There Are No Machines of Loving Grace Without People

On the morning of February 28th, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. When it was finished, at least 168 people were killed—most were children between the ages of seven and twelve. The details are particularly heart-breaking: the school’s principal had moved students to a prayer room after the first strike, calling parents to come get their children. Then a second missile hit the prayer room.

It is considered “among the military’s most deadly incidents involving civilians in decades.” Human rights experts characterize the strike as a war crime. Some in Congress, the United Nations Human Rights Council and others are calling for legal accountability. The Pentagon even opened an investigation. It appears that the mistaken location was a result of stale data and a host of other failures. The US Defense Intelligence Agency misclassified the school as a military target because it was once part of an adjacent Iranian naval base. But it was walled off from that base in 2016 and used as a school for a decade, as shown in commercial satellite imagery.