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Comment by mindcreek | Hacker News Reader

So killing unarmed people helping wounded is perfectly fine huh? This is not an active war zone this area is a Country which us claims to be helping to rebuild order and infrastructure, after us destroyed both.

War is an active engagement between military forces, not randomly killing civillians in a country you are trying to help.

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The pilot was operating on the assumption that the people he fired upon were militants. Think about it; you shoot at armed militants. Minutes later an unmarked van with some unmarked men pulls up, and they jump out and start loading the wounded. Does the van hold civilians? Y/N.

According to the relevant parts of international law, it doesn't matter if they're uniformed military--if they're unarmed and loading wounded into a vehicle for medevac, you let them go.

My point is not that the killing was just. I was just objecting to where the parent suggests the pilot opened fire on civilians knowingly.

You're correct in that, but civilian or not is a technicality, not the issue.

Some unarmed unmarked men.

You must assume Y. You can't just start shooting on the balance of probabilities. It might be forgivable if there was some imminent danger to... somebody. But I'm not seeing that.

Doesn't matter. You aren't allowed to shoot wounded combatants who are out of the action.

There was a little girl in the van. I guess shes an insurgent too

Well, at least we seem to agree that war is bad. ;)

From the pilots eyes, he just got the drop on a bunch of bomb laying insurgents trying to help their friends. Of course if it worked out that way, we wouldn't be having this discussion and it would have been perfectly fine.

>War is an active engagement between military forces

If only that were true beyond some ideal. You realize that the alies dropped incendiary bombs on German cities in WWII that killed women and children at a pace of thousands per bombing run. Not to mention what we did to Japan, or what Japan did to China or Korea, or what the North did to the South (slash and burn) in the war of northern aggression.

> You realize that the alies dropped incendiary bombs on German cities in WWII that killed women and children at a pace of thousands per bombing run.

Not to say that this is acceptable, but Hitler started the bombing of civilians. Apparently, one of the bombing runs on England at night got too close to the city (London?) and killed a bunch of civilians. Instead of admitting that it was a mistake, Hitler pushed out propaganda saying that this was the intention from the start. After that both sides bombed each other's civilian populations.

Actually, many historians argue that the practice of moving from bombing military targets to bombing cities caused Germany to lose the Battle of Britain.

That is definitely true, if the Luftwaffe continuted bombing RAF airfields exclusively, much of Europe could be speaking German today.

However, the point being made was that Allied forces weren't exactly blameless in their conduct in the war, despite the amount of attention given to German war crimes in Nuremberg etc. The bombing of Dresden was referred to as 'terror bombing', in that very little tactical military advantage was gained by conducting the bombing, but civilian casualties were horrendous. Apparently so much incendiary bombs were dropped that the intensity of the flames created sudden 'draughts' of air that were powerful enough to suck someone off their feet into the flames.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War...

Also, a side of the war the Golden Generation would rather sweep under the carpet:

http://www.amazon.com/Taken-Force-American-Europe-during/dp/...

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