9/30/26: Trump Sham AI Deal, Nvidia Stock Buyback, Flight To Israel Hijacked, Minab School Bombing Horrors

This is an I Heart podcast, guaranteed human, didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Oh, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, ready or not, 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. Our good morning and welcome to Breaking Points. Emily, you'll like this. I was at a Dave Chappelle show here in Washington DC on Friday. It was a fundraiser for his high school. He went to high school here in DC, ran into a Breaking Points fan. He said, hey, I just want to let you know that I went to Breakingpoints.com and signed up for the free trial just to own Saga. I love that. So in real life, actual people are doing it. Saga is in shambles. Saga's has been hit so hard by this news. I met a lovely couple in Maine last week who told me they got, with them got the other premium subscription for Christmas. And that made me think, shout out to them by the way, they were amazing. But that made me think, do we need to run a Ryan Grim Christmas sign up special? So you can make someone happy by owning Saga for Christmas as a beautiful gift. It's kind of a gift to us too, because we love to see that. I met somebody recently also who had said, apologetically, he said, my mom got me a gift subscription. Otherwise I would have gotten it on your day. I'm very sorry about that. You don't have to apologize for that. But if you want a month free of the show, go to Breakingpoints.com. We'll actually put up a tally because it's so funny at this point. It really is, like, hilariously love. Can we put up a tally? We'll get us in. We'll get us in. No. So, Saga is so torn because he loves when the business grows and is doing well. He's a little capitalist, but he doesn't know how to feel about it. He's very torn. I feel like actually now this was your grand plan all along. This was it. And sort of wedge between Saga and his love of capitalism. Exactly. Well, here we are and I promised that I would ramble less if people started signing up for the free trial. I broke that promise. So let's, so flagrant. Let's stop. Let's stop the rambling. And a huge meeting between a bunch of AI juggernauts and the president, sorry, superintelligence, SI, and the president, the White House will break down some of that. There was an attempt by an Emirati pilot to take in a flight bound for Tel Aviv out of the sky that that attempt was foiled by another pilot or was it was an Omani pilot actually who was trying to take the plane down an Emirati pilot and others fought the Omani pilot. We'll get into some of the, some of the details on that. My colleague Jeremy Scayhill from Dropsite has been working for I guess months now on an investigation into the massacre at Minab talking to parents, survivors, first responders, prosecutors, and it's put together the most comprehensive look yet of what that day was like in the city of Minab. We're going to talk to him in a little bit. We're also going to have updates on the midterms Emily out with a new profile of independent candidate Dan Osborne over at unheard. The economy continues to completely collapse. We'll be getting inflation data this morning. Emily spoke to a whole bunch of callers in the Megan, Megan Kelly network who not so happy with their choices. Every day, I get these calls now, they're pissed, they're pissed. They are mad, so we'll hear from some of those folks. Jack Smith, so Emily's got some actual news on what Jack Smith has been up to, which she'll get into, and we'll have a lot of fun at the expense of Eric Schmidt who, oh my God, so Hank Johnson famously at a hearing said that he was worried that Guam was going to tip over. And at the hearing people were like, you mean like tip over population wise, into like some other. Chaos. He's like, no, no, no. I mean, tip over. Like, what if there are too many people in the island tips over? This is worse than that already. This is Eric Schmidt's performance yesterday, puts Hank Johnson to rest. Brutal. It's brutal. You're going to want to stick around with that. This is going to be a very long show where we're going to try not to have to cut that episode. Oh, and my car got to us this morning, so if it's late, it's because I went to get in my car. And the city had moved it for no good reasons. Moved it so Mark Wayne Mullin could get to the. Oh, well that was also. I did get behind a Mark Wayne Mullin security detail and watched him walk out with his dry cleaning at eight in the morning. Mark Wayne Mullin did have someone else do that for you. Yeah, you should be at work by then, buddy. 8 a.m. Be in the office. All right. Ryan was at the office at 8 a.m. That's right. All right. Let's get into the show. Big news on the AI front yesterday because Donald Trump has secured a massive voluntary AI safety agreement. I know it's exactly what you all wanted to see from this meeting with Donald Trump and all of the AI leaders. Basically, everybody except for Sam Altman was there and open AI representative Brockman was there. But let's put the first hair sheet up on the screen. Trump. Top AI leaders agreed to voluntary AI standards. There was a lot of hype about what was going to happen at this meeting. I think Trump himself released the seating chart. He has basically all the major leaders in the room. Look at Brockman's signature, by the way. If you're watching this, you can see on the screen all these different signatures and then Greg Brockman's just, it's impossible to say. He's the main funder of that lead the future. Super PAC, right? The AI. Super PAC. Yeah. That guy's signature right there. My uncle does handwriting analysis. I'll ask him to look at that one. I don't even know if you need an expert to tell you that is not the kind of guy you want to rule in the world. No, that tells you everything that you need to know, the signature itself. But basically, the contours of this, it, as Axios reports, quote, puts AI companies at the center of policing their own technology as pressure grows for software safeguards. And basically, yes, it's Zuckerberg told people, some of the steps are going to involve internal risk reviews, outside audits, board oversight, quote, Zuckerberg said the leaders drafted a list of principles that include reviewing internal controls and detecting issues with the technology, which could include multiple layers of auditing controls. So you have all the major companies agreeing to this better than nothing, I suppose, Ryan, but not nearly as good as actually prosecuting some of these people for the dangers their products have been already doing and putting in place. I mean, there are, I think Stolar makes a great argument. There already are laws of books that you can prosecute people for. But if you're gathering all the AI leaders in the room, I think what most people would like to see is, well, here's the laws that you may have violated and that we may be investigating you for and that you should not break going forward because we're going to enforce them. And so, act accordingly. Yes. A late friend of mine here in shorts was prosecuted for, he had legal access to MIT through his MIT fellowship to JSTOR's database of kind of academic papers. He downloaded them, or he downloaded many thousands of them. That's all he did. They tried to put him in prison for 60 years. He ended his life amid the prosecution as they were resistant to any type of plea deal. They were trying to put him like in prison for like decades. His AI companies have done far worse when it comes to hacking through paywalls to extract the exact same type of thing that he was downloading, that he had legal access to. They don't have legal access to it. They're downloading it. Yes. Then they're repackaging it and they're selling it to people. It's at least-- He wasn't even trying to make any money on it. Right. It's at least dubious that they have legal access to it. They just decided to plow through. He had full legal access to it. Right. Right. We have all the text messages of them and their Slack messages saying, "Oh, we managed to get through the paywall and we're extracting everything." He's like, "Sick. Awesome, dude. Great job." We're hacking them. Great. Anyway, so yes, prosecute a few of these guys. I think the guys that replaced them would have a bit more concern about safety. Trump obviously not prosecuting anybody powerful. He's certainly not going there. He doesn't think there's anything remotely dangerous about this. It's kind of amazing to have him in there. But at the same time, he said one of them swaged his concerns about possible safety issues. It's the same thing with all of them. It's like they all know that there are concerns about possible safety issues. They're telling it to us constantly and yet they think the solution here is internal review and you had the FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson standing out there with them yesterday grinning alongside the people he's supposed to regulate. That's lovely. We have some audio from Trump who went to the White House driveway outside of the West wing and he acted up with the CEOs and reporters. So let's go ahead and take a listen to this next stop. Mr. President, tell us why the world should not be concerned about AI, why this shouldn't be guardrails. Because we have people that love. our country and love the world. - But it requires more than love, doesn't it? - No, it requires this. And the smartest people in the world. And we had a great meeting today. Every one of them, we had a great, really a great, great meeting. It was something very, very special. We had the top. I'd say