US Atrocities from My Lai to Minab

“The US bombing of schoolchildren in Iran is the biggest single US massacre of civilians since My Lai. The Israeli bombing of Tehran’s oil storage constitutes the biggest single act of chemical warfare against a civilian population in history. Grotesque new depths of barbarism.”
– Jason Hickel

After Gaza, there’s something of an atrocity blur, in which we become desensitised to death and mayhem and performative cruelty.  But the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, on Saturday is believed to have killed at least 165 people, mostly children under the age of 12 is different. It is undoubtedly the greatest atrocity committed by the USA since the Vietnam War.

The UN’s education agency, Unesco, said the attack was a “grave violation of humanitarian law”.

Reuters and other agencies, including the New York Times have confirmed the school was hit by the US. That the attack received so little media attention is a symptom of media failure and us suffering from ‘atrocity fatigue’. Read Adam Johnson here: Corporate Media Buries Story of US and Israel Killing 168 in Girls School Attack

But there’s another element that makes this incident even darker. The Washington Post reports that (‘Anthropic’s AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud‘):

“In order to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran, the U.S. military leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare, a tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severs ties with the company that created it.”

The Washington Post team of Tara Copp, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Ian Duncan don’t seem to have made any connection between the use of AI and the atrocities on the ground, instead talking of ‘blistering’ targets and fixating on the tech. They write:

“The military’s Maven Smart System, which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations in Iran, according to three people familiar with the system.”

It’s maybe not surprising, Elizabeth Dwoskin’s blurb reads: “Lizza joined The Washington Post as the paper’s first Silicon Valley correspondent in 2016. She writes accountability-driven narratives about high-level figures, institutions, and ideas in the business and tech world – those building the future and shaping the present, from politics to emerging military technologies to health.”

They write: “It was not immediately clear if Maven’s target lists were shared with the Israelis prior to the attack, but the two sides collaborated on what to strike for months. The Israel Defense Forces “in close cooperation with the U.S. Army, worked for thousands of hours to build as valuable and extensive a target bank as possible,” they said in a statement shortly after operations began.”

It gets worse:

“NATO, which signed a contract with Palantir last year, portrayed its version of Maven as giving commanders video-game like abilities to oversee battles in a recent video. In the American military, the system allowed one artillery unit to do the work of 2,000 staff with a team of just 20 people, according to a study of the system’s use by the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps by Georgetown University.”

This mass disassociation and the glorification and deification of tech leads to the reduction of war to game-mode.

This is a genuine White House video:

pic.twitter.com/77wOVDBubF

— BELLA CALEDONIA (@bellacaledonia) March 6, 2026

Robert Booth and Dan Milmo at The Guardian (both also tech journalists) also covered the story: “Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, was reportedly used by the US military in the barrage of strikes as the technology “shortens the kill chain” – meaning the process of target identification through to legal approval and strike launch.”

The use of AI in warfare seems to have arrived without question when it raises the most profound questions of ethics and morality. Killing is outsourced and warfare reduced to a game. The only metric being used is how efficient the tech is in killing people. That these war crimes are then discussed by tech journalists only compounds the depravity of the situation.