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More than two dozen Democratic senators led by Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) are demanding the Trump administration reveal by next week the findings from a Pentagon probe into a Feb. 28 strike at a girls’ school in Iran that killed 175 people, most of whom were children.
“The [Defense] Department must promptly provide Congress with the complete and unredacted investigation, and submit a concrete plan to ensure such a tragedy does not happen again,” according to the July 13 letter sent to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Central Command (Centcom) head Adm. Brad Cooper.
“There is no justification for withholding an unclassified accounting of what happened, what went wrong, and what the Department is doing to prevent recurrence,” add the 25 senators, which include Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed (D-R.I.).
Preliminary findings from the military investigation reportedly said the U.S. was responsible for the deadly Tomahawk missile strike on the first day of the ongoing Iran war.
American forces were conducting strikes on a nearby Iranian base that had once extended onto the school grounds, which had since been designated as a civilian area with a wall and bright painted colors.
But Centcom officers created target coordinates for the strike using outdated and unverified data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, The New York Times reported.
Should the U.S. be found at fault, it would mark the Pentagon’s largest civilian casualty incident since 1991, when it mistakenly bombed a shelter in Iraq during the Gulf War, killing at least 408 people.
Human rights groups and Democratic lawmakers have worried the Trump administration will seek to bury the report due to unfavorable findings after President Trump last month claimed fault for the strike may never be known.
“I don’t know that they are ever going to solve that problem in terms of whose fault was it because there were missiles flying all over the place, and it’s horrible what happened, but there were missiles flying all over the place,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on June 25.
During a Senate Armed Services hearing on Tuesday to consider Pentagon nominees, Gillibrand pressed acting comptroller Jules “Jay” Hurst III for details on how the school was selected as a target and how the bombing was executed.
“One hundred and twenty children were killed, and we still don’t have a report on that,” she told Hurst, who is nominated to serve as the Defense Department’s comptroller. “It is essential that this department give this Congress the report of how that target was selected, why more recent data and information showing that it was clearly a girls’ school and no longer part of the military base that was next door.”
Asked if he had been given the report, Hurst said he had not seen it but that he regrets “the loss of any civilian life in any conflict.”
In their letter, the senators request the U.S. military “promptly finalize the investigation” into the strike by July 20 and provide Congress with the complete and unredacted version, along with an unclassified version suitable for public release.
In addition, the lawmakers want the Pentagon to submit to Congress a prevention plan that identifies corrective actions DOD will take to ensure such a tragedy does not happen again, and brief lawmakers on the investigation and the steps.
“The United States military has a legal and moral obligation to take all feasible precautions to prevent civilian harm,” they write. “When a U.S. strike kills civilians, the Department owes Congress, the American people, and the victims’ families a clear accounting of what happened and a credible plan to prevent future failures.”
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