it looked like a group of about 40, but whatever it was, here's one of them right here, Jensen, and the video. And they love our country and they love the world. And they came together and they did something that few people really, it's almost like a constitution in a way. - Sorry, who should have been held accountable when the AI agents committed a crime like that? - It's not AI, it's essay. That's the other thing. We've changed the name officially today. We've changed the name Steve officially to Si, okay? Si, like Si, Si instead of AI. You know what that means? Super intelligence, don't we? - Well, it's really, really, really, really, really. - So the name, I guess that's really, quite an announcement, because, but the name has been officially changed by the biggest, the smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world at this. And I was with President Xi a few days ago, and he would admit, he said, these are the smartest people in the world at what they do. And it's a big, it's a big thing, but it's been officially changed to super intelligence or SI. - Oh great. Brian, any reaction to that or should we go straight to Dario? - Well, I suppose it's all relative intelligence. So, yeah, let's go with A3. - But even in America, there are so many people that want data centers. You know, the areas with data centers that become very rich, people have become very rich. The taxes have gone down, not up, and a lot of good things have happened. But these people and others, having to do with the data centers that you've been reading so much about, I think they're gonna do things for the community that will be really financially beneficial, and otherwise beneficial, amazing. - Mr. President, on commonality. - I believe with everybody that you're meeting with today, that no guardrails, no regulation of AI, super intelligence, as you call it, is necessary. - Well, there's a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that. But the self-regulation is very important. - Yeah, everybody feeling at ease? - That's him at the meeting, actually. - Right, that was him at the meeting. Dario, his reaction outside, his kind of inability to kind of control himself or appear normal for any considerable stretch of time, I think also had people concerned. But here's Dario Amade of Clawd fame, talking about how he can work with Trump, let's go to A4. - Look, I mean, I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefits of the technology. As the President has said, whoever wins AI wins, I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks. And the mechanism how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we do this right, we work with the President everyone here, we can win safely. - And Elon Musk talked about a few of the things that they agreed to, let's roll A5 to see Elon. - Running up on time, but maybe if you guys could share, you spent a lot of time at the White House, is there anything that you can share with the world about what came out of what was evidently a long and productive lunch? - We did good. - Yeah, we signed a joint declaration regarding SI safety. And I think that'll be published by the White House soon. It hasn't been already, but we agreed to a number of things that include joint monitoring or special committees and just generally grading each other's homework, which is a lot better than if people just grade their own homework for obvious reasons. - Elon, how do we win? How do we keep winning? - Well, we need a lot of power, a lot of energy generation. So, scaling energy, I think, is one of the biggest things. You've got to scale energy, you've got to scale chip production. And I think we're winning on software, on anything intellectual or digital. But in the long run, we need to be able to generate enough power to compete with, I think, essentially China is the biggest competitor. And China has about three times the electricity production of the United States. And I think we'll figure out how to make shifts. So, really, the central challenge, I think, is long, long term is going to be how do you generate enough power and how do you ensure that we have enough logic and memory fabrication capacity in the United States or in a safe region? - Well, we need the right brothers on a job. - Yes, look, turns out the right brothers are on the job. - And he's right, in the sense that the China now produces, when it comes to just solar energy, roughly a third of what it would take to run the entire US electrical grid. And they are adding huge amounts, you know, every month to their grid through clean energy solar or other renewables. The Trump administration came in and blew up the IRA, which was the most aggressive attempt to expand energy production since, you know, in many decades. And yes, now the SI barons, sports illustrated barons, are upset that they don't have enough energy after kneecapping the energy production policy that was put into place, shame for them. - Also, when Elon says it's better than them grating their own homework, I mean, technically based on what they released yesterday, they're still grating their own homework. They're supposed to hire outside auditors and that sort of thing, but there's not a government safeguard built into this to make sure that they're not manipulating the outside auditor in one way or the other. And that's a stretch, of course, because it's supposed to be an external auditor, but it's not what most people want to see, which is government legal oversight of whether or not this is all compliant. - Yeah, and maybe we'll talk about this more tomorrow, but as our client had an interesting interview with Bill Gates, who was making the point that you're kind of looking in the wrong place, like yes, the risk that robots kill us all is a problem. The risk that a person with access to these tools causes immense damage. It kills millions of people or brings down the financial system is a present-day risk that needs to be thought about right now. Sam Altman, though, who at times made some pretty dire warnings about what his technology might do to humanity is sounding a slightly different tune. Let's roll A7. - There's plenty of things I was wrong about too. Like, I try to leave the wrong predictions up, obviously. But I think the important point is like, you get some things right, some things wrong. I think we'll be very right about some things. I think we'll be very right that intelligence continues. I think we'll be very right about the rate of scientific discovery. I think we'll be very right about how people kind of are going to have the same things that they care about in drives in their lives 10 years from now they have from today. And even with this like amazing intelligence, a lot of parts of life are going to stay the same. But then a lot of the details and kind of what order science goes in or whether it's, you know, haircuts or hugging face or obvious docks first, I'm sure we'll be wrong about that. - I'm sure exactly what to make of that. This comes as the New York Times is reporting. We can put up this next element that a bunch of open AI employees were warning that the company wasn't doing enough to respond to the risks that its own product was producing, that its agents were busting out all going all over the world and hacking into everything from Australia to hugging face and in between. And their warnings were ignored. - Right. And it's just, there are ways to pursue investigations to whether or not that's illegal. Whether or not what's happened from open AI is illegal because we keep getting information about these sandbox breakouts that actually do are like hacking websites and potentially stealing information. And because they're like, well, we're sorry. We're trying to figure out what went wrong. And it's maybe because it's digital, we just all shrug. I mean, the public isn't. And I think that's clearly the danger for Trump here so much so that you see some Republicans run to Santa's and Republicans in Florida, for example, trying to carve out a different path because they recognize the raw public anger over all of this. But Trump is just going with the bear hug. - Yeah, he's in for a diamond, for dollar, whatever the phrase is. Yeah, he's not turning around on this, that's for sure. - Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? - Here's what you missed. - And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. - Those are the very people who I always say voted against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. - It's raw. - I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. - Roland Martin unfiltered. - I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. - Y'all go scream at Chanel, but he's dead. You don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. >> Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. >> 12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. You better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now. >> And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcast. >> Wherever you get your podcasts. >> Meanwhile, Nvidia is just cashing out. They're like, all right, let's get out of this. Because you know, we put up a nine here. The biggest corporate stock buyback in history was confirmed by Nvidia's board. $150 billion that they're taking of money. That is, of uncertain origin, I think it would be fair to say. In other words, the money that Nvidia has in its kind of cash pile that it is using for this dock buyback, which is now over $200 billion total. Comes from these really exotic, you could call them, arrangements that they have with these other AI companies that are exchanging stakes in their