‘UNMISTAKABLY a US Attack’ Trump Military Accused of Bombing Iranian School

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0:20The investigation is ongoing. I do not trust that answer. We actually have footage of a projectile coming in makes it unmistakable that this is a U.S. attack. 167 killed all little girls. This is a playbook that you see out of terrorists surrounding themselves with children. What's the story about the volleyball game that they also bombed at the same time with an experimental new missile and they killed 21 girls there? It's basically a missile that like explodes above the ground and basically shoots out 180 ,000 tungsten pellets in all directions. The US denied any responsibility. When I was on your show previously, I disputed the 40 ,000 dead.

1:00I'm not Iran's lawyer. I'm just here to argue against inflated war propaganda.

1:07Piers Morgan:Deny, deflate and delay was the standard policy of the IDF in Gaza whenever there were claims of tragic accidents or crimes. We talked about them regularly on this show. First, they denied all knowledge. Next, they'd flood the zone with reasons to blame somebody else. Next, they promised an investigation with an outcome to be published someday. Trump administration and the US military is now accused of doing exactly the same thing about the missile strike which destroyed an Iranian school, killing many children almost three, four months ago. This week, a congressional committee challenged the head of the US Central Command.

1:40The investigation is ongoing. As soon as it is complete, I'm happy to be as concerned as possible. We will not take responsibility for something we very obviously did. And what... Sir, it's a complex investigation. The school itself is located on an active IRGC cruise missile base. It's more complex than the average strike. I do not trust that answer.

2:00Piers Morgan:Well, Dominic Wagcorn, a reporter with Sky News in the UK, who's in Tehran, responded, We have been there multiple times this week. It is categorically not on a missile base. And everyone we've asked says no military activity nearby. So what is the truth and what do we know for sure? That's the question for today's panel. We'll also tackle the oft-repeated claim that Iranian forces killed 40 ,000 civilians, one of the most frequent justifications cited for war. Joining me is Scott Horton, author of Provote, Ryan Bodenheimer, he's a former Air Force combat pilot, also known as Max Afterburner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist from The New York Times, Maliki Brown, and Christiane Trebet from The New York Times visual investigations team.

2:43Piers Morgan:Well, welcome to all of you. I appreciate it very much. Let me start with you, Scott Horton. Welcome back so soon to Uncensored. I feel quite spoiled that we're getting you so soon. And thank you for your kind words about me on the Joe Rogan podcast, which I really enjoyed too. And we will do that one-on-one, by the way, that you were talking about not getting when you were talking to Joe. So we'll come to that another time. But, Scott, this whole strike on this school, obviously utterly devastating in terms of loss of life, particularly young children. The Sky News report from the guy on the ground makes it crystal clear that this was not part of any IRGC compound, as the early spin wanted us to believe, which begs the question, they must know who has fired this Tomahawk missile.

3:36Piers Morgan:They don't just get fired randomly. Why is there such a concerted effort not to admit what happened? Well, I'm sure it was a targeting mistake. And yes, they should have just apologized immediately and said, well, we didn't mean for that to happen. Now, my best understanding, and you have the New York Times reporters right here whose work I'm referring to here. They seem to show that this used to be part of the same compound, but then they just built a wall and separated it. And they showed where the strikes on all the different buildings, virtually all of the different buildings in that compound, look just the same as this one.

4:15And then it was the Washington Post that published video of a tomahawk incoming that hit another one of the buildings just adjacent to the school there. So apparently this, I believe the Times reported this used to be part of IRGC base. It was essentially on one big piece of property, but they had built a wall separating it back years ago. But the thing of it is, is from the Iranian people's point of view, it seems like we should at least take into account here that regardless of whether it was a mistake or not, just how absolutely horrific this was. And in all the casualties of all the wars, the numbers, you know, get, you know, taken in different contexts and scenarios or whatever.

4:58But I believe it was the leftist media critic Adam Johnson who first pointed out that the casualty count here is essentially equivalent to the Oklahoma City bombing. Only if that entire federal building had been the daycare center. 167 killed all little girls. And this is the kind of, it's one of the things that goes to show why we should not be starting aggressive wars in the first place. Is because mistakes like this can happen and become an absolute stain on this country.

5:28Piers Morgan:OK, Malachy Brown, welcome to Uncensored. What do we know for a fact about this, do you think? What we know for a fact is that, yes, multiple buildings in that area were targeted and, yes, the school building is adjacent to the IRGC facility.

