Martin Di Caro
Pulitzer Prize
winning war correspondent Azmat Khan says the Pentagon still obfuscates, lies,
and manipulates the truth about civilian deaths in war
On the
same day airstrikes killed the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran,
a U.S. missile incinerated an elementary school in Minab, killing 123 children
and dozens of others. Some 250 miles away, U.S. missiles fell on a residential
area of Lamerd, killing 21 civilians, including five children.
Neither
the White House nor Pentagon has publicly admitted responsibility in either
incident, although an internal review reportedly determined Minab was hit by a
U.S. missile. An independent, international fact-finding mission found
“reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime by
launching indiscriminate attacks that killed or injured civilians or damaged
civilian objects.”
Mistaken
attacks and official denials have become a norm in the “global war on
terrorism,” fought with “precision weapons” by remote military personnel often
using faulty intelligence. In Iran, the Trump administration also conducted
“dual-use” targeting and “double-tap” airstrikes, further endangering civilians
and wrecking civilian infrastructure.
Although
there are no official totals, the Human Rights Activists News Agency said in
April that it had documented 1,701 civilian fatalities due to "airstrikes
and impact damage on hospitals, emergency medical facilities, primary schools,
universities, water desalination plants, power plants, civilian airports,
places of worship, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and countless densely populated
residential areas."
To
understand why the innocent continue to die under U.S. bombs, I spoke to The
New York Times journalist Azmat Khan, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning work
revealed deadly patterns of failure and a system of opacity and impunity in
America’s air wars. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Martin
Di Caro: During the most intense period of the U.S. bombing of Iran, did you
notice the same problems that you uncovered in your past investigative work?
Azmat
Khan: Yes, I saw
the same problems over and over. One of the biggest was the misidentification
of civilians. The distinction between civilians and combatants is supposed to
be one of the pillars of targeting.
On the
very first day, the United States hit the girls’ school in Iran. Early reports
suggested the military used poor or outdated intelligence, didn’t bother to
look at open-source evidence, and failed to detect the presence of civilians.
These are all things that I saw over and over again which the military was
unaware of. So, for example, in their own data, they found that
misidentification occurred in about 4 percent of civilian casualty cases. When
I analyzed them, I found that misidentification caused about one-third of the
civilian casualties.
Just
this month, on September 1, the U.S. hit a wedding gathering when the intended
target may have been something nearby. I’ve seen that happen again and again,
and often it was the result of confirmation bias, being predisposed to
believing that everything is a target, even an ordinary action. For example,
someone opening a gate will be seen as an ISIS tactic.
In my
previous reporting I found that [targeters] didn't have enough drone
surveillance video because they were working at such an intense pace. The Iran
war exceeded previous bombing campaigns in its pace, scale, and intensity. So,
of course you’re going to have the same problems endemic to the targeting
system, but at a greater rate with far less accountability.
Di
Caro: What about an overreliance on AI?
Khan: To use AI in any form of
targeting means utilizing an already flawed data set, even if you have a human
vetting it. The result is a system of impunity with a lack of accountability.
And unless you're on the ground and investigating the target sites yourself,
unless you're putting in the resources, time, and effort to understand what
went wrong and why, you're never going to catch these kinds of mistakes. And
can you really call these “mistakes” when they are repeated over and over, and
go unaddressed? Can they be war crimes? This is something Oona Hathaway and I
question in a law review article called “‘Mistakes’ in War.”
Di
Caro: On the subject of transparency and accountability, what do you make of
Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s decision to eliminate the Pentagon’s Civilian
Harm Mitigation office?
Khan: Of course it’s contributing to
the problem. That office was helping review civilian casualty assessments,
largely because the rest of the Pentagon was so understaffed. So even after it
had been gutted, the office was still helping with this. Even before the Iran
war, during the bombing of Yemen in 2025, the U.S. stopped releasing
strike-tracking data that is normally disseminated to the public. So there is
less transparency, along with fewer people qualified and trained in assessing
civilian harm.
Di
Caro: Let’s talk about the use of new weapons. For instance, on the same day
the Minab school girls were killed, PrSM missiles killed 21 civilians in
Lamerd, Iran, according to a report you co-wrote in The New York Times. That
weapon had never been used in combat.
The
Pentagon always says it does not target civilians. But a missile that explodes
above the target and sprays 1,800 tungsten pellets in all directions seems to
be designed to kill as many people as possible.