companies in order and using kind of future projected revenue to produce higher valuations than they take those higher valuations and then do kind of stock or share transfers over to Nvidia and say, okay, now we're covered. >> Because they need each other. >> It's very, yes, it's very, very circular thing. And then both their stocks pop on the announcement of the deal. And you notice that in that transaction, nobody bought or sold anything, just moved things around, did some financial engineering. And then, no, obviously they do sell a lot of things as well, but instead of letting the kind of market guide their stock price, they're juicing it by buying $150 billion worth of it. So if you owned Nvidia stock, you just got sent $150 billion. And we're going to get into some of what makes that extra ridiculous, but Ryan, let's just pause on this point. Is it your sense? So Jensen Long said, this is from yesterday, we all need hope, it's an engineering problem, if it's not an engineering problem, it's not solvable in reference, well, why don't we just roll the clip? This is eight times. >> The problems that we've seen to this point, where open AI and theropic Google and others have had agents that have escaped and have gotten out and done mischievous things, maybe illegal things. The problems we've seen to this point, you think is simply an engineering problem and a fault of those companies, maybe not putting in the right restrictions. >> Well, I think the answer is, we hope it's an engineering problem. I believe it's an engineering problem, I know it's an engineering problem, and we all need to hope that it's an engineering problem, it's not an engineering problem, it's not solvable. And so the fact that all of these companies still are advancing the state of the art is because they also believe it's solvable. These are some of the brightest engineers in the world, I work with all of them, and this is a technically solvable problem. And so the way to think about that is, if you look at, go back to the days of the internet, you access a website, it downloads application, maybe it's Java application, all of the sudden, this application comes into your PC, has access to files and resources, and maybe the applications and tools, and it gets onto your network. Well, in the beginning, we had all kinds of viruses, but we realized that the web browser itself has to be a containment system. The web browser has to provide that application with minimal rights, whatever, only the rights it needs in order to do its job. And it has access to, basically, access to nothing unless the browser gives it access. Essentially, what we're doing here, we're creating basically the modern browser, it's a browser for agents. Okay, so Ryan, what's interesting about that is combined with this buyback news. I'm curious if you're reading into this potential bubble pop warnings. I mean, yeah, everybody understands that this is a bubble, nobody knows when it's going to pop, and nobody knows exactly what will be left behind when it does pop. This is, you know, you can look at history, whether it's, you know, railroad or radio or whatever, dot com, dot com, but nothing but this is different in both size and scale, but also in type and kind. It's a different kind of reinvention of what our economy is. It's the way that Bill Gates was talking about it, he didn't mean exactly like this, but he was talking about it as if it is the culminating battle between capital and labor. And that people and actually it turns out our labor, it's interesting, you like read into how he was described that way too, sort of a dialectic, except the, the AI is planned to break the dialectic by a final triumph of capital over labor and labor turns out to be everybody, including the oligarchs, which would be, nobody saw that one coming. So shocking, well, the, it's also worth mentioning here, we can put this next tattooed H12 up on the screen. Well, Nvidia is doing buybacks, just remember that this is a May 1st headline in the Dallas Morning news. In video, the world's largest company gets at least $23 million in incentives from Irving. That's hardly the only community that's given Nvidia incentives in recent years. And in fact, the federal government gave incentives to companies like Nvidia and the one big beautiful bill. We can put the next tear sheet up on the screen. They avoided $6.8 billion in federal income taxes last year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, using quote, what is the, that's such a great word, quote, pretty pedestrian tax strategy. So that's $4.2 billion for the foreign derived deduction, eligible income deduction, $1.9 billion in unspecified tax credits, $1.4 billion from executive stock options, and $800 million from the new R&D Expensing Provision that was created by Congress last summer. Nvidia obviously did not need $800 million from the new R&D Expensing Provision created by Congress last summer, but hey, they've got enough to do the buybacks now, right? But it's, the scale is wild, it's like what they owed to the government, they ended up paying $19 billion, what they give their shareholders $150 billion. And you can just, just in that right there, you can see this, this yawning gap between private wealth of the top 0.1% and the public's, you know, growing, you know, the public's continuing collapse, basically. Right. And even that, even if they paid with the owed, it's not a good drop in the bucket compared to what they're giving out to shareholders. Yeah, that's a really good point, it's all, the scale of their wealth is just, I can't think of any precedent, can you, human history for this scale? It's, yeah, we're in a, we're in a new territory. Right. All right, Ryan. Well, let's move to the Middle East. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast, here's what you missed and the argument is, do you want to win if you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say voted against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same back. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network, 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now. There was an attempted hijacking of a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv put this New York Times element up on the screen. An Omani pilot is alleged to have attacked his co-pilot, the Emirati pilot. Democrats are only now surfacing of the altercation that ensued the Omani pilot allegedly stabbed the Emirati pilot in an attempt to take over the plane and presumably crash it. Reports are that passengers on the plane and crew basically rushed into the cockpit and tried to, in an attempt to restrain the Omani pilot and effectively regain control of the plane despite it descending some 18,000 feet. We can put up this V.O. here, well, okay, this is an image of the pilot who was the victim, the Emirati pilot who was the victim of the stabbing. The Omani pilot, the Israelis are now registering a complaint that the Omani pilot should not have been on board the plane because Israel as part of the kind of Abraham Accords and the deal that they have with the UAE says that only pilots with permission to fly into Israel It should be allowed to pilot these planes, and Oman does not have such permission as what they're saying, so this would be a violation of the deal to begin with. I mean, put up the next element. This is footage that's circulating now of the passengers dealing with this 18,000-foot plunge as there's a struggle going on in the cockpit for control of the plane before it crashes. It sent out two separate squawks, signals one of them, one of them, an alert of a hijacking, and it ended up landing then in an emergency fashion in Saudi Arabia. Orifying situation. There was a report of another flight being diverted, we don't have any details on that or whether that's even real or a rumor, after incidents like this, you get an absolute kind of flurry of rumors and kind of false information that isn't necessarily put out with the intent of misleading people, but it's just the kind of fog of war that sets in. So, this averted what would have been the death of everybody on board and presumably were mostly Israeli passengers, and so the assumption is that this was a hijacking aim that targeting kind of the Israelis who were flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv. And I mean, this is coming at like the video of this, is just that people just saw on the screen, it's just absolutely horrifying to imagine that your plane, but it's coming. I guess I'm curious what the geopolitical significance of what Israel possibly does after this. Well, there's an election in Israel on October 27th, and you've actually already seen some supporters of Netanyahu capitalizing on this, they even made this bizarre AI video of Netanyahu being the pilot who saves the day, and Netanyahu's opposition figures trying to hijack the plane, so trying to create this metaphor that only producing this metaphor that Netanyahu is the only one that can pilot Israel to safety, and that everyone else is effectively in league with terrorists, like that's kind of Netanyahu's argument in Netanyahu and his coalition's argument. And so I think maybe they'll move on now from attacking this documentary, Naza, which has been Netanyahu's election tactic of the past several weeks to say that he's going to strip the citizenship of these documentary filmmakers who had interviewed 24 IDF soldiers confessing to serious war crimes and laying out the way that they were using AI to produce targets and disregarding or just accepting extraordinary numbers of civilian casualties per strike, up to 500 in one strike, Netanyahu