5:54And according to experts that I've since spoken to since our early reports, it's not uncommon for these IRGC bases, much like American bases, to have schools for the children of the serving members of the IRGC. This particular school was opened up to the public a few years ago, cordoned off from the site, public entrances opened. Other parts of the site also repurposed for public use as a medical clinic and a cultural center there as well. And sources that we've spoken to say that, yeah, there weren't weapons stored there, that it was more of a logistics hub than a base that was used to store cruise missiles.

6:36Why would you store explosives right beside the school that your kids are going to? We know it was hit in that early salvo on the first day of the war, the start of the working week when school was in session. Teachers had called parents to collect their kids once the war started. But by the time that most parents got there, the school building had been hit. And yeah, devastating consequences. There was a second wave of attacks a couple of hours later on that same area and facility. There have been some reports, we haven't been able to confirm them that the school was hit twice, including the Sky News report with an eyewitness who has survived the attack.

7:23But that's what we know so far. And then on the casualties, the original casualties were put at 175. The Iranian state has since revised that down to about 156. And Christiane here, my colleague, and others have been able to corroborate that number.

7:45Piers Morgan:Right, well, let's bring Christian in here. Welcome to you, Two Uncensored. Obviously, there's a lot of investigation that's been going on into this. And I guess, look, in terms of who fired it, there's one of three potential options, I guess, the Americans, the Israelis, or was it some rogue missile that Iran had acquired which they misfired, which seems the least likely of the three scenarios. But do we know for a fact that it was a US Tomahawk missile? Yes, we do. I mean, Maliki and I think, you know, already referenced it as well. But like, indeed, you're mentioning the three actors here. But the fact that we actually have footage of a projectile coming in at that same compound makes it unmistakable that this is a US attack, because what we're seeing in that video is a US Tomahawk missile.

8:40And Trump went as far as to saying, like, Iran may have tomahawk missiles, but there's evidence to back that up. So I don't think it's really worth going into that claim right now. I think by now he has also said, like, he's willing to live with the fact if it happens to be the U.S., right? That's what he said in response to questions of the media about this. But coming back to the casualties, we were able to establish 156, at least 156 people have died, 120 of them being students at the school, 7 in 3 boys, 47 girls, teaching staff as well. I think also seven parents that we were able to identify that had already gotten to the school, as Maliki was referring to, a school driver, and so on.

9:32So absolutely devastating attack. But what is also very interesting is that it's only one of several attacks that opening day of the war where the US actually hit civilian sites.

9:48Piers Morgan:But it's very reminiscent to me about the debate that was going on in Gaza where the constant refrain from the IDF, for example, was when a number of civilians had been killed, was always they were targeting a Hamas compound, a Hamas school or hospital or whatever it was, where Hamas were using it as a base, they were using civilians as some kind of shield and so on. Are we in the same kind of realm here where the argument may be, and they say they're going to conclude the investigation soon. It's ridiculous. It's taken 80 days. But if they come back and simply say, look, we were targeting the base and this missile strayed into the neighbouring school here, it was a genuine mistake.

10:36Piers Morgan:Is that a plausible scenario here? Is that what we're really looking at, do you think? When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. I think that what we're looking at is outdated targeting. is the most likely scenario.

11:18We can't preempt what the investigation is going to finally show. By the way, it's three months on, and in any previous incident, they've come out much sooner than that and admitted liability. So what it looks like, and according to sources that we've spoken to and written about, it looks like it was outdated targeting information that was used and dusted off. And we don't know if that's because of the speed at which targets were being chosen and prepared or what, because there was, you know, this was in the midst of, you know, a flurry of targets on targeting military sites and government officials in the opening hours.

12:00But Piers, you would think that with weeks or months to prepare for this, that due diligence would have been done to ensure that this school, which had a website, an active website, which was clearly separated from the base, is not dissimilar to schools at other IRGC bases along the coast, would have been flagged and, you know, had proper work being done, but on perhaps a no strike list, which is an obligation of militaries to maintain. So there's no evidence that this compound or indeed the school was used for military purposes, was storing weapons or anything like that. You know, it just looks like it was lazy targeting with devastating consequences.

