Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-10-02 Friday

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Headlines for October 02, 2026; “Cruel & Torturous”: Christa Pike in Critical Condition After Botched Tennessee Execution; “The School That Became a Grave”: Jeremy Scahill on U.S Bombing of Minab, Killing 120+ Iranian Kids

From Publix, the House of Journalism in Berlin, Germany, this is Democracy Now. The state of Tennessee has shown us again that they are not capable of carrying out an execution consistent with basic human dignity. Last night was not just inefficient. It was cruel and it was torturous. In Tennessee, death row prisoner Krista Pike remains in critical condition after surviving two lethal injections during a botched execution. We'll speak to a journalist who witnessed what happened and the director of the Cornell Center on the death penalty worldwide. Then Massacre at Minab, the school that became a grave.

Drop site news is out with a major investigation and film about the U.S. bombing of a school in the southern Iranian city of Minab in February, the first day of the U.S. and Israeli war in Iran. The bombing killed at least 156 people, 120 of the victims were children. 26 were teachers, all women. We'll speak to reporter Jeremy Scahill and air excerpts of Drop Sites film featuring survivors, teachers, first responders, parents, and witnesses. Plaster was falling. The ground was shaking.

And at that moment, I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, it's over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble. It's going to fall now. Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust. I told my son, Yassine, run and open the door. Let's get out. All that and more coming up.

Welcome to Democracy Now. Now.org. The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. In Tennessee, Christa Pike remains in critical condition hospitalized after surviving two lethal injections Wednesday. Her legal team is calling on the Republican Governor Bill Lee to reduce Pike's sentence to life in prison and call the botched execution, quote, cruel and torturous, unquote. Christa Pike was still breathing after she was strapped to a gurney and injected with two syringes of pentobarbital as prison officials attempted to kill her for more than two hours. This is Pike's attorney, Randy Spivey, speaking Thursday. The state of Tennessee has shown us again that they are not capable of carrying out an execution consistent with basic human dignity. last night was not just inefficient, it was cruel, and it was torturous. It was also predictable. Krista's legal team told the state of Tennessee and the court that her medical conditions would

cause her to suffer an agonizing death. The state and the court dismiss Krista's concerns. Krista Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Her story's renewed debate on sentencing reform as Pike was just 18 years old when she was convicted of murder in 1995 and sentenced to death. She's also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The UN's human rights office has urged Tennessee not to pursue another execution attempt. This is Ravina Shumdosani, UN human rights spokesperson.

The death penalty has no place in any society. And Krista Pike's case lays bare the multiple reasons why capital punishment should be abolished. Her prolonged suffering is abhorred. warrant and cruel. Key fair trial questions remain unresolved. We call on the state authorities not to pursue any further attempts to execute Krista Pike. The Pentagon is deploying a third aircraft carrier strike group in up to 10,000 U.S. Marines to the Middle East, the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier and the USS Maken Island Amphibious Ready Group left the port of San Diego this week, are expected to be positioned near Iran by the end of November.

They'll add to about 50,000 U.S. military personnel already in the region. In an interview with Time magazine published Thursday, President Trump said renewed large-scale strikes on Iran were possible after the November midterm elections. Meanwhile, ships continue to come under fire while transiting the Strait of Hormuz with five vessels reportedly struck by projectiles in just 72 hours. On Thursday, a super tanker with a capacity. of 2.5 million barrels of oil caught fire after it was hit off the coast of Oman. The Saudi-led military alliance fighting Houthi militias in Yemen said Thursday,

it intercepted four drones launched over southern Saudi Arabia. The alliance accused the Houthis of targeting an electric power station in the Holy City of Medina, a charge the Houthis denied. Meanwhile, there were reports of loud explosion in the Houthi-controlled city of Sana overnight, as yet government forces carry out air strikes. The internet station for migration, more than 145,000 people have been displaced in Yemen since the conflict escalated in June.

In the United Kingdom, said Thursday, they'd arrested a 25-year-old British-Iranian dual national in London, following a security incident at RIA Faireford Air Base on Sunday. The UK has allowed the U.S. to launch a attack on Iran from the air base since March. Authority did not name the man who's being held on suspicion of terrorist acts. The same charge levied against five British nationals who were arrested outside RAA Affairford, then released on bail.

