The Not-Caring Came First

On February 28, 2026, the first night of the war with Iran, an American missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab. A girls’ school. Amnesty counts 156 dead, 120 of them children. Iranian officials put the toll at 168, the figure 41 senators cited when they demanded answers.

Two days later the Secretary of War stood at a Pentagon briefing and promised the assembled press: “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

That sequence is the entire argument.

In Targeting Systems and Stolen Thoughts, I argued that the same black box launders stolen science and launders killing: that alignment was always access control, that a model with no provenance produces both plagiarised physics and unkillable target folders, and that when a missile hits a school, the system worked as configured. I filed Minab under machine failure. The algorithmic kill chain doing what an unaudited kill chain does.

I got it half wrong. The machine didn’t slip its leash. Somebody cut the leash first, on camera, on the record, in that order, and called it lethality.

This post is about the man who configured it.

He fired the adults first

Start the clock on February 6, 2025: seventeen days into the new term, a year before the war. The new administration’s target that day wasn’t American at all. An executive order placed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, asset freezes and entry bans aimed at the tribunal and its officials, with Prosecutor Karim Khan the first individual designated. Within months, reporting showed the court’s work hobbled: the prosecutor’s email cut off, his bank accounts frozen, some investigations ground to a halt. That August the sanctions spread to both deputy prosecutors and two more judges. A year later they reached the court’s president. You don’t sanction a court because you plan to appear before it. The President went after the world’s lawyers first. Fifteen days later, his Secretary of War went after America’s.

On February 21, 2025, in a single night, Pete Hegseth fired the Army’s and the Air Force’s top uniformed lawyers, Lt. Gen. Joseph Berger III and Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer, and moved to replace the Navy’s, Rear Adm. Lia Reynolds, who was already acting in the job. No transition, no explanation offered.

When someone finally asked why, Hegseth was refreshingly honest: they were “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

Understand what a JAG is for. In every target folder, at every stage of target development, there is a lawyer whose actual job is to say no. That is the entire mechanism by which a military claims to fight a lawful war. Distinction. Proportionality. Precaution. Those are checklists, and a lawyer signs the checklist. Hegseth looked at the mechanism that says no and removed it, calling it a roadblock.

That was February. The Inspectors General had been purged in January. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs went the same night as the lawyers. Nobody fires the adults in the room before the field trip unless they know what kind of field trip they’re planning.

Then he fired the conscience

There is an office at the Pentagon whose literal function is caring: the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response operation. Its staff review targeting, investigate strikes, track the dead, and, the radical part, tell commanders when the machine is about to kill the wrong people.

Hegseth gutted it. Staff went from a little under two hundred to around two dozen, some of them part time. CENTCOM’s civilian-harm team went from ten people to one. The part that ends the incompetence conversation: per ProPublica, the top commanders told him not to. Nine of them voted to keep the programme as intact as possible. Central Command, the command that would fight the Iran war, warned that cutting it meant “an increased risk of target misidentification.” In ProPublica’s telling, the programme had no future in his reimagined Department of War. They deleted Defense from the name.

By the eve of the Iran war, the programme had been cut by roughly ninety percent. The Intercept compressed the whole thesis into one headline: Hegseth’s War Department slashed civilian protection staff and brought in AI assessments.

He fired the lawyers, then the caretakers, and then installed a machine in the empty chair. Analysis without analysts. Judgment without judges. The expertise was evicted, and something that can’t care was shown to its seat.

The paperwork of killing

You don’t need the school to see the method. The boats already showed it.

Since September 2, 2025, the US military has carried out at least 70 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing at least 234 people, by the running tallies. No names released. No evidence presented. No trials, because dead men can't contest a designation. The dead are "narcoterrorists," and the word works like a spell: say it, and murder becomes counterterrorism.

The spell deserves a witness, so meet one name that got out. On September 14, 2025, Alejandro Carranza told his eldest daughter he was going fishing and set out after tuna and marlin. On the 15th, an American missile converted him into a datapoint in the war on narcoterrorism. The designation says trafficker. His family says fisherman. The government that killed him has produced evidence for neither: just the designation, and the memo it invokes privilege to keep secret. That December his relatives filed the first known formal complaint of the campaign, with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. One name, one last goodbye, one missile: the identifiable-victim test, run by the whole world at once. The administration's entire defence is that the rest stay anonymous.

