This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

On the first day of the US-Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February, US missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran, killing at least 168 children as they sat at their desks along with 14 teachers – according to the Iranian media – in what may be the worst single atrocity in US military history since the Vietnam War.

The Pentagon claims it is still investigating the incident, but US military sources say that the school was destroyed because of intelligence based on 13-year-old satellite imagery, showing that it shared a gate with an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base. Later pictures showed that this had long ceased to be the case, including a recent image from 2025 of people playing in the school courtyard. This evidence was ignored by US commanders in their rush to provide targets for air strikes.

“The Pentagon is pressing everyone to move faster,” a source told a CNN investigation into the decision to override warnings about the old and outdated intelligence. “A lot of former hedge-fund people and made-for-TV personalities in the mix. But leadership at Centcom [US Central Command] did not push back either.”

The “made-for-TV” personality presiding over the US bombing of Iran was US Secretary of War, and former Fox News co-host, Pete Hegseth. He had emphasised his determination to remove constraints on actions by US military commanders, brazenly calling for “maximum lethality, not tepid legality”.

Hegseth gave substance to his bellicose slogan by cutting 90 per cent of the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response programme (CHMR) that sought to reduce collateral damage inflicted on civilians by US air strikes. According to CNN, the school was targeted after Hegseth had cut the number of CHMR specialists at Centcom from 10 to just one staffer.

The slaughter of the schoolgirls by feckless US military commanders is but one ghastly example of the moral depravity of America during Donald Trump’s second presidency. Trump boasts of assassinating the 86-year-old Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but makes no mention of the killing by his side of his daughter, daughter-in-law and a 14-month-old granddaughter whose name was Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani.

For the US government, casual butchery of the innocent has become the norm. In the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, US Southern Command has carried out some 196 extrajudicial killings of people in boats whom it claims, without producing any evidence, were “narco-terrorists smuggling drugs into the US”. According to an Amnesty International report on the killings, the US has released and not prosecuted........

© iNews