Episode Details

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon can’t count its own war dead and can’t read a satellite photo, and on February twenty eighth it put two Tomahawk missiles into an elementary school in Iran and killed at least a hundred and twenty three children.

That was seven months ago. What’s new is Friday, when Bloomberg got officials inside the investigation to talk.

The school sits in Minab, on the Strait of Hormuz. Two hundred and sixty kids. It was built almost ten years ago on ground that used to belong to an Iranian naval unit, which is the whole problem. The Pentagon filed that address as a military base and never looked again. By 2018 the satellite pictures show painted walls, a soccer pitch, assembly rows, play markings on the ground. The file still said naval unit.

You don’t need a spy satellite to see it. Those pictures are commercially available. Anybody can see them. An American analyst did notice, in 2019, and logged it in a system that doesn’t connect to the database that picks targets. Seven years of a soccer pitch sitting in the wrong filing cabinet.

Now the machine. Centcom runs a targeting system called Maven, built by Palantir, that fuses over a hundred and fifty streams of data and hands commanders a list. Work that used to take hours got condensed into several minutes, and Minab came out as a recommended day one target.

Centcom staff, according to investigators, assumed Maven would flag stale intelligence. Bloomberg’s line about that assumption is the most damning eight words in the piece. “It’s not clear why they had such expectations.”

Palantir is a data company. Its official position is that it is not responsible for the data. Then, after Minab, Palantir quietly built a feature into Maven that re-reviews the intelligence for exactly what it missed. Shipping the fix is a strange way to argue there was nothing to fix.

The rest of this cluster feck is all on Hegseth. The Pentagon had teams whose job was civilian harm mitigation, built after a 2021 Kabul drone strike killed ten civilians, including an aid worker somebody misidentified as a threat. Hegseth gutted them. Ninety percent, department wide, down to under twenty people. Centcom went from ten to one. Nobody from that team looked at Minab before the missiles flew. He called them “Biden-era, non-lethal programs.”

Two days later he stood at a podium and said America was “unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history.” Precise.

A United Nations fact finding mission said last week there are reasonable grounds to call this a war crime, and that the failure to verify the target “went beyond negligence.”

Before any launch a senior commander asks three questions. Is the target lawful? Is the intelligence sufficient? Have reasonable precautions been taken? For a 10 year old elementary school, all three answers came back yes. Seriously?!

It took several minutes to put that school on a list. The report explaining how, is going on seven months, and nobody outside the building has read it.

Mike Little Johnson sent the House home rather than vote on impeaching Hegseth. A hundred and twenty three kids, and the Speaker couldn’t spare the afternoon.

Sources:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-iran-school-attack/

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/09/iran-civilians-trapped-between-extreme-state-repression-and-violations

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/speaker-johnson-recesses-house-early-blocking-massies-push-to-impeach-hegseth