In my last post I wrote that AI must not kill without the right paperwork. I missed the corollary. Sometimes the paperwork is just a memo redefining who may be killed. The Justice Department’s classified OLC memo, the one authorising all of it, rests on a theory the White House had been repeating for months: that the United States is at war with drug cartels. One strand of its reasoning casts fentanyl as a potential chemical-weapons threat, which turns drug smugglers into something close to WMD combatants. When lawyers sued for the memo, the Justice Department claimed presidential privilege over the entire document, because the President himself had supplied its facts. That tells you what they think of it. The Washington Post’s verbs were perfect: the White House steamrolled or sidestepped its own government’s lawyers to get it done.

This office has form. In 2002 it produced the Bybee memo, which redefined torture as whatever stops short of organ failure, and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and “obsolete.” Twenty years on, the move is identical: find the word, shrink the protection, let the strike proceed.

Human Rights Watch calls the strikes extrajudicial killings. The ACLU calls them premeditated killings of civilians outside armed conflict: murder under domestic law. And in August, in a speech in Panama, Hegseth warned that the ICC might come after American personnel, called the strikes “100 percent lawful,” and vowed to keep going. The same court, note, that the administration sanctioned seventeen days into the term, asset freezes first and questions later. The deterrent, in his accounting, is that the killing will simply not stop long enough to be adjudicated.

When Washington last ran a campaign in Central American waters, the World Court ruled on it. Nicaragua v. United States, 1986: the ICJ found the United States responsible for unlawful force, mining harbours and funding the Contras, and ordered it to cease and pay reparation. Washington rejected the court’s jurisdiction, ignored the order, and vetoed the Security Council vote to enforce it. Sixteen years later, Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, authorising “all means necessary” to free any American held by the ICC. Everyone calls it the Hague Invasion Act. It is still on the books. Hegseth’s promise to keep going whatever The Hague thinks has forty years of precedent behind it, and a statute to make it literal.

The double-tap

September 2 again, because it’s the cleanest exhibit. The first missile hit the boat. Two men survived: shipwrecked, wounded, clinging to the wreckage. Under the law of armed conflict, shipwrecked survivors are hors de combat. Untouchable. The oldest protection on the books. A second missile was fired into the wreckage anyway.

Which raises the question of what a government does with footage of its own atrocity. This one offered to show it. Asked about the video of the survivors being killed, the President said whatever they had, “we’ll certainly release, no problem.” “I support the decision to knock out the boats.” Days later he walked it back and left the call to Hegseth. The genre is the thing: a president offering up the best evidence of the worst thing his government has done as if it were a hype edit. The kill as content, the war crime as merch.

Notice who’s holding the bag: the admiral, not the secretary who fired the lawyers and cut the caretakers and boasted about “maximum authorities.” Madeleine Elish calls this the moral crumple zone: the human positioned where the blame lands when the machine’s decisions go wrong, absorbing impact so the chassis stays clean. Bradley is the crumple zone. Hegseth is the chassis.

And all of this was prelude. We knew who they were before the boats, because in March 2025 the leadership accidentally texted its soul to a journalist. The Signal chats are worth rereading for the score, not the OPSEC scandal: the Vice President’s loathing, Hegseth’s “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” The indifference, in their own words, in real time, in all caps. The Pentagon Inspector General spent eight months on it and concluded that Hegseth had shared information originally classified SECRET, risked the safety of American pilots, and declined to be interviewed. His own spokesman called it a “TOTAL exoneration.” Nobody was punished. The adults were already gone; who was left to care?

The people who did care

The not-caring thesis owes you this: some of them did care. You just don't hear from them, because they're gone.

In mid-October 2025, with the boat campaign six weeks old and the strikes landing weekly, Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of US Southern Command, the officer whose job was to run that campaign, was announced as retiring, without explanation. Then the reporting caught up. He had clashed with Hegseth over the strikes, raised concerns about their legality, and been asked to go. A four-star admiral decided the orders were murky enough to end his career over. I read that as the loudest thing a serving admiral can say without a security violation.

Sixty years ago the machinery had a different failure mode, and a different kind of hero. At My Lai, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson landed between American troops and Vietnamese civilians, ordered his crew to fire on their own side if the killing didn’t stop, and pulled survivors out. He was vilified for it, decorated much later, and for decades afterward he was the proof people reached for: somewhere in the machine there was always a man who could land.

