Pentagon whistleblower shreds 'shameful' Trump admin

A former Pentagon official has turned whistleblower, shredding the Trump administration's "shameful" lack of regard for civilian casualties during the ongoing war in Iran, during an interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour.

Wes J. Bryant previously worked with the Department of Defense's office for civilian harm assessment, which was formed to help mitigate non-combatant casualties in military operations. Last year, however, the office was dissolved under the direction of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As the war in Iran has unfolded, critics have highlighted disturbing rhetoric and conduct indicating the administration's lack of care for civilian lives and the laws of war, including the destruction of a girls' school by a U.S. strike and Hegseth's insistence that enemy combatants will be given "no quarter."

Speaking with Amanpour, Bryant said that his colleagues have tracked over 80 potential instances of strikes against civilian targets by the U.S. and Israel, putting casualty estimates around 1,800.

"I find this shameful, frankly," Bryant said. "Shameful that our administration, our secretary of defense — or 'war,' as he calls himself — and our senior military leadership, can't even to this day acknowledge that they struck the school, let alone provide some kind of half-semblance of an apology and address the situation appropriately. For our own secretary of defense and commanders to not even be able to tell the American people where they've dropped their own bombs and missiles, that's a problem in and of itself."

He continued: "And then we have the problem of just the sheer recklessness and bloodthirst of this campaign, and we're joining with Israel, who has been committing genocide in Gaza.... The horrifying aspect of this is that we're importing to the U.S. military, importing the standards that Israel has created with the war in Gaza, of utter recklessness in targeting, blatant disregard for international law and an incredibly high tolerance for civilian casualties, and brushing them off. Saying things like, 'civilian casualties will happen in war, the enemy embeds in urban areas and no other military takes as much care to prevent civilian casualties.'"

Bryant attested to the fact that the U.S. military had, over the years, taken care with military strikes to prevent civilian casualties, but also stressed that many mistakes had been made. This, he argued, was why his prior office for harm assessment was established under the Biden administration. He explained that the office was ultimately slashed under Hegseth's leadership because it did not fit his vision of military "lethality."