AI error or not, Iran school bombing is a permanent stain on America’s soul

The numbers — maybe 175 dead, maybe more — are staggering, but what really matters are their names.

There was Ehsan Saleminia, just 6 years old; Fatemeh Zahra Karimi, age 7; Zeynab Bahrami, 10; Mohammad Shah-dousti, 8; Reza Barani, 7; Athena Ahmadzadeh, 10; Khadijeh Darvishi, 9; Reza Ranjbar, 6; Mohammad-Ali Karyani Pak, 7; Parsa Mokhtari-nasab, 12 — and dozens more.

You can read many of their names here. Every American should take a minute to do this — to remember that an undeclared war waged in our names is about more than rising gasoline prices.

They had faces that flashed with the unblemished softness of youth and bright smiles that look no different than the impish grins you might find at the elementary school near your own leafy American neighborhood, beaming toward a future they will not live to see.

They had dreams — to become a scientist or a poet or a cleric or to find love or have kids of their own — that will never be realized, and they leave parents and grandparents and siblings who spend their every remaining tortured minute on Earth filled with the anger and the sorrow and the unanswered questions.

Who pushed the button to drop powerful bombs on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school as part of what experts believe was a precision airstrike on a site in the southeastern Iranian city dominated by a naval base, which the school used to be a part of but was walled off in the mid-2010s? And why?

According to a report in the U.K.-based Middle East Eye, many of the students — mostly young girls who’d packed classrooms on a Saturday morning that is the start of the Islamic world’s workweek — survived an initial explosion and were then taken by a teacher and a principal to shelter in a prayer hall, which was hit by a second, more lethal strike. Some experts believe this was a so-called “double tap” strike — back-to-back hits designed to maximize death and destruction.

It’s been more than a week now since the school bombing — a fiery cataclysm that was so horrific that it’s taken America and the world a while to fully grasp the magnitude of such a war crime. The city where this atrocity occurred, Minab, looks likely to join the anguished map of places from Wounded Knee to Tulsa to My Lai to Kent State to Abu Ghraib that have left indelible blood stains on the soul of a nation that too often falls far short of its lofty ideals.

A flurry of reports from leading news organizations — citing both military experts and sources inside the Pentagon — say all signs point to the United States military as the actor that targeted and then executed the deadly strikes on Minab. Reuters wrote that U.S. investigators have not concluded their probe but say it’s “likely” the bombs were American. That jibes with a New York Times article which notes that official reports said the U.S. military had been targeting naval sites in the region, near the critical Strait of Hormuz, on that Saturday.

President Donald Trump is telling the world a completely different story. “No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he told journalists aboard Air Force One on Saturday, offering no real evidence to support a claim that, an online critic noted, sounded way too much like Vladimir Putin absurdly blaming the 2014 shooting down of a Malaysian Airlines jetliner on his enemy, Ukraine.

The growing uproar over the school bombing, which experts have almost universally branded as a war crime under international law, has triggered a secondary debate for which there are currently more questions than answers: Was the school accidentally targeted through the use of artificial intelligence, or AI, by the Pentagon.

» READ MORE: A mad king’s illegal war on Iran is a cry for regime change … in Washington

The debate started as soon as the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has been using Anthropic’s advanced AI program Claude to both identify bombing targets in Iran and also prioritize them. As anyone who’s used AI or encountered it during online searches knows, AI tools are trained on the information that has been previously published, so it makes sense to ask whether Claude — if in fact used here — wrongly believed the elementary school building was part of the naval base as it apparently had been at one time.

There are huge and justifiable concerns about handing life-or-death decisions to robots, especially one still experiencing growing pains. In 2024, I wrote a column about Israel’s reported use of AI programs to target its massive bombing of Gaza, which is responsible for many of the 74,000 reported deaths there. But I also argued then that the Israeli program called Lavender “is issuing death warrants for toddlers and their mothers because it reflects the inhumanity that we programmed it with.”

Two years later, the more that I followed and pondered the AI debate over the Iran war, the more I realized that the issue is both important yet something of a red herring. The Pentagon and the White House would surely prefer if the American public blamed the slaughter of little girls and boys on a faceless computer program and not the human beings who programmed that computer with all the care of a 15-year-old playing XBox, or the commanders who can’t even tell us why this war is happening.

Even if AI did target Minab, Claude doesn’t bear responsibility for pulverizing these innocent children as much as — based on almost everything we know so far — Donald does, or Pete.

