.

So from what Israeli officials were saying and what General Dan Cain was saying, and based

on the type of weapon we used, the evidence was pointing more and more towards the U.S.

Strike.

Right.

Because the school is in the south of Iran.

That's right, Michael.

And then we obtained this really critical piece of video evidence.

It was filmed across the street from the naval base at a construction site.

And it shows a missile coming in, not hitting the school, but hitting the base.

And in the milliseconds before impact, you can see the silhouette of the weapon against

the blue sky, which opens the possibility of identifying what type of weapon this is.

Now, Trevor Ball, who's a weapons expert with the research group Bellingcat, he identified

it as a Tomahawk missile.

And we also did.

We spoke to other weapons experts, and my colleague John Ismay, who himself is a weapons

expert, analyzed it.

And based on the dimensions and the design of it, it was clearly a Tomahawk cruise missile.

And that's significant because the only party in this war with Tomahawks is the United

States.

And so the evidence is really pointing towards U.S. culpability.

Right.

This will strike in a Tomahawk missile, likely, destroy that Iranian girl school.

So will the Americans, will the U.S. accept any responsibility?

Well, I understand it.

And then at a news conference on Monday, President Trump positive the idea that around

fire the Tomahawk.

Around is used by, you know, his soul and used by other countries, you know, that.

And whether it's Iran, who also has some Tomahawks, I wish they had more.

Once again, despite all the information we have, yeah, we don't know where he's getting

his information from.

And our colleague, Sean McCreech, who covers the White House for the times, is there an

ask President Trump.

You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own

elementary school on the first day of the war, but you're the only person in your government

saying this.

Even your defense secretary wouldn't say that when he was asked standing over your shoulder

on your plane on Saturday.

Why are you the only person saying this?

Because I just don't know enough about it.

I think it's something that I was told is under investigation.

And President Trump says, well, we're waiting for the results of an investigation.

And if the investigation finds that it's us, I'm willing to live with that.

But I will certainly, whatever the report shows, I'm willing to live with that report.

Which is, in a couple of days, precisely what starts to happen.

Correct.

Officials that our colleagues in Washington, D.C., spoke to, who are close to the investigation,

say that the preliminary findings find that the U.S. is responsible for the school strike.

Well, Maliki, thank you very much for your present.

Thanks, Michael.

After the break, my colleague, Julian Barnes, on exactly what the U.S. government investigation

has found, we'll be right back.

I'm Robin, and I am excited to open my cross-play app.

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other player from scoring high.

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Cross-play, the first two-player word game from New York Times games.

Download it for free today.

I think he thinks he has us in the bag, but I'm not so sure.

Julian, you and a team of our colleagues at the Times broke the story on Wednesday morning

that a preliminary investigation by the U.S. government has

determined that the United States military was responsible for the air strike on this

elementary school that we have been talking about with Maliki.

So tell us what you've come to understand about that investigation.

Well, what we've learned is that the U.S. officials who have been looking into this have

come to the conclusion that the U.S. was responsible.

The military took old information and used it to make the targets on the day of the strike,

and they did not update the data.

They did not verify it and realize what we've all come to know now that this became a

school a decade or more ago.

Right.

In 10 years is a very long time ago.

So you're suggesting that whether it was maps or coordinates, what exactly was it that

they were using that was this outdated?

So the Defense Intelligence Agency is one of the agencies that gathers information and

they do it from maps and they do it from other pieces of data and they put it into a big

database that they will push forward as basically a target list.

As a target list or what you will draw your target list from, right?

Making a target is a complicated process and that's the next stage of the military investigation

to figure out did the verification not take place?

Did it fail to reveal the truth?

Where did that process break down?

Because there's old data that's entered all the time and there are safety nets that are

meant to catch it, but they didn't catch it in this place.

I do think we should linger for a moment on how seemingly straightforward verification

would have been.

And I say that because our colleague Maliki used commercially available satellite photos

to determine that this was a school.

And that's not to mention the fact that the US has drones and planes capable of monitoring

a place like a school from very far away and determining even if the original data was

10 years old, who's coming in and out of a building?

And that work might not have taken very long.

And so it gets hard to understand how the US military could only be reliant on 10 year

old data without doing any of the very simple forms of follow up that would have shown

that it was out of date.

The system for picking targets and verifying targets is very complex.

There is supposed to be a double check.

There is supposed to be a triple check.

You get data from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

You cross-check it with satellite imagery from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency,

the people who look at the satellite pictures.

You have all kinds of computer programs that are supposed to help you the analyst do this.

You have AI that's supposed to review it.

You have your own expertise.

And then the intelligence officer is supposed to take it and then give it to the operations

officer who is hopefully doing a last check that it is what they say it is.

There are levels built into the system that are supposed to catch this.

But we are in an era when they want the military to move fast.

They want the military to be willing to break things.

And the system of checks broke down.

We do not fully know how and when.

But the bottom line is 10 year old data was used and it resulted in a catastrophe.

I want to zero in on something you said because it does feel important.

We now have a defense secretary in Pete Hegseth who routinely talks about how cumbersome

old processes were is dismissive of the old rules and very focused on lethality.

I mean, he literally said no more rules of engagement.

So is there an understanding and perhaps at this point it's an assumption rather than

a determination that that ethos played a role here.

So this is the question I am asking.

This is the question my colleagues are asking.

It's the obvious question secretary defense Pete Hegseth has been saying that these rules

are too cumbersome that they make a weak woke military, right?

So this is the environment that the US military is operating in that said we do not have reporting

that the elimination of the civilian casualty rules played a part here.

Right.

I'm curious Julian, what you think based on your many years covering these kinds of incidents,

what accountability might look like in a case like this.

Do you think that it's likely anyone will be fired for this?

Will there be any effort to hold individuals or an entire chain of command responsible?

Will there be any effort to compensate the families of those killed?

I mean, conversations of very inadequate word given that we're talking about small children

who were killed.

But what do you think happens as a result of this?

In a different administration, this would have been handled in the complete opposite way.

We would be having a president not blaming the opponent.

We would not have a president rushing to judgment.

And then you'd have the US looking to potentially make an apology, potentially to do compensation

to the families in Afghanistan.

There was regular compensation when civilians were wrongly targeted or when there was a civilian

casualty and otherwise correct military operation.

But this is a very different administration.

They do not like to apologize.

This is not the kind of thing that gets you fired.

On the other hand, we still have a professional military.

They operate on our ethos.

They do investigations.

And so there will be a measure of lessons learned, accountability.

The military will try to prevent this from happening again.

What we know is that President Trump, in response to a question from our colleague, Sean

McCreish, said that he would go along with the findings of this investigation.

And so I'm curious, what if anything he or the White House has said about what you have

all learned, this investigation preliminarily has found?

Well, Carolyn Levitt, the press secretary in her statement to us, you know, emphasize

that these are preliminary findings.

But later in the day, as President Trump was walking to Marine Wan, he stopped to talk

to the reporters there.

And one of them shouted out at a question about our story.

A new report says that the military investigation has found that the United States dropped his

school in Iran.

As the Vandering Chief, you take responsibility for that.

That is what?

You can see him take a step back.

I don't know, though.

And then he said, I don't know about that.

It was a kind of a distancing from the story.

So I don't know if we can expect Donald Trump to engage with these findings or the final

military investigation.

It is an uncomfortable subject.

It is not the kind of example of winning that he wants to talk about.

Julian, you had mentioned a few moments ago, Afghanistan.

And the reality is that what happened here, the idea that the US would make a mistake

and that it would kill civilians, it's not a new phenomenon.

We talk about it a lot on the show.

War right now, as the United States largely conducts it, is from the air.

And it's through drones or warships firing missiles from very far away, which is what

we think happened in the case of this school.

And the idea is that it insulates American soldiers from harm that would come from being

on the ground.

But the risks are now very plain.

And we somewhat regularly, as a military, kill civilians because we aren't close enough

to the targets to understand who's there.