There is nowhere to land anymore. You can’t interpose a helicopter between a missile and a boat, or between a model and a target folder. The closest thing the modern machine has to Thompson’s intervention is Holsey’s chair, empty. The lesson this administration took from that history was the one Hegseth said out loud: conscience is a roadblock, and roadblocks get fired.

Which is what makes this an indictment instead of a tragedy. Caring existed. It was fired, evicted, or exiled.

The exoskeleton

January 2026. The AI strategy arrives, and Hegseth delivers its doctrine in a speech at SpaceX, quoting his favourite management text, Elon Musk's personal algorithm: "question every requirement, delete the dumb ones, and accelerate like hell." The strategy's pillars are warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise. There is no pillar named verification. There is no pillar named conscience. And Grok, a chatbot famous for its guardrails the way a sieve is famous for its walls, is announced for military networks, classified systems included.

The results were immediate, and they were measured in targets.

The January operation that took Maduro and his wife from Caracas, an act of war against a sovereign state pulled off as a special-ops episode, reportedly ran on Claude, through Anthropic's partnership with Palantir. When the Iran war opened on February 28, the same stack went to work at scale. Maven helped strike more than a thousand targets in the first 24 hours, a tenfold increase on what was possible before it, and within two weeks Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander running the war, put the total at 5,500. The Washington Post reported that Anthropic's Claude was "central" to the campaign while the company was in what the paper called a bitter feud with the Pentagon over its usage terms. The vendor's leash did not hold. A usage policy is not a kill switch. Anthropic's acceptable-use document and the Department of War's target folders were in negotiation with each other, and the missiles did not wait for the lawyers. The lawyers, you'll remember, had been fired.

That spring, with the war running, a special operations analyst used an AI chatbot while writing an intelligence report. The chatbot hallucinated. It asserted, entirely falsely, that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying nuclear-weapons-program components. The report moved up the chain and the machine did what machines do when fed a hallucination with a classification level: it began preparing an armed interception. Aircraft. Boarding teams. A war with China, teed up by autocomplete. Someone caught it in time, and one of CNN’s sources called it what it was: it “almost started a war.” The incident now lives in the AI Incident Database as item 1701, which is what it sounds like when the end of the world gets a ticket number.

Afterward, nothing changed. No pause. No policy. The strategy on the wall still says accelerate like hell. In my last post I wrote about Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who looked at the system’s output and refused, and whose refusal is the only reason you’re reading this. The lesson we extracted from Petrov was the convenient half: we built systems and left a human in the loop, as if the human were the safety feature. The near-miss proves the human is only a safeguard if the organisation wants a safeguard. This one had just spent a year firing its safeguards and calling it lethality. The loop was the alibi.

The near-miss intelligence was made of a chatbot’s answer: human writing, scraped without permission and digested into a probability engine, now minting classified certainties about nuclear cargo. In the last post I called that theft stolen thoughts. Here they come home to roost. Stolen thoughts, conscripted into killing: stolen consciences. The title of this post is a supply chain.

The school, and the finding

Now put the pieces next to the school.

February 28. The war opens, a thousand targets in a day, target development accelerated by models, the harm-review office cut to around a tenth of its staff, the lawyers a year gone. The Shajareh Tayyebeh school dies in that stream: 156 to 168 people, at least a hundred of them children, and Bloomberg's reconstruction put the children at no fewer than 123. A sports complex in Lamerd died in the same opening salvo. CENTCOM called the reports false; the UN mission did not. The Pentagon's own probe pointed to an American missile. CENTCOM appointed an officer to investigate CENTCOM. Hegseth's contribution was to brag, two days later, about having "no stupid rules of engagement," and to call it "the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history." In April, Senate Democrats put that sequence to him in writing: he had boasted about no stupid rules of engagement days after more than a hundred Iranian schoolchildren were killed. The record does not show that it cost him sleep.

Last week the UN’s fact-finding mission on Iran published its conclusion: reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes, indiscriminate attacks unlawfully killing civilians. The White House answered that “the only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime.” And in the most quietly damning sentence of the whole saga: the United States has still not accepted responsibility for the strike.