Khan: Precision Strike Missile (PrSM)
is an ironic name, because it pushes out the tungsten pellets. Sometimes
weapons are given intentionally misleading names, things designed to give you
certainty, clarity, or comfort when using them.
This
missile is new to combat. We know [what happened in Lamerd] because there
happened to be CCTV footage from the top of one of the buildings that showed
the missile landing, which is rare. What were they trying to target and what
went wrong? We don't have those answers. The Pentagon has not released its
investigation. In fact, when The Times’ visual investigations team identified
it as a U.S. missile, the military tried to suggest Iran was responsible. That
was not true. It was a deliberate lie. And there is no transparency about using
an untested weapon that, according to my sources, has a high fail rate. The
U.S. Army just awarded Lockheed Martin a $1.2 billion contract that includes
more Precision Strike Missiles.
Di
Caro: The Pentagon has admitted to targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran,
but under the rubric of “dual use,” meaning the facility might also have some
military function.
Khan: Under the laws of war and
civilian protection, civilian objects like hospitals or critical infrastructure
are off limits. Dual-use targeting emerged during the Gulf War. It was invented
by the United States and propagated by Israel. Both countries have really
advanced dual-use targeting, and in a densely-populated urban environment the
dual-use doctrine can be used against almost anything because non-state actors
are known to embed themselves in civilian populations. This is a real crisis.
If it
were applied against the United States the way the United States applies it in
the world, a tower that houses businesses that do work for the U.S. government
would be targetable — not with all the people in it, but the structure itself.
So there are questions about the evidence used to prove that a target is used
by the enemy’s military. You know, to what extent does the enemy need to use
it?
Di
Caro: It seems like an excuse to destroy as much civilian infrastructure as
possible.
Khan: Well, the president of the
United States openly said the intent was to destroy Iran, which is not even
meeting the pretense of the dual-use doctrine.
Di
Caro: An investigation by New Lines Magazine found that the United States also
conducted “double-tap strikes” in Iran. They also seemed designed to harm
civilians.
Khan: Double-tap strikes often happen
when rescuers are trying to get to the wounded from the initial airstrike. I've
seen them in every war I've investigated. You will hear two main justifications
for them. [The military] did not consider the people running toward the bombing
site rescuers. They were militants coming to aid their brethren.
[The
other justification is] the military claims the target was obscured — that
there was a cloud of smoke — so they hit it twice because it didn't appear that
the target was damaged the first time. They couldn’t see rescuers or relatives
rushing to the scene.
There
are so many cases in which [the striking forces] classified people attempting
to make their way to the scene to rescue others as combatants. If the Pentagon
has already misidentified the target, then the military won’t suddenly realize
that those people are locals who live nearby. It got to the point where locals
would tell others not to try to rescue the wounded. I know a young man who
wanted to reach his father and was held back. He watched his father burn to
death because he would have been killed too.
Di
Caro: Where was that?
Khan: In Mosul, Iraq. There’ve been
many cases where the official claim that someone was a member of ISIS or
belonged to Hamas felt quite disingenuous after I looked at the surveillance
footage. I’ve seen videos of double-tap strikes in Gaza, for example, where you
can clearly see a child who's been injured, people coming to help that child,
and then another airstrike.
Di
Caro: As you’ve reported, a supposed benefit of relying on so-called precision
air strikes is that the U.S. can eliminate its enemies without deploying boots
on the ground. But the promise of fighting clean, sanitized wars was a lie,
wasn’t it? It’s not clean and sanitized for the people on the receiving end of
U.S. airstrikes.
Khan: It's a good thing when fewer
American soldiers are dying but the U.S. has shifted the costs, the human costs
of its wars, to either partner forces on the ground or to the local population.
For some in the United States, especially policymakers, they might view that as
convenient because the political costs of war have gone down.
Historically
speaking, American soldier deaths are one of the driving forces of anti-war
movements and accountability… But I would argue that things are changing
especially among the younger generations in the United States. Younger people
that see foreign civilians being killed, maimed, murdered, slaughtered, and
child amputees at the highest rates in the world [in Gaza] — they don't think
of them as just some foreign other. They think of them as humans just like you
and me. That's different, and it’s a political constraint. It has resulted in
organizing, activism, and broad discontent among the American public about not
just the wars the U.S. wages, but the countries to which the U.S. sells weapons
and enables to wage these wars. The cost to foreign civilians is not something
you can hide.
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