Trump relied on unverified intelligence to blame Iran for deadly school strike | US-Israel war on Iran
Donald Trump’s attempt to blame Iran for a deadly attack on an elementary school stemmed from a U.S. intelligence assessment that initially suggested the missile belonged to Iran but was quickly dismissed, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The CIA initially told the president that they did not believe the missile that hit the school was a munition used by the United States because the fins appeared to be positioned too low to be a Tomahawk cruise missile.
The CIA realized within 24 hours that the early assessment had been wrong, after additional video from other angles revealed that the missile was actually a Tomahawk, the CIA said on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.
But Trump had already decided on a statement that Iran was responsible for the attack before telling reporters aboard Air Force One last Saturday, although his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was more cautious and said only that the matter was under investigation.
Trump repeated this stance at a press conference the next day. He suggested that it belonged to Iran, although he appeared to acknowledge that the missile that hit the school was a Tomahawk used only by the United States and a handful of allies, including Britain, Japan and Australia.
It was unclear when Trump was briefed on the updated intelligence findings, but former intelligence officials blamed both Trump and the briefers.
“Giving Trump advance information is dangerous because it could turn this into a complete embarrassment,” said a former CIA official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If the manager asks you a question, the best thing to say is that you don’t know, because you know how difficult it is to go back later to correct the record.”
The president’s efforts to pin blame on Iran come as the Pentagon’s ongoing investigation into the attack reached similar conclusions, identifying the missile in question as a Tomahawk fired by the U.S. military and based on old intelligence.
The attack is believed to have killed at least 175 people, most of them children, making it one of the deadliest targeting errors in recent years. The Pentagon investigation focused on why the intelligence was outdated and whether it had been double-checked.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement: “This investigation is ongoing. As we have said, the United States does not target civilians, unlike the terrorist Iranian regime.” A CIA spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Located in the town of Minab, the school was in the same block as the naval base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The school building was once part of a military compound, but it appears to have been walled off and converted into a school between 2013 and 2016.
Targets for air strikes are often generated by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which look at satellite imagery to create “target databases” on a product called the Maven Intelligent System, according to a former senior defense official.
Identifying a building as a target is done with layers of surveillance years in advance by expert analysts, but once it is entered into the database as a possible target, it may not necessarily be reviewed again until an attack is assessed, the official said.
Military planners can then create “target lists” from the database in Maven, including the use of artificial intelligence tools such as Anthropic’s extended language model Claude.
These lists can be set to prioritize different metrics, such as distance to target or probability of destruction. In the opening phase of the Iran war, the list of potential targets reached thousands. It remains unclear whether each of the attacks was verified before they were carried out.