Minab sits in Hormozgan province, whose coast faces the Strait of Hormuz. The last time American weapons killed Iranian civilians here, it was July 1988, and the crew of the USS Vincennes had watched their Aegis system tag Iran Air Flight 655 as a hostile F-14 descending. The crew trusted the label over the radar picture that said otherwise. Two hundred and ninety people died. The captain collected the Legion of Merit, Washington paid compensation while denying liability, and the apology never came. Thirty-eight years on, the acknowledgement still hasn’t.

That’s the full stack of not-caring, laid out in layers: deny the deaths, then deny the intent, then deny the finder’s legitimacy, then keep doing it. The ICC might come for us, Hegseth said of the boats, and we will continue. War-crimes findings used to be reckonings. This one lands as a press release from an organisation the perpetrator has already declared illegitimate.

You have seen this before

The machinery is old. The engine is new.

“There are recurring cycles, ups and downs, but the course of events is essentially the same, with small variations. It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

Theodor Reik, 1965

The Obama administration's signature strikes pioneered category killing: any "military-age male" in a strike zone was a combatant by definition, and the dead were upgraded to combatants after the fact so the numbers stayed clean. Israel's Lavender industrialised it: thirty-seven thousand Gazans marked for death by a model, a human "confirmation" that took twenty seconds, a companion system called Where's Daddy whose specialty was waiting until a suspect went home so the bomb could take the family too. The tolerance settings, per the investigations, ran to fifteen or twenty civilian deaths per junior militant. And Russia has crossed the last line, by the account of Ukrainian investigators and officials: in July a fully autonomous drone, AI-guided, no human in the loop, killed three civilians at a petrol station in Zaporizhzhia, and both sides of that war are now openly racing to remove the loop entirely.

Now the steelman, because it has earned its hearing: AI targeting genuinely is more precise, and precision saves civilian lives. True, and irrelevant. Precision is a geometry claim; proportionality is a moral one. A missile that lands inside the intended building with two metres of scatter has not begun to answer whether that building could be lawfully struck, or what stands next to it, or how many children were in the courtyard. When the wrong building burns, the war crime lands exactly where it was aimed. Precision launders nothing; it sharpens the invoice.

A thousand targets a day is a body count with a dashboard. McNamara ran the Vietnam War on body counts, and the Saigon press corps had a name for the daily briefings that laundered them: the “five o’clock follies.” Sixty years later Goodhart’s law has a payload and a release button. The scholarship has caught up: a Fordham law journal now runs analysis on whether AI-assisted targeting can satisfy the intent standard for genocide, which is a sentence I wish I didn’t know how to write.

The machinery of not-caring

So: did an incompetent man stumble into war crimes, or did a war criminal wear incompetence as a costume? The law has an answer, and it's the hinge of this whole post. It doesn't matter, because engineered ignorance is intent.

Command responsibility, from Yamashita, tried by an American military commission in Manila in 1945, through Rome Statute Article 28, attaches liability to a commander who knew, or should have known, of atrocities and failed to prevent them. Wilful blindness satisfies intent in US law: deliberately avoiding knowledge is treated as knowledge. Now run the record through the standard. He fired the lawyers whose job was to generate reasons to know. He fired the caretakers whose job was to know. He replaced them with a system that cannot know anything and cannot be deposed. "I didn't know" is not his defence. "I didn't know" is the crime: the crime committed in advance, against the future's information, so that the present could stay clean.

Nuremberg disposed of “I was only following orders” eighty years ago. The modern version is more refined: the model said so. It’s superior orders with a preinstalled excuse. The orders came from a system that can’t be cross-examined, purchased from a vendor with a usage policy, run through a human rubber stamp positioned precisely where the blame will land. Every mechanism Bandura catalogued is present: the euphemism (narcoterrorists, collateral damage), the diffusion (the mission commander made the call; I didn’t stick around), the displacement (the model flagged it), the dehumanisation (a boat, a hull, a target package), the advantageous comparison (this is not Iraq). And Hannah Arendt’s famous banality? That was Eichmann, a clerk. Hegseth is loud. He does push-ups with the troops and types PATHETIC in all caps and promises to keep killing regardless of what The Hague thinks. The cruelty never hid in a filing cabinet. It is the content: the second-strike clip, offered up for release by a president who saw “no problem.”

In the last post, the black box’s opacity served the vendors: no provenance for stolen science, no audit trail for stolen killing. What I underweighted was the demand side. Opacity serves whoever holds the box, and the man who holds this one has a use for it that’s older than the technology: destroying the provenance of orders. When the missile finds a school, the question “who decided?” now decomposes into a fog. A model’s output. A memo invoking privilege. A commander’s denial. A senator explaining that drowning men were staying in the fight. Fog is the product. Fog was always the product.

