Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chrisling" data-source="post: 438163" data-attributes="member: 6816">Note I said "civilian infrastructure."  With that caveat aside . . . .The Law of Land Warfare of the United States says, by my reading, that in war it is permissable to kill civilians when attacking a military target, provided the harm to civilians is not disproportionate to the value of the military target.  So, if attacking a wholly military target a large number of civilians are killed it's illegal to attack.  So, poisoning wells, burning farms, blowing up houses where civilians live are illegal to attack unless, somehow, the harm to the military we're fighting would be greater than the civilian harm done.I use the The Law of Land Warfare of the United States as a purely internal example.  Far more strident is the 1977 addition to the Geneva Convention which states, pretty unambiguously, "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive."In the Geneva Convention, itself, of course, are the provisions against attacking medical personel and buildings -- basically anything with the red cross in the white circle, or a few other internationally recognized medical symbols like the red cresent.There are also almost innumerable UN resolutions that affirm that civilian infrastructures are off limits.</blockquote>

Verification