12:46Piers Morgan:So before I go to Ryan, just to conclude on this part of it, if it is how you believe it to be, would that constitute potentially a war crime or not? It's the obligation of militaries to mitigate civilian harm. If there are repeated reckless patterns, then under international humanitarian law, it could be constituted a war crime. As Chris said, these aren't the only civilians or children that were killed in the opening hours of that war by the US using weapons that we can identify as only US weapons. But it depends on whether this is a repeated pattern of recklessness. Okay. Bring in Ryan Bodenheimer.

13:38Piers Morgan:Welcome back to Uncensored, Brian. You're a former Air Force combat pilot, so you're a perfect person to ask here. When you were engaged in operations or you spoke to others who were, you know, put yourself into the pilot cockpit here of whichever plane fired this missile. How confident would you be before unloading and firing a missile on an area like this that the targeting was precise enough to avoid what we've seen happen here? Yeah, great question, Pierce. So I'm glad we're having this discussion. And hello to you and hello to the panel. This is really important that we talk about this. Well, for myself, in an F-15E cockpit, I've been in situations in combat where we've been asked to drop weapons.

14:26And we're the tip of the spear. We can see what's going on. And there's a case that I can recall where we were asked to strike insurgents in Afghanistan and they would surround themselves with children. So that was the tactic that they would use. They would bring children around them. And so in that exact scenario, we were cleared hot to strike, and I delayed. I didn't strike with the kids around them. But that's a tactic that we saw throughout the entire campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we see it in Iran as well, where even when there was the potential for the power plants and bridges to be struck, and Iran called for women and children to go to these locations, essentially doing the same terrorist playbook that we saw in Afghanistan, to try to protect their infrastructure with children.

15:10So this is a playbook that you see out of terrorists, dual use, surrounding themselves with children because they know that we'll hold fire, which is exactly what I did in that situation. And so putting myself in the shoes of that Tomahawk missile operator launching from a submarine, they're not going to purposefully strike something that has kids in it. And you, as the operator, you have that determination, that final determination. If you know that there's children or civilians in it, you have the obligation to not strike, which is why this, to me, is definitely not a purposeful strike. I think the discussion on the panel of this being some sort of targeting error, the Defense Intelligence Agency maybe not having the latest up-to-date information, which is not OK.

15:51That's something that we need to fix and update.

15:53Piers Morgan:When you have a tomahawk fired from a submarine, is the moment called by a pilot in a plane? I mean, how does it work in reality in combat? They're likely using some sort of information previously. They are some sort of information previously from a targeting package. And this was previously a Iranian cruise missile base. We know that. But it was years ago that they say that they separated the school from the actual military operation. But we know the IRGC rotates. They rotate in and out of different locations. They have underground facilities. So there's other things that they could do to have swapped this back and forth a couple times.

16:35But I agree with the panel that we have to have the latest breaking information in a conflict. And in the fog of war, terrible things can happen. So I don't think anybody's justifying this. I mean, this is a true tragedy that those kids died. But if you look at what Iran's doing, they're using it as a propaganda win. I mean, where's the discussion of the thousands of people that were killed over the last few months? They don't want to talk about that. They want to say, hey, look at this, which, again, is a tragic incident. We can't overlook it. but they are fighting a propaganda war where the only situation in that school strike is that the US loses.

17:07There's no propaganda win there.

17:09Piers Morgan:Yeah, it's interesting you bring up, obviously, the killing of all the protesters in general, because last time Scott was on recently, he was extremely sceptical about these claims that up to 40 ,000 protesters were killed. And I will come back to Scott in a second. Maybe just ask you, Maliki, about that. From the New York Times investigative perspective, do we know how many people, or even a vague idea, of how many of those protesters were killed in January? I think it's really challenging. Let me just preface it with that, because there was a communications blackout, a lot of protests were happening at night.

17:53Really, we were relying on video evidence that was being collated and managed to get out through Starlink. onto social platforms and aggregating and collecting that. So to answer your question, we can't truly know yet. It's likely and feasible that it's in the thousands of people, according to what we've seen and we've been able to collate, and also what has been collected by three human rights, Iranian human rights groups who have a record of getting numbers like this fairly accurate. Two of them put it in around 3 ,000 to 3 ,500 people, one at about 6 ,500 people. And it's worth saying that, you know, the Iranian authorities themselves admit that about 3 ,100 people were killed, and they usually lowball those numbers.