“Meaningful human control,” the phrase every AI-arms treaty negotiation turns on, assumes the human is the safeguard. We have now watched, in sequence, on the record: the safeguard fired, the replacement automated, the loop reduced to theatre, and the findings rejected. The system worked as configured.

That was an indictment of the machine when I wrote it. It’s an indictment of the man now. Because this time we don’t have to infer the configuration. We watched him build it: firing by firing, memo by memo, in public, before anyone died.

And if the configuration needs a face, it’s a fisherman’s: a man who told his daughter he was going fishing one September morning and went out after marlin, killed by a state that has a designation for him, a secret memo to justify him, and a year on still no evidence, no inquest, and no reason to say his name in the building where the missile was ordered.

He told us. We have the transcripts.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Amnesty International. “USA/Iran: Those responsible for deadly and unlawful US strike on school that killed over 100 children must be held accountable.” March 16, 2026.
2. Senate Democrats. “Leader Schumer, Senators Van Hollen, Kaine, Schatz, Warren, Lead 41 Senators in Pressing DOD for Answers on the School Bombing and Civilian Casualties in Iran.” March 2026.
3. White House. “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.” February 6, 2025.
4. US Treasury, OFAC. “Issuance of Executive Order Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court; International Criminal Court-related Designation.” February 13, 2025.
5. Amnesty International. “What do the Trump administration’s sanctions on the ICC mean for justice and human rights?” March 25, 2025.
6. PBS News. “Trump’s sanctions on ICC’s chief prosecutor have halted tribunal’s work, officials and lawyers say.” May 15, 2025.
7. International Criminal Court. “The ICC strongly rejects new US sanctions against Judges and Deputy Prosecutors.” August 20, 2025.
8. NBC News. “ICC slams U.S. decision to sanction the court’s president and senior prosecution lawyer.” August 19, 2026.
9. Lawfare. “A ‘Sweeping Overhaul’ of the JAG Corps Poses Likely Dangers.” April 4, 2025.
10. Military.com. “‘People Are Very Scared’: Trump Administration Purge of JAG Officers Raises Legal, Ethical Fears.” February 24, 2025.
11. ProPublica. “Top Commanders Told Hegseth Not to Cut Civilian Protection Program, Poll Showed. He Did It Anyway.” August 25, 2026.
12. The Intercept. “Hegseth’s War Department Slashed Civilian Protection Staff, Brought in AI Assessments.” July 20, 2026.
13. Just Security. “Timeline of Boat Strikes and Related Actions.” Updated September 19, 2026.
14. Al Jazeera. “‘Inevitably difficult’: Inside a family’s fight against the US boat strikes.” January 16, 2026.
15. CNN. “Colombian family files first known formal complaint over deadly US strike in Caribbean.” December 2, 2025.
16. The Independent (via Yahoo News). “Secret DOJ memo that green-lights US ‘drug boat’ strikes is based entirely on a Trump theory: report.” November 14, 2025. (Reporting on The New York Times.)
17. The Wall Street Journal. “Secret U.S. Memo Authorizing Drug-Boat Strikes Cites Chemical Weapon Threat.” November 2025.
18. Courthouse News Service. “Trump DOJ asserts presidential privilege over drug boat drone strikes memo.” June 24, 2026.
19. The Washington Post. “White House ignored legal concerns in deadly strikes on drug boats.” November 22, 2025.
20. Human Rights Watch. “US: Military Boat Strikes Constitute Extrajudicial Killings.” December 16, 2025.
21. ACLU. “Legal Experts Underscore Illegality of U.S. Boat Strikes at Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Hearing.” March 16, 2026.
22. Al Jazeera. “Hegseth cautions that ICC may investigate US boat strikes in Latin America.” August 12, 2026.
23. The Washington Post. “Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.” November 28, 2025.
24. CBS News. “How the Trump administration’s account of Sept. 2 boat strike has evolved.” December 2025.
25. Military.com (AP). “Admiral Says There Was No ‘Kill Them All’ Order in Boat Attack, But Video Alarms Lawmakers.” December 4, 2025.
26. CBS News. “Trump says he supports releasing video of alleged drug boat strike: ‘I support the decision to knock out the boats.’” December 3, 2025.
