At the beginning of the American and Israeli war against Iran, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck an elementary school, killing 175 people or more — children, and presumably teachers, staff and parents.[1][2] The Trump administration denied American involvement; an internal Department of Defense investigation subsequently confirmed it.[2] Kiriakou’s summary judgement is short: “This should never have happened, Ted. Never have happened.”[3]
Why it happened
The targeting data listed the site as a Revolutionary Guards facility. It had been converted into a school somewhere between 2013 and 2016 — “10 to 13 years ago” — and the data was never revised.[4] Kiriakou reaches immediately for the precedent: “See, this is how we accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Right? Because the targeting information is often wrong, rarely updated appropriately.”[5]
He sets against that the procedure that exists precisely to catch it. An analyst is expected “to not just check, double check, triple check” but to send the product to other offices to repeat the exercise — “to make sure you don’t do things like blow up a girl’s school and kill all the children inside.”[6] Updating the file would have required little: “look at a satellite photo and see if there are children there playing in the yard.”[7]
The distinction he insists on is between precision and knowledge. Against the argument that a military able to put a bomb through a window does not hit a school by accident, his answer separates the two capabilities: “let’s not conflate accuracy… by GPS with — we could definitely hit the target. The question is, do we know what the target is?”[8]
Denial and accountability
Kiriakou treats the president’s public line as the tell. Trump had said that anyone could have a Tomahawk cruise missile; Kiriakou notes that “in fact only the US, the UK, and Australia, and Japan have them”, and that when the denial is that loose, “you know that nobody’s going to face any kind of punishment.”[4][9][10] Asked whether there would be accountability inside the system, his answer is one word: “No.”[9]
He expects recurrence because there is precedent: “Just like it happened in the Kosovo War, it happened in the Gulf War. It happens every time we have an armed conflict with some other country. And then we’re like, ‘Oh, our bad. Yeah. Too bad about that. Sorry.’”[10] He does not think the school was hit deliberately.[11][12]
On the claim that 5,000 targets had been struck, he declines to treat the number as information: “that’s a statistic that doesn’t mean anything. Cuz what’s a target? A target could be a garage where there might or might not be a Jeep inside. We can call anything we want a target.”[13][14]
The first hours
Kiriakou reported the strike within hours of it happening, on an unscheduled Saturday broadcast, and sourced it to American outlets: “We know from CNN and from other sources, the New York Times is reporting that an Israeli missile hit a girl’s school in southern Iran this morning killing 57 children.”[15][16]
His warning was that the figure was a template rather than an outlier. “So, get used to that. That’s going to be what this war looks like. The Israelis don’t give a [expletive] about human life, about civilians, and we’re going to see a lot of civilian casualties.”[16]
Attribution
Asked whether CENTCOM’s response — that it was aware of the reports and looking into them — was lip service or a tacit admission that the missile was Israeli, Kiriakou did not hedge. “It’s an Israeli missile.” Asked to confirm: “100%.”[17]
The basis he gave was a pattern rather than a piece of evidence: that the Israelis specifically target civilians, and are, as he put it, “into total war as they used to call it during World War II.”[17]