was making his campaign all about, "I'm the guy that's going to go after them," that was it with the backdrop of all of these leaks about what Netanyahu knew about October 7th, and how many different people had warned him, Egyptian intelligence, Muhammad bin Zayed of the UAE, all of the other warnings, with his opponents trying to relitigate his abject failure on October 7th to keep Israel safe, which is what he wants to run on, so now with his supporters putting him in the position of the pilot who saves the day here, you'll probably see that this reflected in Israeli politics and you're already, as you said, you're already seeing criticism of the Emirates for allowing the Omani pilot on the plane at all, and so we'll see how, you know, what geopolitically, you know, how this unfolds. Yeah, and let's get to this next tear sheet about Iranian currency, so speaking of things that Netanyahu is probably clinging to, Iran's currency has hit another record low with traders in Tehran, so according to NewsNation, now exchanging $2.5 million for one US dollar. For comparison, NewsNation says five years ago, it took about $42,000 for one dollar, meaning it takes about 600 times the Iranian currency to have the same value today. You can bet that's getting straight onto Donald Trump's desk at the White House and Netanyahu who is assuring him victory is just around the corner, meanwhile, the financial times is reporting that mediators are trying to break a deadlock, but, Ryan, when Trump's getting information like this, that I'm sure is being pushed hard on him, how likely is it for any deadlock to be broken as mediators this week, meet and try to do something or anything on that front? Yeah, it doesn't seem like Trump is capable of reaching an agreement to end this war. And at the same, he's also getting told at the same time that oil flows through the straight of Hormuz are approaching pre-war levels, not there yet, but getting closer than people thought was that critics of the US thought was possible, that the US has been able to actually usher through significant amounts. So they're seeing those two things. The problem is that those two things don't necessarily line up with a strategy to win the war. First, take the currency collapse, what does that do to the Iranian consumer? It forces them to consume less. In other words, it brings about rationing every government that is in a war of attrition and certainly a war for survival. When they're facing a blockade, throughout history has always rationed supplies, food, energy to their civilian population, but it's a central war strategy. People don't like it, but people understand it when the situation is existential. What helps Iran here is they get to ration to their civilian population and they get to blame the enemy for doing it because it literally is the enemy that is doing it. So you can take that one off the board as a data point that is getting the United States and Israel closer to quote-unquote winning because there's no government, we're tired of rationing. I think we're just going to surrender. No, you ration so you can outlast your adversary. The second one, yes, there is oil getting through. The prices are still in the $100 range and we'll talk about this in the economy block later. FT was reporting this morning that there is now a very tight correlation just as there was during the Gulf War back in 1991 with a clamping down of oil supply with interest rates. The speaker of the parliament had laid this out in his own strategic formula many weeks ago where he was basically doing when he was finance pro-posts and one of the arguments was the price of WTI crude is correlated to interest rates because as energy prices go up that feeds into the economy as inflation, bond investors then expect the Federal Reserve to raise rates and so they preemptively drive up the cost of debt and interest rates. So the yield rise and the bond prices crash and so the idea here is that Iran isn't able to stop all the oil flow that's true but they're keeping oil prices very high which is keeping the cost of borrowing very high and the cost of living extremely high for the West but it's allowing China to continue to function. Like China is the one that could really pull the leash on Iran here and if they completely did cut down the flow of oil through the strait of our moves that could actually backfire on them because then China would say all right enough of this time to capitulate. So the success points to me are not connected to a strategy to actually win and nobody has explained why getting oil 18 million barrels a day let's say through the strait of our moves and harming the Iranian economy is going to lead to the Iranian government surrendering. Nobody has explained that the A to B there because it's not there. And maybe weakening the dollar in the meantime. And just smashing the American economy to the point where you end up with 54 or 5 Democratic senators. So that plus apparently Iran will unconfirmed reports Iran just struck an LNG tanker would be the first LNG tanker that they've hit in a very long time Iran still maintains agency to upend the status quo. That's the third thing that people aren't really considering. And, Ryan, what you added here to this rundown, the Senate coalition, like looking for answers in the West Bank. Tell us about what's going on with B4 here. Yes, so last night in the Senate, there was a watershed vote. You can put up B4. ahead of the vote, there was this coalition of anti-war groups who urged a yes vote on a measure by Chris Van Hollen that would basically require the State Department to launch an investigation into settler violence in the West Bank, and upon completion of that 30-day investigation, stop weapons transfers to Israel connected to that. So it's complicated. It's a privileged resolution that anybody can bring it to the floor. In the past, when these have come to the floor, either this coalition has found nobody willing to bring one of these to the floor, or when they did, Bernie Sanders brought one to the floor in 2024. My recollection, people can fact check this, is it got 11 votes. So this one can put up B5, got 46 Democrats, and one Republican ran Paul. John Fetterman, of course, voted with Israel on the rest of the Republicans, but so 40 at seven senators voted effectively against Israel on this question of West Bank settler violence. A pack I'm told by Hill sources was whipping this vote quite hard. They must have been because I don't expect more than like five or ten Republicans to vote with Rand Paul, but when it's only Rand Paul, you know the pressure was hard, because what we've heard from Republican senators about their concerns is that every once in a while it percolates. Very, very good point from Emily there that if Republicans are allowed to just vote whichever way they think is politically beneficial to them, you're gonna get a handful of them who are like, look, this is killing me. Well, there's been a drum beat in places, like in serious corners of conservative media that are significantly like Tucker Carlson show about violations of Christians, human rights in the West Bank, which is obviously something that Republican senators have been hearing about and would because their constituents are telling them about it have some political concern at the very least. And so I think the fact that it's just Rand tells that there was a real pressure campaign. Yeah, and to even get for Democrats even to get Senator Rosen from the Vados, very strong supporter of Israel, it means that once the new Senate class comes in, let's say if Troy Jackson wins, Elside, Peggy Flanagan and Minnesota, right there, you're at 50. And that's before you've potentially got another, you know, other wins across the U.S. So what is left for APAC and for Israel, well, to try to sever the link between voters and policy. And one way to do that is to merge the militaries of the United States and Israel. They're trying to do that now through the NDAA, which is getting debated in the Senate as we speak. There is Israeli commentators are being much more public about how important it is to them to merge the two militaries because they see the backlash coming and they want to preempt the ability of voters to do anything about it. So let's roll B6 and then do what's at B7. Even if we, God forbid, have a more hostile administration after Trump's administration, it will still need to report to Congress how it's advancing the mandate that Congress gave the Department of Defense. So even if we have a hostile president, at the end of the day, this is congressionally controlled and it's actually passed into law. So the Department of Defense has to move forward with this type of cooperation. Exactly. Section 224 was part of the NDAA for 2027. So it's part of the mandate and it's attached to the funding that Congress gives to the Department of Defense. It's exactly that. It's a Congress and Congress mandate and it's going to be overseen by Congress and it's not linked in any way to the White House. Now, the challenge that is going to be for both the Trump administration and the Israeli government is to try and push forward as much project as you can up to the end of 2028 so that any new administration will first inherit those activities and if it tries to slow them down, Congress is going to know about it. And secondly, you want to already insert Israel technology into future projects so that any more hostile administration will need to explain to the American public why is it threatening or hurting American technological supremacy just to hurt Israel. So that was the IDF spokesperson, Doron Speelman. We