On Thursday, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said his government had strong indications of Iranian involvement in the incident. But exactly what took place outside the air base remains unclear. A police search of vans being used by the men turned up no signs of explosives. However, the vans did contain empty barrels, large tanks, siphoning pumps and fuel, leading to widespread speculation that the men were stealing petrol rather than plotting an attack. In Texas, Wilbur Rafael Garces Perez, the 28-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker who was shot by an ice agent in Austin, has finally received surgery to remove the bullet from the gun.

his back. The bullet remained jammed in his body for 11 days, causing severe pain. Garces Perez was transferred between an ICE jail and the hospital multiple times and had lost movement on his left side. The shooting by ICE agents earlier this month came as Garces Perez made deliveries for door dash. Garces Perez now faces federal criminal charges. In related news, Associated Press reports ICE has banned high-speed car chases. Vehicle pursuits and traffic stops involving U.S. officers have been under heavy scrutiny as agents have fired their guns more than a dozen times in these encounters since Trump returned to office. At least four people have been killed, including 52-year-old Mexican father

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, fatally shot in Houston in July, and several others wounded. In Minneapolis, the family of Renee Good filed a pair of federal civil rights lawsuits on Thursday over her fatal shooting at the hands of ICE agent Jonathan Ross during mass deportation sweeps in January. One lawsuit seeks to hold the U.S. government accountable under the Tort Claims Act, alleging wrongful death, negligence, and emotional distress. A second lawsuit names ICE agent Jonathan Ross and several top current and former Trump administration. officials, including Stephen Miller and Christy Noem. It accuses them of a conspiracy to interfere with the civil rights of Renee Good, as well as Somali and Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Twin Cities. On Thursday, Renee Good's partner, Becca Good, spoke publicly for the first time since the fatal shooting on January 7th. I don't hate the people who took Renee from us, but what I want them to understand,

Every single day they get to look at their children and their wives and their sisters and know what they took from our family. They took a mother away from her children. They know that and they will carry it forever. President Trump left the White House for campaign events in Texas and Oklahoma on Thursday. The first of what he says will be 32 days of campaigning right up to Election Day. Trump is opening his tour in states normally considered safe territory for Republicans who fear the president's dismal poll numbers will drag down their chances in the midterm elections. Trump's first stop was a Dallas area truck factory where we rallied support for Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton, who's polling behind Democrat James Telerico. No Texas Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994.

According to secretly recorded audio published by the New York Times, Paxton told a group of conservative donors and lobbyists last week that Trump's midterm convention in Dallas had hurt his Senate campaign. When we did that in convention, we dropped our numbers, everybody's every drop. By now, yeah, not good. Republican-affiliated groups spent $122 million. last month alone in support of Ken Paxton's Senate run, including $20 million spent by Donald Trump's Super PAC MAGA, Inc. In September, Paxton told a Texas podcaster, he would be unable to compete without

money from outside groups. And the only thing that really saves us is that the Supreme Court came along and allowed super PACs. Otherwise, you could not run a race in Texas. In New Jersey, an investigation has revealed a Microsoft-linked data center emitted large amounts of toxic air pollution for nearly a year before state regulators stepped in. According to public records, it came by floodlight and the Guardian, the data one facility in Vineland, operated dozens of gas fire generators for a combined 46,000 hours in total without required permits. A Rutgers professor estimated the data center emitted about 140 tons of nitrogen oxides, chemicals that produce smog and are linked to asthma, heart attacks, and premature death. In New York, new details have emerged about Cornell University's botched internal investigation into the sexual assault of a 20-year-old undergraduate student on campus in 2024.

The unsealed documents include 120-page trace. transcript of Jane Doe's hours-long sworn statement to Cornell police and a university investigator in which she described feeling increasingly incapacitated and uncomfortable the night she was drugged, assaulted, and gang raped by seven former and current members of Kai Fi fraternity. She told the investigators, quote, there was really no escape, unquote. According to the New York Times, Cornell omitted the rape allegation in its report to prosecutors. The case has been reopened following global outcry. On Thursday, New York Governor Kathy Hokel named New York Attorney General Letitia James to serve a special prosecutor in the investigation. James had already begun a review of why Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houghton decided not to pursue criminal charges in the case. Ethiopia shuddered its embassy in Eritrea's capitalist Mara on Thursday and named 10 Eritrean diplomats persona after accusing its East African neighbor of arming and supporting rebels in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region.

Eritrea responded by severing diplomatic ties with Ethiopiates, the worst confrontation between the two nations since they signed a peace agreement in 2018, formerly ending 20 years of war. The diplomatic conflict erupted hours after drones struck near the headquarters of Ethiopia. as military and other sites in Addis Ababa. Reuters reports a source linked to the Tigray People's Liberation Front claim responsibility on behalf of the rebel group, which last week resumed attacks on government forces for the first time since a 22 ceasefire ended a devastating civil war. In Brazil, voters are taken to the poll Sunday for a high-stakes election between Brazilian leftist president, Luis Anasio Lula de Silva, who's vying for a fourth, fourth,

term in office and far-right candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of imprisoned former president, Jair Bolsonaro. If no candidate wins more than half the vote in the first round, they'll go to a runoff that's scheduled for October 25th. Lula has warned against attempts to interfere in Brazil's election and threats to democracy by President Trump, who's had a friendly relationship with the Bolsonaro's. Though Trump has so far not publicly endorsed Flavio Bolsonaro, he said he's following the election very closely.

