by Jake Johnson
CommonDreams.org
The Pentagon is reportedly planning to withhold until after the midterm elections the completed findings of its investigation into a devastating U.S. strike on an elementary school in southern Iran, which killed more than 150 people—including 120 children—on the first day of President Donald Trump’s illegal and deeply unpopular war.
Bloomberg reported on Oct. 15 that “top Pentagon officials have expressed their intention to hold off on releasing an internal report into the attack” on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab until after next month’s midterms “at the earliest.”
The internal assessment is believed to have been effectively complete for months, and preliminary findings reported in early March determined that American forces hit the school with a Tomahawk missile due to “outdated” targeting information.
According to Bloomberg, Pentagon investigators “discovered that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, and an overreliance on AI contributed to the attack,” which is regarded as one of the U.S. military’s worst atrocities against civilians in decades. Trump brushed off the massacre in remarks to reporters in June, saying: “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”
Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), said in a statement that “the refusal to come clean about the attack on Minab is not just a shameful exercise to dodge accountability for a horrific war crime; it is actively risking these errors being repeated again.”
“As the administration has dodged accountability on Minab and [a deadly strike on a sports hall hours later], it has engaged in further attacks that may be war crimes, including the bombing of a civilian home on Qeshm Island that killed a family and the bombing of a wedding party in Kuhestak that killed five, including two children,” said Costello. “Ensuring these tragedies don’t repeat starts with accountability on Minab.”
International policy analyst Brian Finucane wrote sardonically that the Pentagon doesn’t “want to remind voters before the midterms of the mass killing of schoolchil dren on the first day of Trump’s glorious war.”
Bloomberg’s reporting came as CNN published a story detailing internal U.S. “strike plans” that include possibly dropping the so-called “mother of all bombs” on
Iranian energy infrastructure.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) is the largest nonnuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal. In 2017, Trump became the first U.S. president to deploy the weapon, authorizing the military to drop it on Afghanistan.
Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, warned that using the bomb against Iran would risk “triggering another major escalatory spiral, potentially including Iranian attacks on critical regional energy infrastructure, with consequences for global markets and the U.S. economy.”
“This only reinforces the fundamental problem: Trump has no viable military solution to the Iran conflict,” Toossi wrote. “Is he looking for one spectacular strike to project strength and declare victory? Or is he prepared to plunge the U.S. into an even deeper, potentially endless war that could devastate the rest of his presidency, legacy, and the economy?”
Costello of NIAC said that “the Trump administration’s threats to commit war crimes in Iran cannot be normalized.”
“President Trump acts on many of his threats, necessitating more urgent action to bring this illegal war of choice to a definitive end,” he added.