also have Mark Dubuets, who is with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is a leading pro-Israel think tank here, probably the leading pro-Israel think tank here in the United States. Let's roll Dubuets. This same financial system that the U.S. has, it gives us enormous leverage against our adversaries like Iran, Russia, China, and certainly non-state terrorist organizations is now going to give theoretically a future American administration enormous leverage against our ally Israel. And I think that's the lesson I want Israelis to understand. So this is not an argument for Israelis to decouple from America and it's exactly the opposite. It's what you said earlier. I mean, you got to make the relationship deeper, integrate our defense industries, integrate technology intelligence, finance, research, supply chains. You got to make Israel so valuable that American strategic interests that weaponizing that financial relationship against Israel is going to impose costs on the United States itself. So that is an American analyst saying that the best thing to happen would be for a foreign country to impose costs on his country. Yeah. I mean, that's unpatriotic. That's unpatriotic because it assumes that the interest of the United States and Israel will always be like this is if we take his most charitable case, then it assumes either way, even at its most charitable. It is predicated on an assumption that the interest of the United States and Israel will always be harmonious, that there will never be significant tensions in the interests of the United States and Israel. You have to buy into that presumption in order for that to not be anything but unpatriotic. And that's just obviously a lot of assumption. I mean, I think you could even get some of the staunchest defenders of Israel to admit that's not always the case. Yep. I think so. Well, as we learn more about the hijacking, we'll keep you updated. I'm sure we'll have more tomorrow on that as well. Yeah. Much to discuss, certainly. Let's Ryan move on to our next block. Spring, Jeremy. Didn't catch the latest role in the Martin Unfiltered podcast. And the argument is, do you want to win? It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests. And they complained about the very thing to receive. It's wrong. I went off. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. Twelve seats. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 23. You better be hitting the ground going to heart in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts. So on the morning of February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran in the middle of nuclear talks that were planned to move towards a technical phase just days away infamously. The strikes included an attack on a school building in the southern town of Minab. Those attacks killed at least 156 people. 120 of the victims were children and 26 were teachers. It is arguably the worst US war crime committed by the United States since Vietnam. My drop site colleague, Jeremy Scayhol, spent the last several months. In fact, speaking with survivors, teachers, first responders, and put his drop site article up on the screen here. And I can't recommend this piece enough. You can find it over at our site. It's a very hard read. But it's important to remind ourselves, I think, of the human cost of our aggression, which in all the talk about the chess games and the economy and the oil flows through the straight of or moves. It can get lost, but it's very real and it is by far the most important element. I want to start, actually, by putting up before we go to you, Jeremy, put up this first element up on the screen, you write, this is Yagub Yastapanana on his six-year-old daughter, Fatima. Fatima's mother and I had noticed Fatima's overflowing intelligence. He told Jeremy, "I'm a poet myself, and I would write poetry, edit poetry. I would repeat the poem." After hearing the poem once or twice, Fatima would immediately memorize it. 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 school that would address Fatima's needs and her active mind. I visited several schools myself. Certainly, you would do the same thing. Any parent would take their child to a good school for a brighter future. I thank God, he recalled thinking, "I found Shajara Tajeva school." That morning, Yagub kissed Fatima goodbye before walking to the local school in Gazon where he taught. So, Jeremy, can you talk to us a little bit about what you found as you spoke to people who were either the victims or survivors of this strike? I have to say, for more than 25 years, I've been a reporter and a lot of the work that I've done has been in war zones, and I reported on U.S. massacres in torture in Iraq on President Obama's expansion of drone strikes, including drone strikes that killed large groups of civilians, including children. I'm no stranger to reporting on U.S. war crimes or the killing of children, but I don't think that in my entire life as a journalist, I've ever reported on a more heinous crime than this. The people who agreed to tell their stories, doctors, parents, teachers, 26 teachers were killed in those airstrikes. All of them were women. One of the teachers was six months pregnant. It's a shock to the heart. I still can't get over the depth of the horrors that people experienced that day, and I think about it in the context of when there's school shootings in America, some of the best journalism ends up happening where they tell the stories of the kids who've been killed and the dreams that they had and the wishes for the future that they had, and you hear about their lives and how they excelled in sports or what they wanted to do in life and we come in direct contact with the humanity of the lives that have been stolen, have been taken. And it's our bombs that are dropped on children across the world. We know almost nothing about who was killed in these strikes, and so part of what we set out to do was to approach this story and say, "Let's hear what happened that day through the lens and perspective of the people who survived it and those who lost their loved ones that day." And we have to remember that on the morning of February 28th, when Iranians woke up, the last thing they had heard the night before was the Omani Foreign Minister had been meeting with Vice President J.D. Vance in Washington and came out and said, "I think we're on the verge of a deal." And there were talks scheduled for a few days down the road in Vienna, Austria to have technical talks about the nuclear negotiations. Our sources in Tehran from the Iranian government were saying to us, "All the indications we're receiving from the mediators is that we're going to have this technical round of talks in Vienna and we'll see what happens there." And so Iranians wake up, they're going to school, they're going to work, this was a Saturday, but it's the equivalent of our Monday morning. Saturday is the beginning of the work in school week. So people all across the country and Iran got up, they knew that war was possible, but they didn't believe that it was going to happen like that morning. People are stuck in traffic jams, they're rushing to get their kids out the door. It also was Ramadan. Most adults and basically any children who were third grade and up were fasting during this period. So it's already a kind of trying stressful period for people on some level. And then air strikes start happening in Tehran and other cities. And the first target that was hit that day, we now know, was the residents of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Kamehni. It killed Kamehni and several members of his family. So the news coverage that morning, a lot of it was on this speculation that Kamehni had actually been assassinated. There were now emerging reports that various IRGC military sites had been hit. And meanwhile in the southern city of Minab, which is just north of Oman in the Strait of Hormuz, Marco Polo wrote about Minab in his diaries and had gone through there. It's a very strategically important place. It's also an agricultural heartland, the home of the mango industry in Iran, big fishing industry from both the Minab river and the Persian Gulf. People had also said their kids to school that morning. And then word spreads like the war has started. And so at this school in Minab, the teachers start getting directives from the principal that the provincial authorities have said, you got to call all the parents and tell them to come pick up their kids because another war is starting and you got to bring them home and there's going to be a shelter in place order. And so one of the teachers at the school, Ms. Salam, told me and her son, by the way, was a fifth grader at this same school. There was a girl school, a boy school, and a preschool, and she was a preschool teacher there. She said, we didn't think we weren't an panic. We started calling parents. We said, okay, the war has actually started. You got to come and pick up your kids. So parents start to arrive at the school that morning. And then as they're kind of getting the backpacks on the kids and parents are pulling up to the front gate, they hear a massive explosion nearby. Now this strike didn't hit the school, but it was close to the school. So people are like, oh my god, what's happening? So the first instinct of the teachers was, we need to get everybody back into the school. And what they were thinking was, they'll never hit a school. So they bring the kids back into the school. And while they do that, some children gathered in a prayer hall with one of the teachers. Ms. Salam, the teacher I talked to, ran back