Pete Hegseth — the shady former Fox News host who runs the Pentagon and dubbed himself “Secretary of War” five months before he launched an unconstitutional one — insists the military is still investigating what happened at the school.

But it’s not clear if he cares that much about what they’ll discover, since he’s already maintained that America is no longer restrained by namby-pamby things like rules of engagement and that “the dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we’re doing here.”

Really? This boomer has lived through “politically correct” U.S. wars like Vietnam, with its copious use of napalm and Agent Orange and that My Lai massacre that killed some 350-to-500 villagers, and Iraq, where “shock and awe” was rained down on the masses and prisoners were tortured at Abu Ghraib. Could the Iran War be worse?

Signs point to yes. While this probe into what happened in Minab drags on, Iran accused America of bombing its freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island that supplies drinking water to 30 villages — an act that’s also considered a war crime. (Iran subsequently struck a similar plant in Bahrain.) This weekend, an attack on an oil refinery near Tehran by our Israeli partners turned the night sky red and, according to one video, sent rivers of flaming oil flowing through downtown sewage lines.

This in a war supposedly rooted in the Trump regime’s alarm — shared by millions of us around the globe — over images of Iran’s government gunning down protesters who’d taken to the streets earlier this year. Does the White House honestly believe that decimating an elementary school, blowing up water plants and firebombing the crowded capital, or torpedoing a boat and slaughtering the tuba players and drummers of an Iranian Navy band, is going to liberate Iran’s beleaguered people?

The people in charge don’t seem to be pondering this, as it’s all a game to them. You can hear it in the despicable language of the lacquered and grotesque Hegseth and his middle-school braggadocio about “warfighting” and “the warrior ethos” and America’s “lethality,” which plugs the military’s most solemn duty into the zeitgeist of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.

The noxious unseriousness that oozes from Hegseth at the podium has been confirmed by shocking social media posts from the Trump White House, including a 40-second clip that merrily merged the footage of actual, deadly bombings in Iran with scenes from Iron Man, Gladiator, Braveheart, Top Gun Maverick, Better Call Saul, John Wick, Tropic Thunder, Superman, Breaking Bad, Transformers, Deadpool, Star Wars, and Mortal Combat. A second, NFL Films-style post mixed brutal hits on the football field with bomb blasts like the one that blew limbs off second-graders.

Presumably this reached its intended frat-boy audience here at home, but no one saw it in Iran, where pallbearers were busy carrying dozens of tiny coffins shrouded in Iranian flags through the packed streets of Minab during the children’s funerals.

The massive throng that came out in the southern Iranian city looked much like the masses that American war planners had hoped would be rising up to overthrow the government. Instead, they carried relics from the Shajareh Tayyebeh school that were splattered with the blood of the innocents and chanted, “No surrender!”

None of this washes away the decades of also deadly abuses by the religious zealots who’ve ruled Iran since 1979, which includes frequent slaughtering of protesters, international terrorism, and jailing dissidents and journalists. Their many mortal sins were due to come crashing down on them.

But this war-of-choice launched by one increasingly out-of-touch American president, without the consent of either the citizenry or Congress, as required by law, is killing hundreds and soon thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with any of that, and not just Iranians. The six U.S. reservists from an Iowa unit who returned to Dover in coffins on Saturday weren’t “warfighting” like an NFL linebacker. They were blown up in a Kuwait supply center doing the grunt work of a world war while the American president can’t be bothered to explain what it’s all about.

When I first learned the details of the school bombing in Minab, I thought right away about an American tragedy that was both very different and yet in a few ways eerily similar. On a weekend morning in September 1963, children walked into a Birmingham church to learn about the Bible, and also had their innocent world rocked by an explosion that came from nowhere.

The four schoolgirls who died in the 16th Street Baptist Church — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley — were children of God, and so were Salma Zakeri, Fatemeh Taherifard, Zahra Ansari, and Fatemeh Fadavi.

We as American taxpayers are paying a staggering $1 billion every day for the bombs that are being dropped on Minab, Qeshm Island, and Tehran. Soon, the Trump regime will come to Congress begging for more dollars so that someone can sit at their game console and target more Iranians. We must urge our representatives to stop this insanity, right now. Not one more dime for these war crimes.

After that 1963 Sunday school bombing, an Atlanta newsman named Eugene Patterson won a Pulitzer Prize for his column that urged a sick society to look not just at the rabid Klansmen who triggered the bomb, but deeper inside itself.

“We know better,” wrote Patterson, in words that should be heard 63 years later by anyone who thinks a robot murdered those little kids in Minab. “We created the day. We bear the judgment.”

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter