9/30/26: Trump Sham AI Deal, Nvidia Stock Buyback, Flight To Israel Hijacked, Minab School Bombing Horrors

25:09Emily Jashinsky:It's interesting you read into how he was describing it. Do you hear it that way too? It's sort of dialectic. Except the AI has planned to break the dialectic by a final triumph of capital over labor. And labor turns out to be everybody, including the oligarchs, which would be, nobody saw that one coming. So shocking. Well, it's also worth mentioning here. We can put this next tier sheet A12 up on the screen. While NVIDIA is doing buybacks, just remember that this is the May 1st headline in the Dallas Morning News. NVIDIA, the world's largest company, gets at least$23 million in incentives from Irving.

25:50Emily Jashinsky:That's hardly the only community that's given NVIDIA incentives in recent years. And in fact, the federal government gave incentives to companies like NVIDIA in the one big beautiful bill. We can put the next tier sheet up on the screen. They avoided$6.8 billion in federal income taxes last year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, using, quote, what is the, that's such a great word, quote, pretty pedestrian tax strategies. So that's$4.2 billion for the foreign-derived deduction, eligible income deduction,$1.9 billion in unspecified tax credits,$1.4 billion from executive stock options, and$800 million from the new R &D expensing provision that was created by Congress last summer.

26:31Emily Jashinsky:NVIDIA obviously did not need$800 million from the new R &D expensing provision created by Congress last summer. But, hey, they've got enough to do the buybacks now, Ryan. Right. But the scale is wild. It's like what they owe to the government, they ended up paying$19 billion. What they give their shareholders,$150 billion. And you can just just in that right there, you can see this this yawning gap between private wealth of the top point one percent and the public's growing, you know, the public's continuing collapse, basically. Right. Yeah. I mean, even that what it was, even if they paid what they owed.

27:13Emily Jashinsky:Right. It's like a drop in the bucket compared to what they're giving out to shareholders. Yeah, that's a really good point. It's all the scale of their wealth is just I can't think of any precedent. Can you in human history for this scale? Yeah, we're in a we're in new territory. Right. All right, Ryan. Well, let's move to the Middle East. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

27:52It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y 'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Twelve seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

28:35There was an attempted hijacking of a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, and put this New York Times element up on the screen. An Omani pilot is alleged to have attacked his co-pilot, the Emirati pilot. Reports are only now surfacing of the altercation that ensued. The Omani pilot allegedly stabbed the Emirati pilot in an attempt to take over the plane and presumably crash it. Reports are that passengers on the plane and crew basically rushed into the cockpit and tried in an attempt to restrain the Omani pilot and effectively regained control of the plane despite it descending some 18 ,000 feet. We can put up this video here.

29:30well, okay, this is an image of the pilot who was the victim, the Emirati pilot who was the victim of the stabbing. The Omani pilot, the Israelis are now registering a complaint that the Omani pilot should not have been on board the plane because Israel, as part of the kind of Abraham Accords and the deal that they have with the UAE, says that only pilots with permission to fly into Israel should be allowed to pilot these planes, and Oman does not have such permission as what they're saying, so this would be a violation of the deal to begin with. I'm going to put up the next element. This is footage that's circulating now of the passengers dealing with this 18 ,000-foot plunge as there's a struggle going on in the cockpit for control of the plane before it crashes.

30:32is it sent out two separate squawk signals, one of them an alert of a hijacking, and it ended up landing then in an emergency fashion in Saudi Arabia.

30:44Emily Jashinsky:Horrifying situation. There was a report of another flight being diverted. We don't have any details on that or whether that's even real or a rumor. the, you know, after incidents like this, you get an absolute kind of flurry of rumors and kind of false information that isn't necessarily put out with the intent of misleading people, but it's just, you know, the kind of fog of war sets in. And so this averted what would have been the death of everybody on board. and presumably were mostly Israeli passengers. And so the assumption is that this was a hijacking aim that targeting kind of the Israelis who were flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

31:37Emily Jashinsky:And I mean, this is coming at like the video of this is just that people just saw on the screens. It's just absolutely horrifying to imagine that on your plane. but it's coming. I guess, and I'm curious what the geopolitical significance of what Israel possibly does after this. Well, there's an election in Israel on October 27th, and you've actually already seen some supporters of Netanyahu capitalizing on this. They even made this bizarre AI video of Netanyahu being the pilot who saves the day, and the opposition Netanyahu's opposition figures trying to hijack the plane so trying to create this metaphor that and we're like 24 hours into this if that yeah and producing this metaphor that Netanyahu is the is the only one that can pilot Israel to safety and that everyone else is effectively in league with terrorists like that's that's kind of Netanyahu's argument Netanyahu and his coalition's argument.

32:46And so I think maybe they'll move on now from kind of attacking this documentary, NASA, which has been Netanyahu's election tactic of the past several weeks, to say that he's going to strip the citizenship of these documentary filmmakers who had interviewed 24 IDF soldiers confessing to serious war crimes and laying out the way that they were using AI to produce targets and disregarding or just accepting extraordinary numbers of civilian casualties per strike up to 500 in one strike. Netanyahu was making his campaign all about, I'm the guy that's going to go after them. That was with the backdrop of all of these leaks about what Netanyahu knew about October 7th and how many different people had warned him.

33:40Egyptian intelligence, Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE, all the other warnings, with his opponents trying to relitigate his abject failure on October 7th to keep Israel safe, which is what he wants to run on. So now, with his supporters putting him in the position of the kind of pilot who saves the day here. I think you'll probably see that this reflected in Israeli politics. And you're already, as you said, you're already seeing criticism of the Emiratis for allowing the Omani pilot on the plane at all. And so we'll see how, you know, what geopolitically, you know, how, this unfolds. Yeah.

34:27Emily Jashinsky:And let's get to this next tear sheet about Iranian currency. So speaking of things that Netanyahu is probably clinging to, Iran's currency has hit another record low with traders in Tehran's, according to NewsNation, now exchanging 2.5 million riyals for one US dollar. For comparison, NewsNation says five years ago, it took about 42 ,000 for $1, meaning it takes about 600 times the Iranian currency to have the same value today. You can bet That's getting straight onto Donald Trump's desk at the White House. And Netanyahu is assuring him victory is just around the corner. Meanwhile, the Financial Times is reporting that mediators are trying to break a deadlock.

35:08Emily Jashinsky:But Ryan, when Trump's getting information like this that I'm sure is being pushed hard on him, how likely is it for any deadlock to be broken as mediators this week meet and try to do something or anything on that front? Oh, yeah. It doesn't seem like Trump is capable of reaching an agreement to end this war. And he's also getting told at the same time that oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz are approaching pre-war levels. Not there yet, but getting closer than people thought was, that critics of the U.S. thought was possible, that the U.S. has been able to actually usher through significant amounts.

35:49So they're seeing those two things. The problem is that those two things don't necessarily line up with a strategy to win the war. First, take the currency collapse. What does that do to the Iranian consumer? It forces them to consume less. In other words, it brings about rationing. Every government that is in a war of attrition and certainly a war for survival, when they're facing a blockade throughout history has always rationed supplies, food, energy, to their civilian population. But it's a central war strategy. People don't like it, but people understand it when the situation is existential.

36:38What helps Iran here is they get to ration to their civilian population and they get to blame the enemy for doing it because it literally is the enemy that is doing it so you can kind of take that one off the board as a data point that is getting the united states and israel closer to quote-unquote winning because there's no no government we're tired of rationing i think we're just going to surrender No, you ration so you can outlast your adversary. And then the second one, yes, there is oil getting through. Oil prices are still in the$100 range. And we'll talk about this in the economy block later.

37:26FT was reporting this morning that there is now a very tight correlation, just as there was during the Gulf War back in 1991 with a clamping down of oil supply with interest rates. And so, and Mohamed Ghalibov, the Speaker of the Parliament, had laid this out in his own kind of strategic formula, you know, many weeks ago where he said, where he was basically doing one of these finance bro posts. And one of the arguments was...

37:57Emily Jashinsky:He was going full Ackman? Yeah, Like the price of WTI crude is correlated to interest rates because as interest rates go up, I mean, as energy prices go up, that feeds into the economy as inflation. Bond investors then expect the Federal Reserve to raise rates. And so they preemptively drive up the cost of debt and interest rates. And so the yields rise and the bond prices crash. And so the idea here is that Iran isn't able to stop all the oil flow. That's true. But they're keeping oil prices very high, which is keeping the cost of borrowing very high and the cost of living extremely high for the West.

38:43But it's allowing China to continue to function. Like China is the one that could really pull, you know, pull the leash on Iran here. And if they completely did cut down the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, that could actually backfire on them because then China would say, all right, enough of this. Time to capitulate. So the success points to me are not connected to a strategy to actually win. And nobody has explained why getting oil 18 million barrels a day, let's say, through the Strait of Hormuz and harming the Iranian economy is going to lead to the Iranian government surrendering.

39:26Right. Nobody has explained that, the A to B there.

39:29Emily Jashinsky:Mm-hmm. Because it's not there. And maybe weakening the dollar in the meantime. And just smashing, yes, smashing the American economy to the point where you end up with 54 or 5 Democratic senators. It's like, so that, you know, plus apparently Iran will, unconfirmed reports, Iran just struck a, an LNG tanker would be the first LNG tanker that they've hit in a very, very long time. Iran still maintains agency to upend the status quo. That's the third thing that people aren't really considering. And Ryan, you added here to this rundown the Senate coalition looking for answers in the West Bank. Tell us about what's going on with B4 here.

40:17Yeah, so last night in the Senate, there was a watershed vote. You can put up B4. Ahead of the vote, there was this coalition of anti-war groups who urged a yes vote on a measure by Chris Van Hollen that would basically require the State Department to launch an investigation into settler violence in the West Bank and upon completion of that 30-day investigation stop weapons transfers to Israel connected to that. So it's complicated. It's a privileged resolution. Anybody can bring it to the floor. In the past, when these have come to the floor, either this coalition has found nobody willing to bring one of these to the floor, or when they did, Bernie Sanders brought one to the floor in 2024.

41:04My recollection, people can fact check this, is it got 11 votes. So this one, put up B5, got 46 Democrats and one Republican, Rand Paul. John Fetterman, of course, voted with Israel and the rest of the Republicans. But so 47 senators voted effectively against Israel on this question of West Bank settler violence. AIPAC, I'm told by Hill sources, was whipping this vote quite hard.

41:39Emily Jashinsky:They must have been because I don't expect, you know, more than like five or 10 Republicans to vote with Rand Paul. But when it's only Rand Paul, you know, the pressure was hard. Exactly. Because what we've heard from Republican senators about their concerns, every once in a while, it percolates. Very, very good point from Emily there that if Republicans are allowed to just vote whichever way they think is politically beneficial to them, right, you're going to get a handful of them who are like, look, this is killing me. Well, there's been a drumbeat in places like in serious corners of conservative media that are significant, like Tucker Carlson's show, about violations of Christians' human rights in the West Bank, which is obviously something that Republican senators have been hearing about, and would, because their constituents are telling them about it, have some political concern, at the very least.

42:27Emily Jashinsky:And so I think the fact that it's just Rand tells you that there was a real pressure campaign. Yeah, and to even get, for Democrats even to get Senator Rosen from Nevada, I was a very strong supporter of Israel, means that once the new Senate class comes in, let's say if Troy Jackson wins, El-Sayed, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, right there you're at 50. And that's before you've potentially gotten other wins across the U.S. So what is left for AIPAC and for Israel? Well, to try to sever the link between voters and policy. And one way to do that is to merge the militaries of the United States and Israel.

43:16They're trying to do that now through the NDAA, which is getting debated in the Senate as we speak. Israeli commentators are being much more public about how important it is to them to merge the two militaries because they see the backlash coming and they want to preempt the ability of voters to do anything about it. So let's roll B6 and then do what's at B7. Even if we, God forbid, have, let's say, a more hostile administration after Trump's administration, it will still need to report to Congress how it's advancing the mandate that Congress gave the Department of Defense. So even if we have a hostile president, at the end of the day, this is congressionally controlled and it's actually passed into law.

44:07So the Department of Defense has to move forward with this type of cooperation. Exactly. Section 224 is part of the NDAA for 2027. 2027. So it's part of the mandate and it's attached to the funding that Congress gives to the Department of Defense. It's exactly that. It's a Congress mandate and it's going to be overseen by Congress. And it's not linked in any way to the White House. Now, the challenge that is going to be for both the front administration and the Israeli government is to try and push forward as much projects as you can up to the end of 2028 so that any new administration will first inherit those activities.

45:00And if it tries to slow them down, Congress is going to know about it. And secondly, you want to already insert Israel technology into future projects so that any more hostile administration will need to explain to the American public why is it threatening or hurting American technological supremacy, you know, just to hurt Israel. All right, so that was the IDF spokesperson, Doron Spielman. We also have Mark Dubowitz, who is with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is a leading pro-Israel think tank here, probably the leading pro-Israel think tank here in the United States. Let's roll Dubowitz.

45:41This same financial system that the U.S. has that gives us enormous leverage against our adversaries like Iran or Russia or China, and certainly non-state terrorist organizations, is now going to give, theoretically, a future American administration enormous leverage against our ally Israel. And I think that's the lesson I want Israelis to understand. So this is not an argument for Israelis to decouple from America. And it's exactly the opposite. It's what you said earlier. I mean, you've got to make the relationship deeper, integrate our defense industries, integrate technology, intelligence, finance, research, supply chains.

46:19You've got to make Israel so valuable that American strategic interests, that weaponizing that financial relationship against Israel is going to impose costs on the United States itself. So that is an American analyst saying that the best thing to happen would be for a foreign country to impose costs on his country.

46:45Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. I mean, that's unpatriotic. I got his face. That's unpatriotic because it assumes that the interests of the United States in Israel will always be, like this is, if we take his most charitable case, then it assumes either way, even at its most charitable, it is predicated on an assumption that the interests of the United States and Israel will always be harmonious, that there will never be significant tensions in the interests of the United States and Israel. You have to buy into that presumption in order for that to not be anything but unpatriotic. And that's just obviously a flawed assumption.

47:20Emily Jashinsky:I mean, I think you could even get some of the staunchest defenders of Israel to admit that's not always the case. Yep, I think so. Well, as we learn more about the hijacking, you know, we'll keep you update. I'm sure we'll have more tomorrow on that as well. Yeah, much to discuss, certainly. Let's, Ryan, move on to our next block. Let's bring Jeremy in.

48:02interest and they complained about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y 'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

48:47So on the morning of February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran in the middle of nuclear talks that were planned to move towards a technical phase just days away. Infamously, the strikes included an attack on a school building in the southern town of Minab. Those attacks killed at least 156 people. 120 of the victims were children and 26 were teachers. It is arguably the worst U.S. war crime committed by the United States since Vietnam. My drop site colleague Jeremy Scahill spent the last several months, in fact, speaking with survivors, teachers, first responders, and put his drop site article up on the screen here.

49:30You know, I can't recommend this piece enough. You can find it over at our site. It's a very hard read, but it's important to remind ourselves, I think, of the human cost of our aggression, which in all of the talk about the chess games and the economy and the oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, it can get lost. But it's very real, and it is by far the most important element. I want to start, actually, by putting up, before we go to you, Jeremy, put up this first element up on the screen. This is, you write, this is Yagub Yastapanana on his six-year-old daughter Fatima. Fatima's mother and I had noticed Fatima's overflowing intelligence, he told Jeremy.

50:20I'm a poet myself. When I would write poetry, edit poetry, I would repeat the poem. After hearing the poem once or twice, Fatima would immediately memorize it. When we would tell her a story, she would never forget the story, and she would recite the story moment by moment, word for word. I wanted to find a school that would address Fatima's needs and her active mind. I visited several schools myself. Certainly you would do the same thing. Any parent would take their child to a good school for a brighter future. Thank God, he recalled thinking, I found Shajara Tayeba school. That morning, Yagub kissed Fatima goodbye before walking to the local school in Gerzang where he taught.

51:03But so, Jeremy, can you talk to us a little bit about, you know, how you know what you found as you spoke to people who were the either the victims or survivors of this of this strike? You know, Ryan, I have to say, you know, for more than 25 years, I've been a reporter and a lot of the work that I've done has been in war zones. And, you know, I reported on U.S. massacres and torture in Iraq, you know, on President Obama's expansion of drone strikes and including drone strikes that killed large groups of civilians, including children. So, you know, I'm no stranger to reporting on U.S. war crimes or the killing of children.

51:50But I don't think that in my entire life as a journalist, I've ever reported on a more heinous crime than this. You know, and the people who agreed to tell their stories, doctors, parents, teachers, you know, 26 teachers were killed in those airstrikes. All of them were women. One of the teachers was six months pregnant. You know, it's a shock to the heart. I still can't get over the depth of the horrors that people experienced that day. And, you know, I think about it in the context of when there's school shootings in America, you know, some of the best journalism ends up happening where they tell the stories of the kids who've been killed and the dreams that they had and the wishes for the future that they had.

52:47And you hear about their lives and how they excelled in sports or what they wanted to do in life. And we come in direct contact with the humanity of the lives that have been stolen, have been taken. And when it's our bombs that are dropped on children across the world, we know almost nothing about who was killed in these strikes. And so part of what we set out to do was to approach this story and say, let's hear what happened that day through the lens and perspective of the people who survived it and those who lost their loved ones that day. And we have to remember that on the morning of February 28th, when Iranians woke up, the last thing they had heard the night before was the Omani foreign minister had been meeting with Vice President J.D.

53:40Vance in Washington and came out and said, I think we're on the verge of a deal. And, you know, there were talks scheduled for, you know, a few days down the road in Vienna, Austria, to have technical talks about the nuclear negotiations. I mean, our sources in Tehran from the Iranian government were saying to us, you know, all the indications we're receiving from the mediators is that we're going to have this technical round of talks in Vienna and we'll see what happens there. And so Iranians wake up, they're going to school, they're going to work. This was a Saturday, but it's the equivalent of our Monday morning.

54:12You know, Saturday is the beginning of the work and school week. So people all across the country in Iran got up. They knew that war was possible, but they didn't believe that it was going to happen like that morning. People are stuck in traffic jams. They're rushing to get their kids out the door. It also was Ramadan. So most adults and basically any children who were third grade and up were fasting during this period. So it's already a kind of trying, stressful period for people on some level. And then airstrikes start happening in Tehran and other cities. And the first target that was hit that day, we now know, was the residence of the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

54:53And it killed Khamenei and several members of his family. So the news coverage that morning, a lot of it was on this speculation that Khamenei had actually been assassinated. There were now emerging reports that various IRGC military sites had been hit. And meanwhile, in the southern city of Minab, which is just north of Oman in the Strait of Hormuz, Marco Polo wrote about Minab in his diaries and had gone through there. It's a very strategically important place. It's also an agricultural heartland, the home of the mango industry in Iran, big fishing industry from both the Minab River and the Persian Gulf.

55:36People had also sent their kids to school that morning, and then word spreads like the war has started. And so at this school in Minab, the teachers start getting directives from the principal that the provincial authorities have said, you've got to call all the parents and tell them to come pick up their kids because another war is starting, and you've got to bring them home, and there's going to be a shelter-in-place order. And so one of the teachers at the school, Ms. Salem, told me – and her son, by the way, was a fifth grader at this same school. There was a girl's school, a boy's school, and a preschool.

56:05And she was a preschool teacher there. She said, you know, we didn't think, we weren't in a panic. You know, we started calling parents. We said, okay, the war has actually started. You got to come and pick up your kids. So parents start to arrive at the school that morning. And then as they're kind of getting the backpacks on the kids and parents are pulling up to the front gate, they hear a massive explosion nearby. Now, this strike didn't hit the school, but it was close to the school. So people are like, oh my God, what's happening? So the first instinct of the teachers was, we need to get everybody back into the school.

56:41And what they were thinking was, they'll never hit a school. So they bring the kids back into the school. And while they do that, some children gathered in a prayer hall with one of the teachers. Ms. Salem, the teacher I talked to, ran back up to her classroom because some of the kids whose parents hadn't arrived yet were just waiting there in the classroom with their backpacks on. And she goes in and the kids are saying, Miss, Miss, what's happening? And she says, oh, everything is going to be fine. And that moment, she hears a sound that she said she would never be able to replicate it. It was just like a whoosh boom.

57:18And she said, and all of a sudden, everything shook. The windows blasted out. Smoke starts to appear. And then immediately, another massive bang. And she said she realized that we've been bombed, that the school has been hit. And she thinks she's dying in a moment. She thinks everything is going to collapse around her. And then she says there was just silence for a moment. And she looks around and she sees the children. And she just starts running to get them outside. And when she gets outside, she steps into the apocalypse, as she describes it. Children shrieking, bloodied faces, limbs on the ground, panic everywhere.

57:57And she turns around and she sees that the entire school is in flames and smoke. And she's saying to the kids, don't turn around, don't turn around. And she runs them out to the gate. And meanwhile, firemen had started to come in and she recalls yelling to the firemen, there's children trapped under the rubble. You have to go in there. And so what had happened is that the U.S. directly hit the school with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles. And we obtained high-definition or high-resolution photos showing that the parts for the missiles were manufactured by the Raytheon Corporation, the leading manufacturer of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

58:37And so remember, parents had been coming also to pick up their children. So among the 156 people that died in these strikes were 120 children from both the girls, the boys' school, and the preschool, 26 teachers. and then parents who had left work to come and get their children and bring them out. And so what then unfolded over the course of the next few hours was that roughly a thousand people descended on the school, firemen, Red Crescent, but also ordinary people, parents, and they were all digging. And some of the first responders described to us how when they first arrived, they were wearing gloves and masks.

59:18And when they realized that it It was children that they were trying to recover. They dispensed with the gloves and masks and they were digging. And one of the first responders said that at the end of that first day, he realized that he had the flesh of the children and the teachers stuck to his shirt, that he had brain matter under his fingernails from digging. And he said he couldn't get it out. And eventually that night, he had to just obsessively cut his fingernails because he couldn't shake the fact that he had probably a child's brain matter under his fingernails. And, you know, you showed the image of Yagoub and his daughter Fatima, and, you know, they had fought to get their daughter into this school.

1:00:02And, you know, he also arrived on that scene. And he said that, you know, at the end of that first day, you just knew, you knew no one else was coming out. And he and his other family members split up, and he went to the hospital. And some of his family members stayed at the recovery scene. And then late that night, like 1030, an ambulance came. And he said he just knew in his heart that Fatima was going to be in it. And it turned out that his six-year-old daughter had died with her cousin, who also went to the school. And they were in the arms of a teacher that had shielded them from the bombing.

1:00:40And the reason the first responders knew that, these girls had their backpacks with them. Their bodies were completely intact and the teacher had suffered massive wounds all over her body. And so the first responders determined that. And what I'll say is that when the, you know, there's a whole narrative about where was this school? Was it on a military base, et cetera? And I'm going to get to that, but I just want to say this before we get into those details. You know, every single person that we spoke to, whether it was the director of the hospital or it was the fireman or it was the Red Crescent first responders, or it was the parents, any American that would hear this story, any American, especially that has a child, your heart can't help but bleed for what they've gone through.

1:01:31And every single person we talked to, as we started to finish our interview, they all made a point of saying, we know that there's many people in America who have empathized with us or sympathized with us. And, you know, and they also were aware that we were speaking at a time when Americans were getting their kids ready for school. And they were saying, how can we send our children to school? How can we go school shopping for them? This impacted, it pierced the heart of Iranian society across the political, cultural, ethnic spectrum. And the response of the United States to this was so indescribably callous.

1:02:09You know, the very first things that were said, you know, CENTCOM released the boilerplate thing. We understand there are reports of civilian casualties. We always investigate it. But the first narrative that really was put out by the president of the United States was Iran did this. He went so far as to lie and say Iran also has cruise missiles. They're generic. Only five countries in the world have cruise missiles. This is a highly sensitive American technology. He said, oh, Iran's missiles are inaccurate. Oh, the IRGC must have done it. And then the dominant narrative, which is the one that is sort of at the center of what the emerging Pentagon story is about this, is that the school was actually embedded on a military base.

1:02:52And in fact, the head of U.S. Central Command, General Brad Cooper, told Congress that it was on an active IRGC missile base. Now, we investigated this quite thoroughly. And the story is this, that up until 2014, there was an IRGC Navy barracks that was on this swath of land where this school now is. in 2014, the IRGC essentially donated the land to the province and they began a redevelopment and redistricting of that land. And the IRGC vacated most of that land. They maintained one administrative office for the IRGC Navy, but they moved about two kilometers away from the site of this school. And by the way, the place that they moved to, I learned this morning, wasn't even hit.

1:03:47an active, open, publicly identified IRGC facility that was roughly a mile and a half away, wasn't even hit that morning. And so we got the permits showing from the Iranian officials, showing when the school was registered, a boys' school, a girls' school under this banner. And so what happened there is that this land was redistributed. They built a huge walled compound that the school was in. There was only one entry and exit. It had no connection whatsoever to this remaining IRGC administrative office. There was a medical clinic nearby that used to be on the property of the IRGC that was a public health clinic.

1:04:24It did have an insurance contract to provide health care to military families, but it was not an official IRGC health clinic. There was a co-op store that was run by essentially like a teacher syndicate for low-cost supplies and other financial assistance to educators. There was a car wash and then what we would call in America strip mall. And so, you know, the school was hit. And what we understand now from the emerging details on this so-called investigation is that what the Pentagon essentially is heading toward is saying, oops, we had outdated satellite photos. We didn't realize that it still wasn't this sprawling IRGC base.

1:05:02We didn't know that this was a school that was there. And, you know, the MAVEN system of Palantir failed to pick it up, artificial intelligence, you know, etc. But the military veterans that I spoke to who worked at high levels at the Pentagon on targeting said that regardless of if that's true, that AI missed this, that they were relying on outdated satellite maps, none of it should have happened. Because if you're going to select targets like this, there are mandated processes that you have to go through to validate the most current intelligence you have on a site before you launch it. And so what essentially is happening right now, I think, is a kind of cover up within a cover up that we're witnessing from the Pentagon.

1:05:48Many Iranians believe this was a deliberate strike. I talked to a former senior State Department official who also says she can't – who served under Trump, under Bush, under Biden. And she said she can't make peace with the idea that this was just some error, knowing what she knows about how carefully you're supposed to vet these targets. And the last thing I'll say on this is we have to remember, this wasn't like the school got indirectly hit when they hit something else. This was a direct strike, multiple direct strikes on this school. And it was in the opening hours of the war, meaning this was a tier one target that they had selected to be hit really, really early on.

1:06:30So at the end of the day, what we have is a direct strike with multiple, at minimum of two Tomahawk cruise missiles, killing 120 children, killing 26 teachers, including one who was pregnant. The United States trying to put out a nonsense story that it was Iran that bombed the school themselves, denying that it was American cruise missiles, saying the Iranians also have Tomahawk cruise missiles. That was false. We now have clear evidence that these were Raytheon manufactured U.S. cruise missiles. And if it wasn't enough that they bombed the school directly, a couple of hours after they bombed the school, when all of the first responders are there, when all of the parents are there, when they're trying to recover the kids and their bodies, the United States then launches another series of strikes, multiple missiles.

1:07:15They hit the clinic. They hit the car wash. They hit the small businesses that are there. If that wall hadn't been built around the school, multiple witnesses who were there when this happened, told us a thousand people probably would have been killed from those follow-up attacks. Iran's justice minister, in an exclusive interview with us, said, we don't call this a double tap, we call this a triple tap, because they hit the school multiple times, and then they launched another strike directly in the vicinity of the school. So they're saying that it's a triple tap strike.

1:07:45Emily Jashinsky:Jeremy, I heard Tucker Carlson recently comparing this to an Oklahoma City bombing type effect to make it maybe more approachable from an American perspective. In our country, this has really been an afterthought, and I think that's part of what's sad to see your great, detailed, horrific reporting on this. But can you tell us about how politically this played out in Iran, and not even just politically, but culturally, socially, how this played out for the Iranian public and is still playing? It's still obviously a very big question at the forefront of their minds. Yeah, you know, I also want to say that, like, there has been some really good journalism on this in two basic categories.

1:08:27I mean, one, you know, in the US, in Britain, Iranian filmmakers like Helya Dutaghi, she made a great series about the Minab bombing that no one probably has seen in the West, because, you know, it was produced in Iran, but it's in English, and people can see it. It's called Still Minab. You know, so it's not that there hasn't been journalism or an attempt to sort of tell the human story. It's that it's overwhelmingly been kind of shorter news stories. You quote a couple of the parents, you talk about the pain. And, of course, that's very important. But in terms of really humanizing the people who experience this in the way we would with, for instance, the Oklahoma City bombing or with a school shooting or in the aftermath of 9-11, the stories that were done about the people who died in the Twin Towers or at the Pentagon, you know, or at the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, you know, that kind of journalism is ultimately what cuts to the heart of all of us.

1:09:23And so, you know, when we're looking at this, I think it's important to not say, well, this is something that happened over there, because we're actually not allowed to do that. This happened because of orders given at the highest levels of power in the United States. And, you know, multiple Iranians I talked to, like the chief psychologist that I spoke to, who's treating the children and the families, you know, she's from Minab herself. And she said that that morning, people were calling her and saying, can this actually be true that America bombed a school, bombed a school in Minab? I think that even the way that Iranians, many Iranians have come to view the United States and the sort of way in which they think there are no boundaries, especially after the Gaza genocide and the indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure, I think there was disbelief at the beginning that how could this be real?

1:10:19And, you know, one, this leading international law expert that I interviewed, I was interviewing him about, he's an Iranian, I was interviewing him about sort of Iran's options for how they're going to pursue this legally. And he even got very emotional when he started talking. And this answers your question, Emily. He said, Iranians love poetry, and we love literature, and we love stories of sorrow, and we love stories of the underdog and the forgotten. And he said, and the job of a great Iranian writer is to cut to the heart, and is to inspire those kinds of deep emotions in people. And he said, the way that this minah bombing has impacted every level of our society goes beyond even the most epic, tragic poems and literature of our history.

1:11:09And people are saying they'll never be the same. And I also interviewed the minister of justice and I asked everybody that I talked to, what do you want to see happen here? And even the minister of justice, he talks about the complexities of international justice. Neither the United States nor Iran are signatories to the International Criminal Court. But at the same time, also, even if they did manage to get something at the International Criminal Court, Trump is now going after trying to destroy the court, sanctioning it. There was bipartisan legislation passed under George W. Bush that came to be known as the Hague Invasion Act that says that if any U.S.

1:11:50personnel are ever brought to any proceedings at the Hague, that the U.S. military can go and actually rescue them. And so, you know, what options are there for Iran? You know, there may be a possibility of setting up a special tribunal with prosecutorial powers based on a precedent recently set by a tribunal set up to prosecute Russia for crimes in Ukraine. So, you know, you talk about this and we get into all of these details. But at the end of the day, when you talk to an ordinary Iranian that was impacted by this, they're saying that justice means that we take action to ensure that this never happens again.

1:12:26And so, you know, some people say, this is why it's important for Iran to

1:12:33reinstall deterrence against the United States, because we can't depend on international institutions. You know, I think that part of, you know, remember that what was happening prior to the start of this war, there were these huge protests, you know, in Iran. And the narrative in January was Trump saying, you know, this is a regime that's murdering its own people. Help is on the way. You know, there were huge protests that were happening from the Bazaris, the small business owners. You know, the narrative just before the February 28th war began was very different. And I think the fact that they killed Ali Khamenei right off the bat, who was not just the political leader of the country, but was also a deeply revered religious leader in Shia Islam in Iran and beyond.

1:13:18That was something I think that in some ways cut across any political divides in Iran. But also, they killed 120 kids, including directly hitting the girls' school part of this building. And I think that in some ways, it served as a unifying incident because of the heinous nature of it, that whatever you think about the government in your own country, someone would come from afar and launch their most sophisticated missiles on our children and shred them into pieces. You know, the description from the director of the hospital, who, by the way, he said he had never spoken to Iranian or foreign journalists before speaking to me.

1:14:07And he said that he had never been able to do it, to get the composure to be able to speak about the events of that day, but he agreed to talk to me. And when we were done with the interview, and he did a good job of keeping it together, given, I mean, this is a guy who was seeing children's hands brought in, kids who were being identified because their dad had put a brand new pair of SpongeBob SquarePants socks on him that morning. He's witnessing this throughout the day. And at the end of our interview, he doesn't realize that we're still recording. And he says to a colleague, I injured my hand because I was poking my pen so deep into my thumb because I didn't want to cry.

1:14:51And this is the director of the hospital. He said they had room in their morgue for six bodies. And then they become overflown with casualties and injuries. And he said at first, they were expecting that they were going to be treating people from the bombing. but he said that it just, it quickly occurred to him, these are children's body parts coming to the hospital. Imagine this too, nurses and doctors in that hospital had children who were killed in that bombing. And yet they stayed in the hospital to treat the wounded while also having to look for, is my child here? Is their arm here? Is their leg here?

1:15:25Do I recognize the clothing still on it? On a human level, it doesn't matter if you're Iranian or American, think about that just as a human being what that was like. The morgue filled up so quickly that they had to start using the kitchen facilities in the hospital to store body parts of children. They had to start using the coolers in the hospital. Then those filled up. And then they had to call fishermen and shrimp farmers and ask them to bring their frozen fish trucks. And they started putting the body parts of children in the fish trucks. And then parents have descended on the hospital. And while they're there, the word of that third round of strikes or that second wave of strikes, people start to hear that that has happened and that a clinic has been hit.

1:16:07And then a rumor starts the Americans are going to bomb the hospital next. And so the director of the hospital says most people then fled the hospital because they believed that we were going to be bombed. And he said, not a single one of my nurses or doctors left the hospital. We all accepted that we may be martyred and we would rather die trying to save our people's lives than flee because of the possibility that America or Israel might bomb our hospital. A little girl who's the niece of the teacher at the school, she also went there, told her aunt that she has nightmares and believes that the US and Israel are still hunting the surviving children of the school and that the war won't end until they've killed all of them.

1:16:53The drawings that we published of what children remembered that day of what happened, children running out and calling for their friends, children who remember being trapped under the rubble and hearing their friends screaming, and then having to live with the fact that those friends aren't alive anymore and feeling, as the psychologist told us, they feel like they're bad people, these little kids. They're afraid to tell their parents, I saw Ali's hand because they think they did something wrong because they saw the severed body parts of their friends. These are seven, eight, nine, ten-year-old kids.

1:17:26Yeah, I wanted to highlight that part, actually, because it felt like, reading through your story, that there's a deeper sense of guilt among the survivors of this attack than among the American officials who actually carried it out. We can put up the quote card five here. This is Dr. our Darvishy who you talked about earlier. He said, I had a talk with a mother who told me that she was to blame for her child's martyrdom because, quote, my son told me that morning that he had a stomach ache and didn't want to go to school. I killed my son. I was the one who caused my son's death. And then Miss Salem, the teacher that you mentioned, she said the night of the bombing, she was calling as many of the parents of her students as she could, as well as those of her former students.

1:18:16She recalls how the parent of one of her students confronted her. Didn't you say my child was your child? You saved Yassin. You couldn't save my child. Salem remembered. I said, I swear he wasn't with me. And she paused. It's very hard. Now to the actual guilt. We can put up a quote card three here. You write, early in his tenure as war secretary in 2025, Pete Hegseth dissolved the Civilian Protection Center at the Pentagon, where an official that you interviewed worked, and announced a policy of, quote, maximum lethality, not tepid legality, unquote. The Trump administration has staked out a public and internal posture that has dramatically loosened restrictions on the killing of civilians, and Trump has repeatedly stated U.S.

1:19:05intent to bomb civilian sites. Quote, I think these are all syncing together. And then, of course, the rhetoric from not just Hegseth, but especially Trump himself about destroying an entire civilization, all of that filters into the culture, said Bryant. These factors he charged, combined with the drive to strike an unprecedented number of sites in Iran in a short amount of time, created the conditions for the Minab strike. And so, can you talk a little bit about the the sense of survivors, of the guilt that they're going through and where it actually lies? Yeah, you know, there's another story.

1:19:46You know, a lot of the kids and the surviving teachers, they go to the cemetery, you know, to sit at the graves of their friends and others. And, you know, I mean, again, think about it on a parental level. You know, your kid has has survived something unspeakable, you know, where their classmates have been slaughtered and their school has been bombed. And, you know, Ms. L.M. told us that when she was crying that day, some of the students came up to her and they said, we have money, we can help you rebuild your school. They thought she was crying because the school was destroyed. You know, like the minds of children can pierce your heart in a way that no one else, you know, can.

1:20:30But also they feel like the parents and others have told them, you know, your friends and your teachers are all in a better place. You know, they're in heaven. And then the children say, well, why aren't I in that better place? You know, what did I do to have to stay here? You know, and why did you rescue me? Was what Yasin, the son of Miss Salem, said. Why did you come so early to get me? you know, when, when, and he starts naming his friends, when they're all in, in heaven now, you know, there are reports from the psychologist that there are children that have been burning themselves with lighters or matches because they want to feel what it felt like when their friends were burned alive.

1:21:14Um, you know, so it's like, I, I, the, every story embedded within this is a horror story. And the dignity of the parents and others who took the time to speak about it, I don't know that I would be capable of doing that if it was my own child that I'm talking about. And then the humanity. And I think that in our broader narratives, and this is true about Palestinians and Gaza, it's certainly true about Iran, there somehow is this really kind of demeaning, dehumanizing set of sins of omission about their humanity or their intelligence. You know, Iran is a highly educated, advanced society in so many ways.

1:22:02You know, that one father, Yagub, who we're talking about was such a fascinating guy whose daughter Fatima was killed. He had been an accountant at a fishing business in Minab. And when his daughter was born, he said that he felt that it was like a challenge from God, that he wanted to do something more with his life. And he went back and he got his certification to teach and he became a teacher of Persian literature and felt like that it was because of his daughter that he had been set on that path. And so then when he's reading his own poetry or reciting his own poetry to her and realizes that this little tiny toddler can actually memorize these poems, including my poems, not to mention poems from Iranian history that he felt like I have a child who has a gift and she gave me the gift of giving me new direction in my life.

1:22:55I need to give her a gift. And that's how he ended up finding the school. So it's like, you know, you're you you talk to to each each sock that they found, each shoe that they found, each hand that they found. They all had a story behind them. You know, this school wasn't hidden somewhere. They had a social media presence. They were posting videos that look like anyone else's videos from any school in any country. Kids playing hula hoops, bake sales, school performances, singing, the celebration of kids' birthday parties where the parents come and then they bring baked goods from home. This school from satellite imagery, just a few weeks before the US directly struck this school, you could see kids on the soccer field.

1:23:42You could see the murals on the wall. This had been a school for more than 10 years when the United States bombed it. And so there isn't any concrete evidence to say, oh, well, the United States deliberately bombed a school full of children. But what's the response to this then? How could you not understand that that's what you were doing? Tomahawk cruise missiles also have photographic capability on them. They can loiter. They can be steered. They want us to believe that no one bothered to check at all, that no one looked at more recent satellite imagery, that the missiles didn't pick up photos of any of this.

1:24:24I mean, it's really stunning. And the fact that there was an active IRGC facility, not on that compound, but not that far away and somehow that doesn't get hit and they directly strike with at least two Tama cruise missiles, a school full of children. You know, Congress, a few Congress members have raised a ruckus about this. This should be a total scandal. This is one of the gravest war crimes that I'm aware of since the Vietnam War in terms of single episodes, one of the single most grave war crimes. The only comparable single strike that I could think of that I think is in the same category was in the 1991 Gulf War when George H.W.

1:25:09Bush defended the bombing of the Amariya bomb shelter in Baghdad, where the United States dropped a bunker buster bomb. It ripped a hole open where there was a bomb shelter with hundreds of Iraqis in it. And then they dropped another bunker buster bomb directly inside of the bomb shelter and killed more than 400 Iraqis. I visited that shelter in Baghdad because it's now a memorial. And it was the same narrative afterwards. Oh, the Iraqis were using them as human shields. Oh, this was actually a military facility. It's the same story they roll out every single time. When the other side kills civilians, they're intentionally killing civilians.

1:25:49When the United States does it, it's oops, we tortured some folks, as Obama said, or oops, we didn't do it on purpose. They directly hit a school and killed 120 kids, and they killed 26 teachers, one of whom was pregnant, and they killed parents who had come up to pick their kids up that day. This can't just be swept under the rug, and Congress needs to be as aggressive as possible, and it should cut across party lines. Well, this story is titled Massacre at Minab, the school that became a grave. We'll put the link below. Obviously, you can find it at Dropside. Jeremy, thanks so much for this reporting and for joining us today.

1:26:23Emily Jashinsky:Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks for putting a focus on this. Appreciate it.

1:27:10We'll be right back. or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.