up to her classroom because some of the kids whose parents hadn't arrived yet were just waiting there in the classroom with their backpacks on. And she goes in and she's, the kids are saying, Ms, Ms, what's happening? And she says, oh, everything is going to be fine. In that moment, she hears a sound that she said just she, she would never be able to replicate it. It was just like a whoosh boom. And she said, and all of a sudden, everything shook. The windows blasted out, smoke starts to appear. And then immediately another massive bang. And she said she realized that we've been bomb, that the school has been hit. And she thinks she's she's dying in a moment. She thinks everything is going to collapse around her. And then she says there was just silence for a moment. And she looks around and she sees the children. And she just starts running to get them outside and when she gets outside, she steps into the apocalypse as she describes it. Children shrieking, bloodied faces, limbs on the ground, panic everywhere. And she turns around and she sees that the entire school is in flames and smoke and she's saying to the kids, don't turn around, don't turn around and she runs them out to the gate. And meanwhile, firemen had started to come in and she recalls yelling to the firemen, there's children trapped under the rubble you have to go in there. And so what had happened is that the US directly hit the school with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles. We obtained a high definition or high resolution photos showing that the parts for the missiles were manufactured by the Raytheon Corporation, the leading manufacturer of Tomahawk cruise missiles. And so remember, parents had been coming also to pick up their children. So among the 156 people that died in these strikes were 120 children from both the girls, the boys school and the preschool, 26 teachers and then parents who had left work to come and get their children and bring them out. And so what then unfolded over the course of the next few hours was that roughly a thousand people descended on the school, firemen, red crescent, but also ordinary people, parents, and they were all digging. And you know, some of the first responders described to us how when they first arrived they were wearing gloves and masks and when they realized that it was children, that they were trying to recover, they dispensed with the gloves and masks and they were digging. And one of the first responders said that at the end of that first day, he realized that he had the flesh of the children and the teachers stuck to his shirt, that he had brain matter under his fingernails from digging and he said he couldn't get it out and eventually that night he had to just obsessively cut his fingernails because he couldn't shake the fact that he had probably a child's brain matter under his fingernails. And you know, you showed the image of Jaguub and his daughter Fatima and you know, they had to get their daughter into this school and you know he also arrived on on that scene and he said that you know at the end of that first day you just knew you knew no one else was was coming out and and he and his other family members split up and he went to the hospital and some of his family members stayed at the recovery scene and then late that night like 10 30 and ambulance came and he said he just knew in his heart that Fatima was going to be in it and it turned out that his you know six-year-old daughter had died with her cousin who also went to the school and they were in the arms of a teacher that had shielded them from the bombing and the reason the first responders knew that you know these girls had their backpacks with them they their bodies were completely intact and the teacher had suffered massive wounds all over her body and so the first responders determined that and and what I'll say is that when when the you know there's a whole narrative about what where where was this school was it on a military base etc and I'm going to get to that but I I just want to say this before we get into those details you know every single person that we spoke to whether it was the director of the hospital or it was the fireman or it was the red crescent first responders or it was the parents any American that would hear this story any American especially that has a child your heart can't help but bleed for what they've gone through and every single person we talked to as we started to finish our interview they all made a point of saying we know that there's many people in America whose empath who have empathized with us or sympathized with us and you know and they also were aware that we were speaking at a time when Americans were getting their kids ready for school and they were saying how can we send our children to school how can we go school shopping for them this impacted pierce the heart of Iranian society across the political cultural ethnic spectrum and the response of the United States to this was so indescribably callous you know the the very first things that were said you know sent com released the boilerplate thing we understand there are reports of civilian casualties we we always we always investigated but the first narrative that really was put out by the president of the United States was Iran did this he went so far as to lie and say Iran also has cruise missiles they're generic only five countries in the world have cruise missiles this is a highly sensitive American technology um he said oh Iran's missiles are inaccurate oh the IRGC must have done it and then the dominant narrative which is the one that is sort of at the center of what the emerging Pentagon story is about this is that the school was actually embedded on a military base and and and in fact the the head of u.s. central command general Brad Cooper told Congress that it was on an active IRGC missile base now we investigated this quite thoroughly and the story is this that up until 2014 there was an IRGC Navy barracks that was on this swath of land where this school now is in 2014 uh the IRGC essentially donated the land to the province and they began a redevelopment and redistricting of that land and the IRGC vacated most of that land they maintained one administrative office for the IRGC Navy but they moved about two kilometers away from the site of this school and by the way the place that they moved to I learned this morning um wasn't even hit an active open publicly identified IRGC facility that was roughly a mile and a half away wasn't even hit that morning and so we got the permits showing from the Iranian officials showing when the school was registered a boy school a girl school under this banner and so what what happened there is that this land was redistributed they built a huge walled compound that the school was in there was only one entry and exit it had no connection whatsoever to this remaining IRGC administrative office there was a medical clinic nearby that used to be on the property of the IRGC that was a public health clinic it did have an insurance contract to provide health care to military families but it was not an official IRGC health clinic there was a co-op store that was run by essentially like a teacher syndicate for low-cost supplies and other eight financial assistance to educators there was a car wash and then what we would call an America strip mall um and so you know the school was hit and what what we understand now from the emerging details on this so-called investigation is that what the Pentagon essentially is heading toward is saying oops we had outdated satellite photos we didn't realize that it still wasn't this sprawling IRGC base we didn't know that this was a school that was there and you know the maven system of volunteer failed to pick it up artificial intelligence you know et cetera but the you know military veterans that I spoke to worked at high levels at the Pentagon on targeting said that regardless of if that's true that AI missed this that they were relying on outdated satellite maps none of it should have happened because if you're going to select targets like this there are mandated processes that you have to go through to validate the most current intelligence you have on a site before you launch it and so um what what what essentially is happening right now I think is a kind of cover-up within a cover-up that were were witnessing from the you know from the Pentagon many Iranians believe this was a deliberate strike I talked to a former senior State Department official who also says she can't who served under Trump under Bush under Biden she said she can't make peace with the idea that this was just some error knowing what she knows about how carefully you're supposed to vet these targets and the last thing I'll say on this is we have to remember this did with this wasn't like the school got indirectly hit when they hit something else this was a direct strike multiple direct strikes on this school and it was in the opening hours of the war meaning this was a tier one target that they had selected to be hit really really early on so at the end of the day what we have is a direct strike with multiple at minimum of two Tomahawk cruise missiles killing 120 children killing 26 teachers including one who was pregnant the United States trying to put out a nonsense story that it was Iran that bombed the school themselves denying that it was American cruise missiles saying the Iranians also have Tomahawk cruise missiles that was false we now have clear evidence that these were Raytheon manufactured US cruise missiles and and if it wasn't enough that they bombed the school directly a couple of hours after they