Ed Rasimus wrote:
On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 09:59:56 -0400, "George Z. Bush"
wrote:

I committed no atrocities, am guilty of no war crimes, .....

If, in your entire career flying bomb-carrying combat aircraft, you ever
jettisoned your bomb load for whatever reason on other than your assigned
bona-fide target (let's say in a free fire zone), there are some who might
make the argument that you most certainly did commit either an atrocity or a
war crime if your bombs landed on innocent enemy civilians. I personally
don't care to pursue that point, but you ought not be shocked to learn that
some people might, and they're not necessarily unpatriotic because they feel
that way.

"War crimes" need to be defined as violations of international accords
regarding the conduct of armed conflict. We can't ascribe the term to
whatever offends our particular sensibilities or suits our political
needs of the moment.

Let's take the red herring off the table. Let's just assume that the situation
I described is a violation of the section of the Geneva Accords that prohibits
punishing the civilian populace of the nation with which we are at war, to which
the US is a signatory.

Jettisoning weapons in emergencies, for personal defense, etc, is NOT
a war crime. There is considerable difference between jettisoning a
weapons load and targeting innocents. One is acknowledged as an
unavoidable risk of a combat zone while the other is most assuredly
proscribed.

I didn't suggest any imminent emergency. I was just suggesting that you had a
piece or ordinance hung up that you couldn't release on target. I also did not
suggest deliberately targeting civilians.

A "free-fire zone" is, in its entirety an area of unrestricted weapons
employment with only small exceptions, such as hospitals, refugee
camps, churches (religious buildings), and white flags exempt.
Delivering in a free-fire zone is not a war crime.

Let's assume that your exceptions to the definition of a "free fire zone" are
accurately stated, as they probably are. The problem becomes one that you may
be somewhat delusion if you think that some people might not take exception to
your conclusion regarding delivering ordinance in a free fire zone when (let's
assume) the entire Gulf of Tonkin was readily and safely available for that
purpose

Certainly there are some who "might make the argument" that I "most
certainly did commit either an atrocity or a war crime (that's either
an interesting distinction or a redundancy) IF your bombs landed on
innocent enemy (oxymoron???) civilians."

Well, we've finally reached an area of agreement in that there might be some
who would consider dropping ordinance on enemy civilians to be an atrocity or a
war crime. I happen to be one of those who think those terms are not
necessarily mutually exclusive in that traumatically amputating the extremities
of an unarmed civilian might well be both an atrocity and a war crime.

I've previously challenged your categorization of innocent enemy civilians since
you apparently suggested that they can't be enemy and innocent at the same time.
Infants and young children are incapable of posing a credible threat to our
armed forces, as are other civilians, including the excessively aged and the
infirm. Pretending that they don't exist in a free fire zone simply because you
can't see them is unacceptable. Only those who take up arms against you are
legitimate targets; those you suspect might do so are not until such time as
they arm themselves. As long as they're unarmed, they're protected by the
provisions of the Geneva Conventions regardless of our suspicions.

But making the argument isn't
following the definition of a war crime. Some might even accuse the
military of genocide or wholesale murder, but they would be employing
a despicable level of hyperbole.

The purpose of military operations is to "kill people and break
things". Doing anything less is a sure route to defeat.

In other words, you're saying that anything goes and that you have no
constraints on anything you or the military choose to do. If you claim
something like that, you have to realize that the entire world will snicker and
smirk when our government issues its next annual report of nations who have
egregiously violated the human rights of its own citizens or of others. How can
we expect others to live by our human rights rules when we fail to do so
ourselves? Won't we have lost the moral high ground that our nation has always
enjoyed in the past? Up until WWII and perhaps the Korean War as well, we used
to be the world's good guys. Nowadays, a billion plus Muslims look on us with a
clearly jaundiced or suspicious eye, as well as many others of our former
friends and admirers. What happened to bring that about?

George Z.