Tuesday marks five months since the US carried out a deadly attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in the city of Minab, Iran, which killed more than 150 schoolchildren along with over a dozen teachers.
The US Department of Defense (DOD), however, has yet to release the results of the investigation it said it was conducting on the strike.
In a Tuesday social media post, CNN host Jake Tapper highlighted the DOD’s silence about the school attack, noting that “the White House and Pentagon have so far refused any accountability or transparency.”
Tapper then posted a timeline of accumulated evidence that the US was responsible for the deadly strike, while also including a quote from Rachel VanLandingham, a retired official from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), who said “it’s atrocious that we haven’t had an acknowledgement, an explanation, and an apology yet” from the Pentagon.
Earlier this month, CNN reported that the investigation into the school bombing was essentially complete, and it found that US military commanders “bypassed warnings” indicating that their database of strike targets inside Iran was badly out of date shortly before authorizing the attack on the building.
Two of CNN’s sources said senior commanders ignored the warnings out of “expediency,” as they did not want to significantly delay providing target lists during the outset of the war, which Trump illegally launched in February without authorization from the US Congress.
A group of experts at the United Nations last week renewed calls for the US to release the findings of its probe into the school bombing, noting that the US has “obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”
“Five months following the school bombing in Minab, the US and Israel have not made any findings public, raising valid questions regarding the impartiality, effectiveness and transparency of any investigation that may be underway,” they said. “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
Two weeks ago, a group of 25 Democratic US senators sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pressing him to release the results of the Pentagon investigation and to submit to Congress a “prevention and remediation plan that identifies the specific corrective actions the Department will take to ensure this does not happen again.”
“The United States military has a legal and moral obligation to take all feasible precautions to prevent civilian harm,” the senators wrote. “When a U.S. strike kills civilians, the Department owes Congress, the American people, and the victims’ families a clear accounting of what happened and a credible plan to prevent future failures.”
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