bombed the school when all of the first responders are there when all of the parents are there when they're trying to recover the kids and their bodies they then launched the United States then launches another series of strikes multiple missiles they hit the clinic they hit the car wash they hit the small businesses that are there if that wall hadn't been built around the school multiple witnesses who were there when this happened told us a thousand people probably would have been killed from those you know follow-up attacks irons justice minister in an exclusive interview with us said we don't call this a double tap we call this a triple tap because they hit the school multiple times and then they launched another strike directly in the vicinity of the school so they're saying that it's a triple tap strike do you hear me I heard Tiger Carlson recently comparing us to Oklahoma City bombing type of fact to make it maybe more approachable from American perspective out in our country this has really been an afterthought and I think that's part of what's sad to see your your great detailed horrific reporting on this but can you tell us about how politically this played out in Iran and not even just politically but culturally socially how this played out for the Iranian public and it's still playing it's still obviously a very big question at the forefront of their minds yeah you know I also want to say that like there there has been some really good journalism on this in two basic categories I mean one you know in the US in Britain Iranian filmmakers like Helia Dutagi she made a great series about the Minab bombing that no one probably has seen in the West because you know it's it it was produced in Iran but it's in English and people can see it it's called still Minab you know so it's it's not that there hasn't been journalism or an attempt to sort of tell the human story it's it's that it's overwhelmingly been kind of shorter news stories you quote a couple of the parents you talk about the pain and of course that's very important but in terms of really humanizing the people who experiences in the way we would with for instance the Oklahoma City bombing or with a school shooting or in the aftermath of 9/11 the stories that were done about about the people who died in the twin towers or at the Pentagon you know or at the plane that that went down in Pennsylvania you know that kind of journalism is ultimately what cuts to the heart of of all of us and and so you know when we're when we're looking at this I think it's important to to not say well this is something that happened over there because we're actually not allowed to do that this this happened because of orders given at the highest levels of power in the United States and you know multiple Iranians I talked to like the chief psychologist that I spoke to who's treating the children and the families you know she's from Minab herself and she said that that morning people were calling her and saying can this actually be true that America bombed a school bombed the school and Minab. I think that even even the way that that Iranians, many Iranians have come to view the United States and the sort of way in which they think there are no boundaries, especially after the Gaza genocide and the indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure. I think there was disbelief at the beginning that how could this be real? And you know, one, this leading international law expert that I interviewed, I was interviewing him about, he's an Iranian, I was interviewing him about sort of Iran's options for how they're going to pursue this legally. And he even got very emotional when he started talking, and this answers your question, Emily, he said, you know, Iranians love poetry, and we love literature, and we love stories of sorrow, and we love stories of the underdog and the forgotten. And he said, you know, and the job of a great Iranian writer is to cut to the heart, you know, and is to inspire those kinds of deep emotions in people. And he said the way that this minabombing has impacted every level of our society goes beyond even the most epic tragic poems and literature of our history. You know, and people are saying they'll never be the same. And you know, and I also, like, I interviewed the Minister of Justice, and I asked everybody that I talked to, like, what do you want to see happen here? And, you know, even the Minister of Justice, he talks about the complexities of international justice, you know, neither the United States nor Iran are signatories to the International Criminal Court. But at the same time, also, even if they did manage to get something at the International Criminal Court, Trump is now going after trying to destroy the court, sanctioning it. You know, there was bipartisan legislation passed under George W. Bush that came to be known as the Hague Invasion Act that says that if any U.S. personnel or ever brought to any proceedings at the Hague that the U.S. military can go and actually rescue them. And so, you know, what options are there for Iran? You know, there may be a possibility of setting up a special tribunal with prosecutorial powers based on a precedent recently set by a tribunal set up to prosecute Russia for crimes in Ukraine. So you know, you talk about this, and we get into all of these details. But at the end of the day, when you talk to an ordinary Iranian that was impacted by this, you're saying that justice means that we take action to ensure that this never happens again. And so, you know, some people say, this is why it's important for Iran to reinstall deterrence against the United States, because we can't depend on international institutions. You know, I think that part of, you know, remember that what was happening prior to the start of this war, there were these huge protests, you know, in Iran. And the narrative in January was Trump saying, you know, this is a regime that's murdering its own people, help is on the way, you know, there were huge protests that were happening from the Bazaaris, the small business owners. You know, the narrative just before the February 28th war began was very different. And I think the fact that they killed Ali Kamehni right off the bat, who was not just the political leader of the country, but was also a deeply revered religious leader in Shia Islam in Iran and beyond, that was something I think that in some ways cut across any political divides in Iran. But also, they killed 120 kids, you know, and including, you know, directly hitting the girls' school part of this building. And I think that, you know, it, in some ways, it served as a unifying incident because of the heinous nature of it. That whatever you think about the government in your own country, someone would come from a far and launch their most sophisticated missiles on our children and shred them into pieces. You know, the description from the director of the hospital, who, by the way, he said he had never spoken to Iranian or foreign journalists before speaking to me. And he said that he had never been able to do it, to get the composer to be able to speak about the events of that day, but he agreed to talk to me. And when we were done with our, with the interview, and he did a good job of keeping it together, given, I mean, you know, this is the guy who was seeing children's hands brought in, kids who were being identified because they, their dad had put a brand new pair of sponge bob square pants socks on him that morning. You know, he's, he's witnessing this throughout the day. And at the end of our interview, he's, he doesn't realize that we're still recording. And he says to a colleague, I injured my hand because I was poking my pen so deep into my thumb because I didn't want to cry. You know, and this is, this is the director of the hospital. He said they had room in their morgue for six bodies. And then they become over flown with, with casualties and injuries. And he said at first, you know, they didn't, you know, they, they were expecting that they were going to be treating people from the bombing. But he said that it just, it quickly occurred to him. These are children's body parts coming to the hospital. Imagine this too. Nurses and doctors in that hospital had children who were killed in that bombing. And yet they stayed in the hospital to treat the wounded while also having to look for is my child here? Is there arm here? Is there leg here? I recognize the clothing still at it on a human level. It doesn't matter if you're a body in a American, think about that just as a human being, what that was like. The morgue filled up so quickly that they had to start using the kitchen facilities in the hospital to store body parts of children. They had to start using the coolers in the hospital. Then those filled up and then they had to call fishermen and shrimp farmers and ask them to bring their frozen fish trucks. And they started putting the body parts of children in the fish trucks. And then parents have descended on the hospital. And while they're there, the word of that third round of strikes or that second wave of strikes, people start to hear that that has happened and that a clinic has been hit. And then a rumor starts, the Americans are going to bomb the hospital next. And so the director of the hospital says most people then fled the hospital because they believe that we were going to be bombed. And he said, not a single one of my nurses or doctors left the hospital. We all accepted that we may be martyred and we would rather die trying to save our people's lives than flee because of the possibility that America or Israel might bomb our hospital. A