And in Spain, a fragmented Spanish parliament is set to vote today on a pair of measures to ban evictions until 2030 while protecting the rights of tenants. The measures are expected to fail since the party of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez does not hold a majority in the parliament. Sanchez issued the housing decrees in response to public uproar over the eviction of 87-year-old Marie Carmen from her lifelong home in Madrid. Activists have set up large protest encampments in Madrid's Puerto de Seoul Square. Their protests have spread to Barcelona and other Spanish cities.

It's very important to protest because the problem is very big. There are many people that can't afford rent, many people, young people, older middle-aged people. Housing is a very big problem. I don't know why this movement didn't start before. Those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman in Berlin. Coming up in Tennessee death row prisoner, Christa Pike, remains in critical condition in the hospital after surviving two lethal injections during a botched execution.

We'll speak with a witness and one of her lawyers. Stay with us. The bold. that were on the show. And the cherry blossoms bloom. The world's on fire by Fero Foster. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the war in peace report. I'm Amy Goodman.

Tennessee's Governor Bill Lee has halted all remaining executions this year. After a death row prisoner survived two lethal injections. Wednesday night. According to her lawyers, Christa Pike was still breathing after she was strapped to a gurney and injected with two syringes of pentobarbital in a botched execution that spanned more than two hours. Witnesses say Pike described a burning spot in her arm that felt like it was going to burst. She smiled and laughed, then gasped repeatedly and began snoring, but continued to breathe. She was later taken to the hospital. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee is ordered an independent review of the botched execution, but Krista Pike's attorney say he should go further and commute

her sentence. On Thursday, Krista Pike's attorney, Randy Spivey, addressed reporters during a news conference. Krista is alive right now. We don't have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment. But we do know that she is alive right now in receiving life-saving medical care. The state of Tennessee has shown us again that they are not capable of carrying out an execution consistent with basic human dignity. Last night was not just inefficient, it was cruel, and it was torturous. It was also predictable. Krista's legal team told the state of Tennessee and the court that her medical conditions would cause her to suffer an agonizing death. The state and the court dismiss Christ's concerns.

The governor's call for an independent review does not go far enough. After having endured solitary confinement for more than 20 years and a full attempt to kill her by lethal injection, Krista has endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty. Krista Pike's lawyers revealed the execution team went through at least seven needles trying to find a vein, including one that appeared to be bent when it was pulled from her arm. Medical experts say the blistering and burning around the IV insertion sites suggest the pentobarbital may have leaked into the surrounding tissue rather than entering Pike's bloodstream, potentially causing chemical burns.

Some experts have raised the possibility. The pentobarbital may have degraded or expired, which could have made it less effective. Krista Pike was sentenced to death for a 1995-month-year-old. murder she committed when she was 18 years old. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Wednesday night's attempted execution went forward only after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay by an appeals court which had paused her execution to consider whether her sentencing had fully weighed mitigating evidence, including severe childhood trauma and neglect, including rape and sexual abuse and mental illness.

Weeks before her botched execution, Pike and her lawyers argued a single-dose lethal injection could be tantamount to torture due to Pike's small veins. This is an unedited audio recording shared by her lawyers with the New York Times. On our lethal injection method, simply that things. Tony Coor brothers lived out my worst nightmare, detail for detail. and I don't want to go through that. The drug is supposedly bombs very bad, and so that sounds scary to me because they used the work drawing notes

and speaking about this drug. And the thought of suffocating in drowning on my bodily fluid and blood isn't very appealing to me. I'm very remorseful now. I wasn't in the beginning when I first caught this charge. I didn't care what I had done or who I attended to. The horror of the pain that I caused her family, my family, my code of image family,

I've affected this world in such a negative way when all I ever wanted to do was care for people and leave love. I have done the opposite of that, and that pains me. Those were the words of Krista Pike speaking weeks ahead of her botched execution. She was referring to the case of Tennessee death row prisoner Tony Carruthers, who was issued a one-year stay of execution in May after prison officials were unable to find a backup injection vein in another botched execution attempt that left Carruthers suffering and in pain for over an hour. Pike's lawyer said, quote, we take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true, Vane access, blown veins, degrade de Pento Barbatol, no emergency medical care available, when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy, they say. Well, for more, we're joined by two guests.

