Video is from previously aired interview with Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski on Truthwire
In the early Saturday hours of what Trump proclaimed would be the swift, decisive, derailment of Iran, two Tomahawk missiles reduced a girls’ school in Tehran to rubble. The first strike sent children and teachers scrambling through debris, parents rushing to pull the wounded from the massive collapsed concrete. But then forty minutes later, a second missile arrived—a truth that haunts the rattled consciousness of military analysts and human rights observers alike.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired U.S. Air Force officer and longtime Pentagon insider, points to this timing as evidence that whatever happened that night was no accident. “The video is good,” she says plainly. “Live video is good. They clearly knew what they were hitting.” The school, it would later emerge, was not an arbitrary target: it was where children of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership attended classes—a not highly publicized fact—placing it squarely within a targeting philosophy that has increasingly blurred the lines between military necessity and psychological warfare.
Perhaps most disturbing though, is the emerging consensus that human hands may not have been the ones solely responsible for selecting the children as targets. Kwiatkowski raises a strong possibility that military ethicists have warned about for years: artificial intelligence may have recommended the strike. With Israeli companies like Palantir deeply embedded in U.S. military infrastructure, and Israel widely regarded as the global leader in AI-assisted targeting—a reputation forged through years of operations in Gaza—the technological architecture for algorithmic warfare is already in place. “The AI racks and stacks based on whatever parameters you’re trying to accomplish,” Kwiatkowski explains. “If you want to destroy morale, if you want to decapitate leadership, the AI takes data points, updates information, cross-checks mapping, and produces a prioritized list.” What makes this particularly chilling is the built-in deniability it offers commanders and politicians alike. When software selects targets, when algorithms recommend strikes, the human chain of command can retreat behind the claim that they were simply following computational logic—a modern twist on the Nuremberg defense that has troubled military lawyers since the dawn of precision warfare. What’s worse is now the Pentagon is set to adopt Palantir AI as a core US military system, with its Maven artificial intelligence system becoming an official program of record, according to the Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg.
Contrary to White House expectations of a swift Iranian collapse though, Tehran has since demonstrated resilience, military capacity and strategic patience that Western analysts severly underestimated. The Persian power, having watched decades of American intervention across West Asia, from the fake war on terror with Iraq’s to Afghanistan’s occupation to Libya’s orchestrated regime-change chaos, spent decades preparing precisely for this moment. Iranian engineers spent years studying captured American and Israeli drones, building indigenous manufacturing capabilities that now supply both domestic forces and allied groups across the region. When President Trump reportedly expressed surprise that American bases in the Gulf came under immediate attack, Kwiatkowski frustratedly noted that Iran’s leadership had announced exactly this response repeatedly during negotiations. The strikes against U.S. facilities in Bahrain and elsewhere, the fifty-third missile barrage against Israeli positions, the sustained pressure on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—none of this should have come as a surprise to an administration that actually lived in reality instead of dismissing their “enemy” as weak.
As Senator Richard Blumenthal and other Democratic voices raise alarms about Russian and Chinese assistance to Iran, Kwiatkowski invites viewers to consider the obvious hypocrisy baked into such complaints. The United States has spent years directing Ukrainian strikes against Russian targets, providing satellite imagery, targeting data, and advanced weaponry while insisting that Kive makes its own decisions. According to Kwiatkowski, Iran joined the BRICS economic alliance precisely because the West, after the 1979 revolution and the overthrow of the Shah, pushed Tehran toward Eastern partnerships. China’s Belt and Road Initiative runs directly through Iranian territory, creating economic interdependence that naturally extends to information sharing during wartime. “Why wouldn’t China be extremely interested in watching and participating?” Kwiatkowski asks. “They’re looking at the Iranian battlefield as a laboratory for understanding American military weaknesses and strengths.” The Strait of Hormuz remains open to most global shipping—just not to American and Israeli vessels or those aiding them—a distinction that undermines claims of Iranian aggression against international commerce.
The Exposed Cracks Within the Epstein Empire
Back in the United States, the conflict is exposing fractures that run deeper than partisan politics. The Federal Communications Commission, under Trump appointee Brendan Carr, has begun threatening broadcast licenses over coverage deemed insufficiently supportive of the administration’s war narrative. The president has taken to Truth Social to suggest that images of anti-war protesters are AI-generated fabrications—a claim contradicted by on-the-ground reporting and the visible mobilization of activist networks. Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations (ICE) have adopted Palantir’s predictive technology for geofencing and warrantless surveillance, raising Fourth Amendment concerns that civil liberties organizations warn represent an unprecedented expansion of domestic police powers. “Trump is number one in destroying the Constitution,” Kwiatkowski states bluntly, drawing historical comparisons to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus while noting that modern surveillance capabilities make historical abuses seem almost quaint by comparison. The combination of algorithmic targeting abroad and algorithmic policing at home suggests a technological authoritarianism that transcends traditional left-right divisions, exposing a more top-down fight.
As we arrive on the fourth week of the conflict with no end in sight, the most dangerous question hovers over every strategic discussion: will nuclear weapons enter the battlefield? Israel’s Samson option—the doctrine of last-resort nuclear retaliation—has long included contingency plans for strikin targets if the existence of the Israeli state is perceived as threatened. Iran’s leadership, having watched the United States decapitate its military command structure and strike a school filled with children of the elite, has consolidated national unity rather than fractured as U.S.-Israeli planners anticipated. Kwiatkowski warns that the very desperation now gripping Israeli society—the realization that six million Jews face an indefinite missile campaign from an adversary with seemingly inexhaustible stockpiles, who are also not afraid to die—could trigger precisely the catastrophic response that nuclear doctrine was designed to prevent. “We should be very watchful of both false flag and the temptation by very evil politicians in both Israel and the United States saying that this is the time to experiment with a nuclear battlefield,” she concludes. The war that was supposed to end by Purim has now a grinding stalemate heading toward a defeat for the entire West, and in the space between failed expectations and mounting losses, the unthinkable can begin to seem like the only option remaining.
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