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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

Per the link, those were removed prior to Operation Midnight Hammer, which happened in 2025, which nearly a year before last month's operation. I'd interpret that as unrelated.

> an article about how the US Military has been lying

That's a gross mischaracterization of the submitted article. FTA:

"The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported."

There is no "lying". The US government is not making false statements, they are declining to fully state losses. Every single military on earth does this. The US nor its military is under no obligation fully report combat losses.

> I’m not sure taking the word of the US military in the comment section of an article [...] is super convincing

So you'd rate an unsourced claim by an anonymous internet commentator as more credible than a statement from the commander of USFK?

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I’d love to take the word of the military at face value, it’d be extremely comforting to be able to do so — but they have been lying constantly about the war. Not proactively disclosing losses in real time is one thing (though the excuses to avoid doing so fall completely flat in my opinion), but they lied about Minab, lied about the F15 being shot down, lied about the THAAD being struck in the first place (they’d claimed the missiles fire toward Jordan were successfully intercepted), they lied about the Saudi Embassy strike (“minor material damage”), and they continue to lie about the number of casualties.

Random commenters à la Bellingcat are far more trustworthy with their specific claims than Hegseth or CENTCOM. And I believe the THAAD was being relocated because The South Korean press had pictures of the radar system being dismantled. It now seems like they decided to only ship the interceptors to the ME, but to pretend like the reporting at the time wasn’t accurate is just silly.

> lied about the F15 being shot down

This didn't happen, give a source. You're probably confused about the F-15 that was struck but not shot down near Qeshm Island. That happened a day before a different F-15 was actually shot down near the city of Lali, in Iran’s Khuzestan Province.

> lied about the THAAD being struck in the first place

Neither did this, give a source. The US military refusing to comment, or claiming some (but not all) missiles were intercepted, is not lying.

> Saudi Embassy strike (“minor material damage”)

Source, I'd love to see the false statements the US military made.

> they continue to lie about the number of casualties

Source? I'd love to see this too, from what I understand the US stopped reporting the number of casualties, which is drastically different from "lying".

Minab I'll admit the military tried to deny, but that was an issue with AI targeting using outdated data (Iranian naval base converted some military buildings on-base into a school, and the US targeted these buildings with outdated maps). Aljazeera has some good maps of what happened: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab...

> South Korean press had pictures of the radar system being dismantled

No, look again at those photos. They do not show radar systems being dismantled, only interceptors being moved.

> The US stopped reporting the number of casualties, which is drastically different from "lying".

You are describing "lying by omission" which is a very well known form of lying. Specifically, they stopped reporting the number of casualties to intentionally misrepresent what was happening in the war.

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