27. CBS News. “Trump walks back support for releasing video of second boat strike.” December 2025.
28. Madeleine Clare Elish. “Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 5, March 23, 2019.
29. The Atlantic. “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” March 24, 2025.
30. FactCheck.org. “Pentagon Inspector General Report Not ‘Total Exoneration’ for Hegseth.” December 2025.
31. DefenseScoop. “Hegseth announces, without explanation, that Southcom commander Adm. Holsey is retiring.” October 16, 2025.
32. CNN. “Commander in charge of US military operations in the Caribbean retires after clashes with Hegseth over boat strikes.” December 12, 2025.
33. Wikipedia. “Hugh Thompson Jr.” (My Lai intervention.)
34. DefenseScoop. “‘Accelerate like hell’: Hegseth moves to reshape DOD’s AI and tech hubs.” January 13, 2026.
35. Defense One. “Grok is in, ethics are out in Pentagon’s new AI-acceleration strategy.” January 13, 2026.
36. Brookings. “Making sense of the US military operation in Venezuela.” January 5, 2026.
37. Axios. “Pentagon’s use of Claude during Maduro raid sparks Anthropic feud.” February 13, 2026.
38. Wikipedia. “Project Maven.”
39. CSIS. “What Is Maven Smart System, and What Does It Do?” June 2, 2026.
40. Gulf News. “US Strikes Neutralize 5,500 Iranian Targets, Including Warships: CentCom Commander.” March 12, 2026.
41. The Washington Post. “Anthropic’s AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud.” March 4, 2026.
42. CNN (via Times of Israel). “US nearly raided Chinese ship after AI falsely flagged ‘nuclear’ cargo.” September 18, 2026.
43. AI Incident Database. “Incident 1701: AI Chatbot Reportedly Misidentified Chinese Ship Cargo as Nuclear-Program Components, Prompting U.S. Military Interception Preparations.” September 2026.
44. Bloomberg. “Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School.” September 18, 2026.
45. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “Warren, Van Hollen Open New Investigation into Hegseth’s Role in Dismantling Military’s Civilian Harm Prevention Guard Rails.” April 20, 2026.
46. NBC News (AP). “U.N. mission finds grounds to believe U.S. committed war crimes in Iran.” September 17, 2026.
47. CNBC. “UN mission finds evidence signaling U.S. war crimes in Iran; Washington rejects report.” September 18, 2026.
48. Wikipedia. “Iran Air Flight 655.”
49. Quote Investigator. “History Repeats Itself, But It Rhymes.” January 12, 2014. (Documents the Reik attribution.)
50. +972 Magazine. “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.” April 2024.
51. The Guardian. “‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify targets.” April 3, 2024.
52. The New York Times. “A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by AI.” August 24, 2026.
53. Cameron Mukerjee. “AI and Dolus Specialis: Adapting Genocide Law to the Rise of AI-Powered Weaponry in International Conflicts.” Fordham International Law Journal blog, March 31, 2026.
54. Wikipedia. “Yamashita standard.” (Command responsibility after the 1945 Yamashita trial.)
55. Wikipedia. “Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.” (Article 28, command responsibility.)
56. Wikipedia. “Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB.” (Wilful blindness standard.)
57. Wikipedia. “Nicaragua v. United States.” (1986 ICJ judgment.)
58. Wikipedia. “American Service-Members’ Protection Act.” (The “Hague Invasion Act.”)
59. Wikipedia. “Torture Memos.” (Bybee memo; Gonzales “quaint and obsolete” memo.)
60. Military Times. “Hegseth, Caine lay out Iran goals: ‘No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire.’” March 2, 2026.
61. TribLive. “Analysis: Hegseth’s boasts of ‘maximum’ engagement authorities face scrutiny after school is hit.” March 13, 2026.
62. Euronews. “Preliminary inquiry indicates US was responsible for deadly strike on Iranian elementary school.” March 12, 2026.
63. Fox News. “Hegseth announces Pentagon probe into deadly strike on Iranian school.” March 13, 2026.
64. RTTNews. “CENTCOM Refutes Media Claims Of US Strikes On A Civilian Target In Iran.” April 1, 2026.
65. Al Jazeera. “UN fact-finding mission says US committed possible war crimes in Iran.” September 17, 2026.
66. TechCrunch. “AI hallucination nearly triggers US military operation.” September 18, 2026.