little girl who's the niece of the teacher at the school. She also went there told her aunt that she has nightmares and believes that the U.S. and Israel are still hunting the surviving children of the school and that the war won't end until they've killed all of them. The drawings that we published of what children remember that day of what happened. Children running out and calling for their friends. Children who remember being trapped under the rubble and hearing their friends screaming. And then having to live with the fact that those friends aren't alive anymore and feeling as the psychologist told us, they feel like they're bad people. These little kids. Actually, they're afraid to tell their parents, I saw Ali's hand because they think they did something wrong because they saw the severed body parts of their friends. These are 7, 8, 9, 10-year-old kids. I wanted to highlight that part, actually, because it felt like reading through your story that there's a deeper sense of guilt among the survivors of this attack than among the American officials who actually carried it out. We put up the, quote, "5" here, this is Dr. Darbyshe, who talked about earlier. He said, "I had a talk with a mother who told me that she was too blame for her child's martyrdom because," quote, "my son told me that morning that he had a stomach ache and didn't want to go to school. I killed my son. I was the one who caused my son's death and then Miss Salem, the teacher that you mentioned. She said the night of the bombing, she was calling as many of the parents of her students as she could, as well as those of her former students. She would call as how the parent of one of her students confronted her, "Didn't you say my child was your child? You saved your scene. You couldn't save my child," Salem remembered. I said, "I swear he wasn't with me." She paused. It's very hard. Now to the actual guilt, we can put up, quote, "3" here, you write early in his 10-year as war secretary in 2025, Pete Hegseth dissolved the civilian protection center at the Pentagon where an official that you interviewed worked, and announced a policy of, quote, "maximum lethality, not tepid legality," unquote. The Trump administration has staked out a public and internal posture that has dramatically loosened restrictions on the killing of civilians, and Trump has repeatedly stated US intent to bomb civilian sites, quote, "I think these are all thinking together." Then, of course, the rhetoric from not just Hegseth, but especially Trump himself about destroying an entire civilization, all of that filters into the culture, said Bryant. These factors, he charged, combined with a drive to strike and unprecedented number of sites in Iran in a short amount of time, created the conditions for the Minab strike. Can you talk a little bit about the sense of survivors of the guilt that they're going through and where it actually lies? Yeah, you know, there's another story, you know, a lot of the kids, and the surviving teachers they go to the cemetery, you know, to sit at the graves of their friends and others. And, you know, I mean, again, think about it on a parental level, you know, your kid has, has, has survived something unspeakable, you know, where their classmates have been slaughtered and their school has been bombed. And, you know, Miss LM told us that when she was crying that day, some of the students came up to her and they said, um, we, we have money. We can, we can help you rebuild your school. They thought she was crying because the school was destroyed, you know, like the minds of children can pierce your heart in a way that no one else, you know, can. But also they feel like the parents and others have told them, you know, your friends and your teachers are all in a better place, you know, they're in heaven. And then the children say, well, why aren't I in that better place? You know, what did I do to have to stay here? You know, and, and, um, why did, why did you rescue me? Was what the, you're seeing the son of Miss LM said, well, why did you come so early to get me, you know, when, when any starts naming his friends, when they're all in, in heaven now, you know, there are reports from the psychologists that there are children that have been burning themselves with lighters or matches because they want to feel what it felt like when their friends were burned alive. Um, you know, so it's like, I, I, I, the, every story embedded within this is a horror story. Um, you know, and, and the dignity of the parents and others who took the time to speak about it, like, I don't know that I would be capable of doing that if it was my own, um, my own child that I'm talking about. And then the, you know, the humanity and, you know, I think, I think that in our broader narratives, and this is true about Palestinians and Gaza, it's certainly true about Iran, there's somehow is this really kind of, um, meaning dehumanizing, uh, set of sins of omission about their humanity or their intelligence. You know, Iran is a highly educated, advanced society in so many ways. You know, that, that one father, young, who we're talking about was such a fascinating guy, um, whose daughter Fatima was, was killed. He had been an accountant at a fishing business in Minab. And when his daughter was born, he said that he, he felt that it was like a challenge from God that he wanted to do something more with his life. And he went back and he got his certification to teach and he became a teacher of Persian literature. And, um, and felt like that his, it was because of his daughter that he had been set on that path. And so then when he's reading his own poetry or reciting his own poetry to her and realizes that like this little tiny toddler can actually memorize these poems, including my poems, not to mention poems from Iranian history, that he felt like I have a child who has a gift and she gave me the gift of, of giving me new direction my life. I need to give her a gift. And that's how we ended up finding this school. So it's like, you know, you're, you, you talk to, to each, each, uh, sock that they found, each shoe that they found each hand that they found. They all had a story behind them. You know, this school wasn't hidden somewhere. They had a social media presence. They were posting videos that look like anyone else's videos from any school in any country, kids playing hula hoops, bake sales, um, school performances, singing, the celebration of kids birthday parties where the parents come and then they bring, you know, baked goods from home. This school from satellite imagery just a few weeks before the U.S. directly struck this school. You could see kids on the soccer field. You could see the murals on the wall. This had been a school for more than 10 years when the United States bombed it. And so, you know, there isn't any concrete evidence to say, Oh, well, the United States deliberately, uh, bombed the school full of children. But, but where, what, what's the response to this then? You know, how could, how could you, how could you not understand that that's what you were doing? Tomahawk cruise missiles also have photographic capability on them. They can loiter. They can be steered. They want us to believe that no one bothered to check at all, that no one looked at more recent satellite imagery, that the missiles didn't pick up photos of any of this. I mean, it's really stunning. And the fact that there was an active IRGC facility, not on that compound, but not that far away. And somehow, that doesn't get hit. And they directly strike with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles, a school full of children. You know, Congress, a few Congress members have raised a ruckus about this. This should be a total scandal. This, this is one of the gravest war crimes that I'm aware of since the Vietnam war in terms of single episodes, one of the single, most grave war crimes, the, the only comparable single strike that I could think of that I think is in the same category was in the 1991 Gulf War when George H. W. Bush defended the bombing of the Amaraya bomb shelter in Baghdad where the United States dropped a bunker buster bomb. It ripped a hole open where there was a bomb shelter with hundreds of Iraqis in it. And then they dropped another bunker buster bomb directly inside of the bomb shelter and killed more than 400 Iraqis. I visited that shelter in Baghdad because it's now a memorial and it was the same narrative afterwards. Oh, the Iraqis were using them as human shields. Oh, this was actually a military facility. It's the same story they roll out every single time when the other side kills civilians. They're intentionally killing civilians. When the United States does it, it's oops, we tortured some folks as Obama said or oops, you know, we didn't do it on purpose. They directly hit a school and killed 120 kids and they killed 26 teachers, one of whom was pregnant and they killed parents who had come up to pick their kids up that day. This can't just be swept under the rug and Congress needs to be as aggressive as possible and it should cut across party lines. Well, this, this story is titled "Masker at Minab," the school that became a grave. We'll put it the link below. Obviously, you can find it at drop side. Jeremy, thanks so much for this reporting and for joining us today. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks for putting the focus on this, I appreciate it. This is a whole sale attack, it is targeting black people in every federal agency it's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHartRadio app Apple Podcast. Or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.