18:43But what we could see in the footage is, you know, extensive use of live fire being used on protesters. We documented it in 19 cities in Iran and six suburbs of Tehran. And we saw people being shot in the head, you know, legs, bodies, torsos being carried away. It was widespread. And we also have reported, my colleague Farnaz Pazahai, reported along with us that the order came from the top to quash the protests and the order was given to security forces to use lethal force.

19:24Piers Morgan:And, Christian, again, before I come to Scott on this, you know, you work in the New York Times visual investigations team. There's so much misinformation, AI fakes and so on, swirling around now about almost everything. How hard is it for you to do your job and actually get to the truth? Because, you know, I had a very interesting chat with Scott a couple of weeks ago about this. And, you know, he, and from what Maliki's just said, there's no clear evidence that tens of thousands were killed. I don't know whether they were or not. Scott's very much of the view that it's at the lower end of the toll and that if it was at that kind of level, we'd know about it.

20:06Piers Morgan:But would we know about it? Is there a way to verify it or not? I mean, that's a great question, Piers. And I think, you know, even, you know, just to start, like even when we say the lower end, if we take, let's say, what the Iranian authority said, which is over 3 ,000, that's still a lot of people, you know, for anti-government protests. So even that, I think, is a lot. But it has been really hard. Like, just to give you an example, like, we would see these scattered videos coming out, but it could be like a video that maybe a doctor filmed in a hospital, and you see maybe a couple of body bags laying around.

20:40And it takes some time. We can use high resolution satellite imagery to verify like, oh, this is a recent video filmed in this hospital in Tehran. We can count the body bags, but it tells us very little what, you know, who are the people inside the body bags? How did they die? And I think that's why, you know, just to add to what Maliki is saying, like it's very hard for us to verify these numbers. And I think, you know, So even if you're referencing AI and AI-generated videos, even in countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, where we have basically we can go on the ground, we can knock on people's doors, but there's still a lot of mis - and disinformation out there.

21:23And when you have a very restrictive authoritarian regime like in Iran or the Iranian authorities, I mean, and there's almost no information coming out, it's just very, very hard. At the same time, yeah, even these, if we deem them to be low, I think 3 ,000 is still a lot, and those numbers are probably way higher.

21:51Piers Morgan:Yeah. So, Scott, let me come back to you. You know, one of the more notable aspects of this war, now in three months in, A, it's taken a lot longer than people were led to believe it would take, which wasn't surprising to me and I don't think to you. But once you get into a war like this, they talk a lot in the military of the fog of war. This incident was obviously horrific, both the protest killings in January and then the killing of this school and so on. How much can we... I mean, how confident are you, for example, when you assess these things? You go into great detail and you speak to lots of people, But how confident can you be that the information you get is correct?

22:38Well, it depends. I mean, I try to read the Post, the Times and the Journal every day with a severe amount of skepticism. But that is who the government talks to. So they're indispensable. I mean, New York Times will give themselves Pulitzer Prizes over completely fake reporting about George Papadopoulos and 100 ,000 other things they've gotten wrong over the years. But at the same time, if the DIA or one of these reports on this story has it that someone at the Pentagon or maybe the National Security Council told them that, yeah, the DIA gave us outdated information. Well, then you can take that as essentially sounds like a confession against interests of reality.

23:22It's not a leak where they're trying to sabotage Trump with that. They're saying, OK, yes, this was us, but don't put my name on it because I don't want that. But that sounds to me like a credible explanation that and and we might find out that, no, the Israelis gave them this bad data or whatever. But I had no reason to believe that. No, there's that hasn't been demonstrated by anyone that there was any reason to think that this was deliberate. it again in that the new york times i'm sorry which of these gentlemen did the video there um uh where they show the bird's eye view of the place after virtually every one of the buildings has been hit and they all have exactly similar damage they were all hit with the exact same type of munitions clearly within a short period of time there so i don't think there's really any

24:07Piers Morgan:question that they did it is it morally justified is it morally justified scott in any way no no Well, let me ask you a specific question about that. Is it morally justified? I had a big argument with Tucker Carlson about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. And obviously after World War II, Geneva Convention came in, rules were changed and so on. But is it morally justified to target an organisation you believe to be a terror group, like the Israelis and Americans view the IRGC for their propping up of all these terror groups through the Middle East? If you're targeting them but you make a mistake, is the targeting, the actual attack, morally justified in any way to you?