In February, on the first day of Trumptydumpty's undeclared war on Iran, there was a strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in the town of Minab. It's been broadly discussed that the strike was based on bad data, that it used to be an Iranian Revolutionary Guards post, which could be considered a valid target. And originally the school was within the perimeter of the Guards' compound.
But over a decade ago that changed. The compound perimeter was changed, slicing out the school. Walls were built around it that had three access portals, none with guard posts, also the walls were painted pink and blue to denote the girls and boys sides.
In an unreleased report, the strike planners used a Palantir AI tool called Maven, which did not note that it was no longer a Guards site. Nor did it flag it for human review. Apparently users of Maven expected the system to flag such invalid targets, targets that include things like hospitals, etc., but it would seem that particular functionality was never there to begin with. Palantir, after the school bombing, did at that human review alert in.
The strike planners were also using outdated satellite imagery to identify the target. In 2018 images, it plainly shows the demarcation between the school and the Guards compound and the erection of the wall, along with the construction of a football pitch (soccer) and other children's recreational equipment. The school also had its own web site and appeared on Google Maps.
A different analyst noted the changes to the school in 2019 and logged them into a computer system, but it wasn't accessed by the strike planners.
So basically there were multiple failures and no reason why the school was targeted and all those children killed.
And a particularly telling paragraph from the article:
"Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. Centcom’s group shrank from 10 people to one. No member of those teams reviewed the Minab site before the missiles were up in the air." I'm curious how long 'recent years' are.
Who needs civilian harm mitigation teams? The military's job is to blow shit up and kill!
A recently released U.N. preliminary report says that
"there were reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack. It found the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military objective and that the failure “went beyond mere negligence.” The report said the United States “directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”Maven is still used regularly for strike package creation.
https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-investigators-say-overreliance-on-palantir-ai-tech-contributed-to-u-s-strike-that-killed-123-iranian-children-2000814477![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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