That was especially true a few years back and we did an episode about it when the US military

killed a man in Afghanistan who we believed was a suspect of an attack when, in fact,

he was an aid worker and we killed nine members of his family, including his seven children.

Is this form of modern American warfare just going to be far more error prone?

No matter what war you're in, there are going to be errors, there are going to be human

errors, there are going to be machine errors.

You can't get away from mistakes in warfare.

But what you say is true, right?

If this was a different kind of war, we would have had a spotter on the ground.

They are that ultimate check.

And that person would have said, wait, there are school children here, there are playgrounds

here.

This is not the right target.

And when you are at a remove hundreds of miles away firing Tomahawk missiles, making

orders from half a world away in Tampa, Florida, like you are at a remove from the battlefield.

And that does create an opportunity for these kind of errors.

Just to end our conversation here, Julian, it is very hard to say what will ultimately

define any war and we are now a week and a half into this one, a lot could happen.

But it feels like a mistake of this magnitude with the death of so many innocent children

feels like it will be remembered on all sides as a signature moment of this war.

How do you think that this mistake, this tragedy, this killing of all of these children at

this elementary school in the early hours of this war is going to be remembered?

When you think about this war, you know that no matter what policy goals are achieved

in this war, the death of the supreme leader, the weakening of the Iranian regime or the

elimination potentially of its nuclear program, whatever is to come, this war is still going

to be remembered, defined by this mistake as well.

It's too big an error.

It's too big a tragedy.

And if we think back on other American wars, we do think of the things that go wrong,

right?

If we go back to Vietnam, we think of the Mealai massacre, we think of the use of napom

that killed children.

If we go to the Iraq war, we think of Abu Ghraib and the abuse of prisoners there.

We think of that terrible military mistake and the consequences it had.

And no matter what is to come in this war in Iran, the killing of the school children,

the mistaken targeting of a school by the U.S. military is going to color how we look

at it.

Well, Julian, I appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We'll be right back.

ZS is a global consulting and technology firm that partners with companies to improve

life and how we live it.

With over 1,700 customers in more than 170 countries, ZS helps businesses connect data,

technology, and human ingenuity to drive impact.

ZS helps clients in healthcare, consumer goods, and retail, travel and hospitality and more.

By putting our deep expertise to work, ranging from AI and analytics to strategy and transformation.

To connect impact that matters, visit zs.com today, that's zs.com.

Here's what else you need to know today.

On the 12th day of the war, Israel's bombardment of Lebanon intensified.

Israel's attacks aimed at Hezbollah, which has fired rockets into Israel in support of

Iran, has killed more than 600 people and displaced more than 800,000, according to Lebanese

officials.

In Iran, the Times reports that the country's new Supreme Leader, Mushtaba Hamanei, has

yet to make a public appearance, in part because he was wounded during the opening days

of attacks by the U.S. and Israel.

Meanwhile, with the straight of Hormuz still closed to moshipping, oil prices rose again

on Wednesday.

That was despite a pledge by the 32 countries of the International Energy Agency to release

400 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserve.

It was the largest release in the agency's history.

It was the latest economic disruption from the war.

On Wednesday, Iran struck three commercial ships around the straight of Hormuz, and several

major banks, including city and HSBC, said they would temporarily close their offices

in the Persian Gulf, out of fear for the safety of their workers.

Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lynn and Michael Simon Johnson.

It was edited by Patricia Willens and Paige Cowatt, contains music by Rowney Bestow

and Sophia Landman.

Our theme music is by Wunderling.

This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

That's it for the day of me.

I'm Michael Bavaro.

See you tomorrow.

ZS is a global consulting and technology firm that partners with companies to improve

life and how we live it.

With over 1700 customers in more than 170 countries, ZS helps businesses connect data,

technology, and human ingenuity to drive impact.

ZS helps clients in healthcare, consumer goods, and retail, travel and hospitality, and more.

By putting our deep expertise to work, ranging from AI and analytics to strategy and transformation.

To connect impact that matters, visit zs.com today.

That's zs.com.