In Nashville, Tennessee, we're joined by Stephen Hale, criminal justice reporter at the Nashville Banner, author of Death Row welcomes you visiting hours in the shadow of the execution chamber. He witnessed Krista Pikes' Box execution on Wednesday evening in Orleans, Massachusetts. We're joined by Sandra Babcock, clinical professor of Cornell Law School, director of the Cornell Center on the death penalty worldwide. She recently co-wrote an article headline Tennessee failed Krista Pike long before her execution date. We welcome you both to Democracy Now. Let's begin in Nashville. Stephen Hale, you witnessed the attempted execution of Krista Pike. Can you explain what happened? Well, thanks.

for having me, Amy, I guess the answer is yes and no. I can tell you what I saw. One of the continuing frustrations of this situation from our perspective as reporters is that we can't explain as much as we'd like to be able to. But I can tell you that, yes, what you described there in your intro is correct. Christa Pike, we understand, was given two rounds of lethal injection drug, pentobarbital. I have seen five executions in Tennessee, including the aborted one that you mentioned of Tony Carruthers back in May. And I've never seen anything like what we saw Wednesday night. And a number of the witnesses who were there with me have also seen a number of other lethal injections in this state and others.

And it was new to all of us. It was pretty clear early on that things were going wrong, but even then we didn't know they would go quite as wrong as they did. And it's all been quite disturbing, as you can imagine. Describe what you heard and saw. So you mentioned that Krista Pike was talking and kind of smiling even at times. She was in conversation with her spiritual advisor who was in the room with her. And they, in the early stages of this attempted execution, were repeating a kind of prayer mantra. They were saying, may you be at peace, may you be kind and gentle to yourself?

At one point she looked over in our direction at the window that we were sitting behind, and she said to the people behind the glass, and she repeated that again, may you be at peace. But it wasn't long after that that the drugs were administered, and even at a certain point we saw what we understand to be a signal in the execution chamber that the drugs had been fully administered. And even after that point, she was still moving her body, she was still talking to her spiritual advisor,

and that continued long after we expected it to. What then happened was obviously a very long process, but the curtain was drawn twice. And for your viewers to understand, that's normally only done right before the person is declared dead. In this case, the curtain was closed. While we all knew she was still alive,

and we could still hear her breathing, snoring, kind of struggling. And it was then her spiritual advisor was pulled out of the execution chamber. We waited there in the dark for a bit, and then the prison officials came and brought the spiritual advisor back into the execution chamber

so that they could try again. And that's when they gave her a second round of, Pento Barbatol. We continued to hear her snoring. At times saw her, you know, kind of opening her mouth wide, almost as just gasping, but without making a sound. And then at a certain point, the curtain was closed again. And I repeat, it was closed while we could still hear her and knew she was alive. And we sat there for around 50 minutes, listening to the sound of her snoring quite loudly, breathing, you know, in strained breaths. And but with no information about what was or wasn't going on. behind the curtain. As we watch the news conference, Sector Babcock, year one of the attorneys for Krista Pike, the attorneys called for the governor to commute Krista's sentence. The governor's announced independent review was described as insufficient without greater transparency and preservation of records. Can you talk about the legal recourse you have right now? I mean, my

understanding is Krista Hale is in the hospital and critical condition. They're trying to keep her alive. And if they succeed and she sent back to the prison, they will try to kill her again. The most important thing right now is that Mr. Pulse. I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Go ahead. I can hear you. Can you hear me? Okay. The most important thing right now is that Krista pulls through this. We still don't know what her prognosis is. is, and we are all waiting to see, and that is the primary concern. But in the meantime, the governor must immediately commute her death sentence. Krista Pike, as Mr. Spivey said a few minutes ago, has just experienced the most agonizing attempt at lethal injection in the country's history.

And it's important to remember that Krista should never have been in this position. She should never have been sentenced to death in the first place. She was an 18-year-old kid, an immature 18-year-old, who was just a year after a violent rape, which was the last of three different men who had raped her in the course of her childhood and adolescence. She was not receiving medication for post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder at the time of this crime, which she committed with her abusive boyfriend at the time. there are so many reasons why she never should have been in that execution chamber in the first place. And on top of that, the state of Tennessee had always accused her of fabricating these accounts of

childhood sexual abuse and rape. They called her a liar, a pathological liar. They said that she was promiscuous. They said that basically that she had invited it or invented it. In fact, her sexual assaults were documented by police reports, court records, hospital records. She actually reported them, unlike most rape victims. And after decades of denying the truth of her suffering, the state just last month finally admitted that she had, that, that, that, that, that it did not dispute her history as a survivor of unimaginable sexual violence. We tried to get the courts to stop her execution and the Sixth Circuit agreed. And they halted it. And the state immediately appealed and the Supreme Court vacated that stay over the dissents of three justices who said,

we must recognize that we are not infallible and that there is a risk of irretrievable harm if this execution goes forward. Their concerns were ignored. The state of Tennessee plowed ahead. As you said at the top of the hour, and as Mr. Spivey explained, the state was on notice about her medical condition. All of these facts were known to the courts. This case represents a colossal failure, not only of the lethal injection process, but of the legal architecture that is supposed to ensure that people do not suffer a torturous death at the hands of the state. Sandra Babcock, Tennessee's governor billee has halted. all remaining executions this year. You're having a governor's election this year.

And one of the candidates, the Republican senator, Marsha Blackburn, who's running for governor, has said many times on the campaign trail, she wants executions to happen quicker and she wants to use the electric chair. Can you respond? Well, I'm not a Tennessean, and I will not be voting in the election. But what I think about that statement is, is that it is typical of politicians who are seeking to appeal to a common thirst for vengeance when people hear about violent crime. It is a black and white way of viewing the world that

does not reflect the complexities of crime, that does not reflect the complexities of women's histories of violence and the experiences that pave the pathway to incarceration. It's what they perceive as something that will appeal to the electorate. it's a cop-out is what it is. And people who have worked in this system, and that includes prison officials and guards, who have worked alongside supervising people on death row, recognize that these are full human beings and that you cannot execute someone under the conditions that Tennessee just attempted to do without recognizing that what Tennessee did was an act of cold and calculated homicide

that was far crueller in its way, and because of its premeditated, deliberate nature, than the act that Krista Pike was convicted of committing at a time when she was in the grip of a mental illness that was unmedicated coming off of the trauma of a violent rape. Sandra Babcock, can you say whether Krista Pike, is conscious in the hospital and critical condition? We do not know. We have no information. None of the information that we have heard. Most of it is rumors is reliable. We are waiting to hear any official word from the medical team. She is now receiving medical assistance from doctors who respect the Hippocratic Oath.

Unlike the doctor who was present in the execution chamber with her, whom we know is incompetent and who is also responsible for the botched execution of Tony Carruthers in May. And finally, I want to go back to Stephen Hale in Nashville. You not only witnessed the attempted execution of Krista Pike, you witnessed the attempted execution of Tony Carruthers and May. Your final comments on what happened there, leading to him being granted a stay of execution. Yeah, Amy, as you say, and I spoke to you in May, and we do need to find a much better way of getting in touch,

but I are a much better reason for doing so. That was also a horrifying attempted execution in its own way. A difference was that this one went much further, that execution, as you remember, was called off from our perspective as witnesses before the curtain was open, and so before it had sort of fully begun from our vantage point, of course, on Tony Carruthers' end, they had been trying and struggling to get IV access for a long time. I think overall, I would just emphasize to your viewers that we have been here before in Tennessee, not just in terms of there being a botched execution earlier this year, but in terms of the governor calling for a pause on execution

so that the protocol can be reviewed. That happened in 2022 when an execution was called, off at the last minute because of problems with the protocol. An outside legal review found that the department had not been following its protocol on numerous occasions, and a new protocol was created. That's the one we're using now. And this year, there have been, as we've been discussing, two botched executions under that protocol. We did not know until yesterday, after hearing from Krista Pike's attorneys, the degree of struggle that there had been to get IV access for her. So that was new information to us because as reporters and witnesses, we don't see that part during an execution. but that obviously, it appears, was a problem yet again in this process.

And so what will happen going forward is very unclear, but this is the experience that we all had Wednesday night and that Krista Pike had is unique in some ways, but also not new here. Stephen Hale, I want to thank you for being with us. Criminal Justice Reporter at the Nashville Banner, author of the book, Death Row welcomes you, visiting hours in the shadow of the execution chamber, speaking to us from Nashville. and Sandra Babcock, clinical professor of Cornell Law School, director of the Cornell Center on the death penalty worldwide. We'll link to your piece that you co-wrote.

Tennessee failed Krista Pike long before her execution. Coming up, Massacre at Minab, the school that became a grave. We'll speak to Jeremy Scahill of DropSight News back in 15 seconds. Honey, yes, the world's on fire. Angel wings exposed. Hide the feather. Their bones. The world's on fire by Farrell Foster.

This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman. We're broadcasting from Publix, the House of Journalism, in Berlin, Germany. The Pentagon sending a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East as President Trump considers a new escalation of the U.S. war in Iran. The latest move adds 7,000 sailors up to 3,000 Marines to the U.S. military presence in the region. Today we spend the rest of the hour looking at the U.S. bombing of a children's school in the Iranian city of Manab on the first day of the U.S.

Israeli war on Iran. The bombing killed at least 156 people, 120 of them children, 26 teachers, all women. A United Nations fact-finding mission recently concluded the U.S. strike was a war crime, but the Trump administration has not yet even acknowledged U.S. responsibility. Drop site news is out this week with a devastating investigation into the bombing of the school. The article in accompanying video is headline Massacre at Minab, the school that became a grave. We're joined right now by investigative journalist Jeremy Skate Hill lead author on the report. In a moment, Jeremy, will play some of your interviews with survivors, first responders and parents. But first, Jeremy, set up what happened that day on February.

28th. Thanks, Amy. You know, we need to back up a few weeks and remember that Iran and the United States were engaged in an intense round of negotiations that were being mediated by the Sultanate of Oman, which had been the main mediator for two decades between the United States and Iran on nuclear issues. And it played a major role in brokering the 2015 JCPOA agreement signed under Barack Obama. And the Iranians were very skeptical about this process. And the Iranians were very skeptical about this process because just some months before these negotiations in June of 2025, when the Iranians were negotiating with the United States, the U.S. and Israel launched surprise bombing attacks against Iran in what became known as the 12-day war. But the foreign minister of Oman on February 27th had gone

to the United States. He met with Vice President J.D. Vance in the White House. He came out and he told media that he was optimistic that a deal was going to be reached and that it would be historic in nature. Yes, there were details to work out. Nothing was guaranteed, but that there were technical talks scheduled for the following week in Vienna, Austria. And so when Iranians woke up on the morning of February 28th, let's remember this was a Saturday, but in Iran, Saturday is the beginning of the school and work week. And so Iranians were, you know, paying attention to everything, but they went to bed, understanding that this process was still going on, that war was very much a possibility, but not believing it was going to start imminently because you had this next round of

negotiations and you had the Omani foreign minister expressing optimism. Well, then, as people are stuck in traffic jams, they're getting their kids out the door for school. Children start arriving at school. We get the initial reports that there are air strikes that have happened in Tehran, the capital of Iran. And the first strikes that happened that day were on the residents and offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini. And so a lot of the media speculation at that point was about whether or not Iran's supreme leader had been assassinated. And word starts to spread very quickly across Iran and on state media that there are attacks happening throughout the country. And so administrators and officials in provinces around Iran

begin calling schools and directing principals and teachers to start having parents come to take their children home. There was going to be a shelter in place order. And the Iranians had been through this before. And so as this is happening, we then start to hear shocking reports that in the southern Iranian city of Minab, a missile has slammed into a girl's school. And we start to see images that show children and the bodies of children. And very quickly, the media narrative sort of becomes, and this is being pushed kind of by the United States, that the school had been, right next to an IRGC missile facility and that it was sort of collateral damage. We did an investigation into this.

There's been some very good reporting on this. This is not a story that we broke, but what we did is we really went deeply into what happened in the experience of Iranians who lived at that day. And by talking to teachers who survived, you know, 26 teachers were killed in this attack. One of them was pregnant, 120 children. This was not a single bombing or collateral damage. There were at least two direct hits on a school packed with children that was with Tomahawk cruise missiles, one of the most sophisticated weapons in the U.S. arsenal.

And a couple of hours after those initial hits, as first responders came, as parents came, the U.S. launches more strikes. A total Iran says if 13 missiles were launched, the Justice Minister of Iran told me this isn't a double-tacked. double tap strike. This is a triple tap strike. And, you know, one of the most horrifying details, Amy, that we uncovered is that after the first bomb had hit near the school that morning, the teachers didn't believe that their school would be bombed because it was a school. And they had gathered the children, many of the children in the schoolyard because their parents had come to pick them up. And when the bombs hit not far away from the school, they said, my God, we need to get everyone back into the school. So they usher the children back into the school. One of the teachers took

some of the girls into a prayer hall inside of the school. And then moments later, direct hit with a Tomahawk cruise missile on the school. So the protected site of the school, the parents and the teachers thought that they would find shelter there. And the United States directly bomb that school while they were inside. Jeremy, I want to go to the voices of the people themselves. This is an excerpt of your drop site news, new investigation massacre at Minab, the school that became a grave, featuring interviews with Yagub Yazdan Pana.

His daughter Fatima died in the strike. But first, this is preschool teacher, Husnia Salem. She survived the bombing. Like any other day, I got my child ready at 7 o'clock because my son is in fifth grade and attended the same school. I got my child ready and headed to school. My son went to the boys' school and I stayed at preschool in my own class. Our school had two floors.

The upper floor was for the girls and the downstairs was for the boys. One section was for preschool. You can say there were three schools there. There were students there from all walks of life. children from working class families, educators. We had all kinds of students there. I have to go back a little and tell you about how I chose this school. Fatima's mother and I had noticed Fatima's overflowing intelligence.

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 very good school that would address Fatima's needs and her active mind. After asking a lot of questions, I found Shajare Tayebe's school. After the lesson started, we handed out books and the children did their activities. I took the children to the schoolyard, the park that was in our schoolyard so the children could play. The time was around 9.30, I think.

When I was informed by a friend that the war had started and they had hit Tehran. In the first moments of the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign, they strike the... personal residence and offices of Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, and they killed, assassinated not only Khomeini, but members of his family. They start then striking other leadership targets of the IRGC, the elite military force of Iran, political offices in Iran, government ministries in Iran. And word starts to spread all across the country.

that this isn't just like a one-off airstrike, that this does seem to, in fact, be a full-scale war. Administrator said there are war conditions, and it's better if the children go home early. We didn't have a single thought or didn't imagine that they may want to hit our school. In complete calm and relaxation, we were calling families and telling them to come and take their children.

As they were coming to get the kids, a number of the children had left, and some were still at the school. I first heard the sound of an explosion. After a missile strike nearby, some teachers ushered children back inside the school for protection. The preschool children were five years old, and all they did was yell, Miss, Miss, and were crying. I ran to them. children. I just said, get under the table. I didn't think they were going to hit the school. I just thought that someplace had been hit. I said, don't be afraid, sit down. I heard this horrible

sound, and it was so close. Two simultaneous sounds. They're still in my ear. My son even describes them. And then explosion. Plaster was falling. The ground was shaking. And at that moment, I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, it's over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble. It's going to fall now. Then there were no more sounds.

The class was full of smoke and dust. I told my son, Yassine, run and open the door. Let's get out. My preschool kids didn't have shoes on since our classroom was carpeted. I took the children in my arms, one by one, and brought them out to. side. We exited from the preschool yard gate until we reached the first street. I looked behind me and I saw smoke and fire coming from the school office. All I said to the preschool children was kids, just look in front of you. Don't look back. I told everyone to run to the

school because they had hit the school. The children are under the ruins. Go save them. That's an excerpt from Dropsite News New Investigation Massacre at Minab, the school that became a grave that was preschool teacher, Hasnia Salam. She survived the bombing. In this clip, we hear more from Yagub Jaspana, who describes how we race to the school to look for his little daughter, Fatima. It was like something was telling my heart that the school they were talking about was Shajare, Taiyebe.

I lost it. I left my classroom, ran home, took my car and spent to Minab. When I arrived, I said, oh no, the unimaginable had happened. As soon as I arrived there, I saw there was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep in having a nightmare. In this excerpt from Dropsite News, new investigation, massacre at Minab, the school that became a grave. We hear two Iranian Red Crescent Society emergency workers describing the utter devastation following the U.S. strike on the Minab School.

Mothers came to me and said, my daughter is in the classroom, my son is in the classroom, in God's name please bring me my son. We didn't know how to answer these families. Each body part that was brought out from the building and taken to the ambulances. The families ran, looking to see who it was. People kept coming and coming to help

to remove children from under the ruins. All of us were there waiting. I, a 32-year-old father, was waiting for them to bring my daughter from under the ruins. Imagine the depth of this catastrophe and how hard it was for us. There was a father with us. who was searching for his two children, until it was four or five o'clock at night, when his fingers no longer worked.

His fingers were covered in blood. He had lost his fingernails. In that same condition, he fell asleep. There was also a father. We had nothing to give him. All that remained was a father. the school bag and shoes. Where we had collected the school bag and shoes, the father sat and was talking to the school

bag and shoes. He was just talking to the school bag and shoes. Nothing from his child has been recovered. Again, those are two Red Crescent workers. An excerpt of Dropside News, new investigation massacre at Monab, the school that became a grave. In March, President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth denied the U.S. responsible was responsible for bombing the school. They spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One.

Did the United States bomb a girls' elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war and kill 175 people? Based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. Was that true, Mr. Hickson? It was Iran who did that. But the only side that targets civilians is Iran. We think it was done by Iran. That was Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth and President Trump. In July, President Trump told a different story appearing on Fox News, talking about the airstrike.

There are images from this site that show fragments that appear to be from U.S. Tomahawk missiles. Is it possible that old intelligence or a mistake during a very active time in the war led to this event? It is, but it's also possible that those images that you have are AI, generated. I know we're waiting for a conclusive report. I don't think they can be a conclusive report. Oh, really? So that's President Trump talking about the report. Jeremy Scahill. You are the co-founder of Dropsite News. This is incredible investigation massacre at Minab. Can you respond to what Hegg Seth and Trump said and talk about the state of the investigation into this deadly attack

on the schools February 28th that killed over 150 people, as you said, 120 of them children. Amy, I think there's only two possibilities here for what actually happened that day. On the one hand, it's possible that because Pete Hegseth came in with a tone set by Trump himself, that civilian deaths don't matter, that soldiers and military personnel should not worry about killing or injuring civilians, that they eliminated the entire department that is supposed to do civilian harm mitigation, that they used AI, including Maven systems developed by Palantir, to rush to develop as many targets as possible, that they had old satellite photos that indicated that this was a military base and not a school. And that because of that disregard for civilians and civilian life,

they pushed forward and said, we want to break records. They're always talking about records and maximize lethality. And so it was a process where they didn't care and they just started striking everything. On the flip side of it, and, you know, former senior State Department official told me this, knowing what she knows about the entire system and the fact that this was struck in the first hours of the first day of this war that they had been planning, that something very sinister may well be at the core of this. And so, you know, it's important to say, up until the year 2013, this was, this area in Minab was actually a facility that was operated by the IRGC. We obtained documents, and the satellite photos also show this clearly, showing that in 2014, the

school filed for registration. The IRGC donated the land. The province redistricted the whole area. And the IRGC actually moved most of its facilities nearly two miles away. That base, which was a publicly known base, was not hit during these attacks that morning. Instead, it was an area that was a school, a carwash, a clinic, what we would call in America a strip mall. And the only remaining IRGC building in that vicinity was an administrative office of the naval forces of the IRGC, and they had totally vacated that property after the June 2025 war. So what happened that day was there was literally no presence of the IRGC whatsoever there. And in fact, satellite photos from just weeks that the public can see from just weeks

before this strike, you could see the murals on the wall. You could see the soccer field. Some of the satellite photos show shadows of tiny people playing outside. I spoke to West Bryant, who used to be one of the people in charge of civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon up until 2025. His division was the one that Hegseth shut down. And he said that you, under the rules and the doctrine, they should have checked the most readily available satellite imagery before launching any strike of that nature. The other thing is Tomahawk cruise missiles have cameras on them. They can loiter. They can shift direction. So there are

many, many questions that need to be asked about this. This is one of the single gravest war crimes that I'm aware of since Vietnam. It's akin to the Amariah shelter bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 1991 Gulf War, when the U.S. dropped a bomb, a bunker buster bomb, ripped open a hole in a bunker where hundreds of civilians were, and then dropped another 2,000-pound bomb directly incinerating more than 400 people. It rises to the level of gravity of that crime. And it's really just shocking that there isn't more outcry from the American public and the U.S. Congress.

one of the most severe war crimes. And it's not like, you know, the tone under Obama where he says, oh, oops, we tortured some folks or they said, you know, we regret this. Trump's people are defiant about this. And the Democrats, you know, they're not in control of the Congress right now, but this should be front and center of foreign policy questions toward Donald Trump. If the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, they should go after them for this. These are war crimes. Has any investigation been done by the U.S. government made public? No, the United States Central Command is supposedly doing an investigation, but Bradley Cooper, the head of Sentcom, lied in front of Congress and said this was an active IRGC missile base. There's no evidence to suggest that there ever were missiles launched from this site. And this was congressional testimony. It seems like the best case scenario is that they kind of say this was human error, artificial intelligence, and outdated maps because the threat was so serious and we moved forward and oops, this was a mistake. That would be the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario in some ways is that Trump's people and the Pentagon just simply say, oh, no, this is Iranian propaganda. We still think that maybe the IRGC bombed it themselves. That's why it's so important to have actual investigations. The UN sent a commission there, and they've determined that it's a war crime. Just on the basis of the idea that if they used AI, if they use systems where they shut down the civilian harm mitigation and they didn't check to see what was there before they launched the missile, that satisfies the legal barriers to indicate that a war crime, not just a crime

against humanity, was committed. Jeremy, we just have 20 seconds, but the devastating pictures of, I mean, the victims are not only those who've died, but the children that survived that are saying to their parents, I wish I had been one of the martyred to be with my friends, these last 20 seconds, the effect today. You know, one of the drawings from the psychologist, a child just drew a severed hand. And she said, you know, that the kids feel like they did something wrong, that they don't understand why their friends died and they weren't able to save them. Jeremy, we have to leave it there. It is an incredibly devastating report. Jeremy is co-founder

of DropSight News. We'll link to your new investigation in film Masker at Monab, the school that became a grave. A happy. birthday to Lauda Bastille. Early, happy birthday to Becca Staley. Special thanks to our crew here in Publix, the House of Journalism in Berlin, Frederick Gallard, Frank Biedman, and Yasmin, Arnold, and Dennis Moynihan. I'm Amy Goodman. Thank you so much for joining us.