The WTC complex had defense department offices: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/2001/09/federal-agencie...

By your logic it's the federal government's fault those 3000 people died on 9/11, they were being used as human shields.

American bases in europe have schools on them. Fair targets?

They (the Americans) should have also marked the schools on said military maps of theirs, and hence they could have made a value judgment of "is it worth killing some IRGC men in the middle of nowhere vs. the international backslash of killing school-going children?". It looks like they most probably didn't do that, probably because their "advanced" AI systems didn't bother with marking schools on their military maps.

> This was a choice to use children as human shields

Perhaps we should have, you know, just not bombed that particular fucking site until the end of the fucking school day if it was such a vital target. God forbid we act like a vaguely intelligent country, instead of drunkly screaming "maximum lethality" at every conceivable opportunity.