From Scott Kozel:
(Stuf4) wrote:

From Scott Kozel:
(Stuf4) wrote:
From Scott Kozel:

I snipped the rest of your post because my comments above were
sufficient to refute your argument.

The space shuttle is not a "military aircraft" and it is not an
"aircraft" at all during the cruise portion of its mission, so your cite
the Hague Rules of Air Warfare is irrelevant.

There are many who would say that these Rules of Air Warfare are
irrelevant no matter what. Even for regular aircraft. Notice that
Tokyo firebombing, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc came *well after* these
rules were drafted.

Strawman alert. It's also amusing that you don't mention that the
Japanese were the ones who first conducted the firebombing of cities.

Since the focus has been on NASA, I considered it to be more relevant
to focus on other US gov't observance/lack of observance of the Hague
rules (rather than the Japanese or anyone else).

The fact that the Japanese were the ones who "lowered the bar" and first
conducted the firebombing of cities in that war, is crucial to
understanding why they later got the same treatment, and those cities
that you mentioned were legitimate aerial targets by the standards of
Hague, in that they were defensed cities that contained valid military
targets.

It is clear to me that such indiscriminant bombardment was expressly
prohibited. In particular, Articles 22, 24 and 25:

http://lawofwar.org/hague_rules_of_air_warfare.htm


I suspect that these Hague articles formed the basis for LeMay's
post-war words:
--------------
"Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose
if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal..."

(From http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/pe...ndeAMEX61.html,
one of many sources where LeMay's quote can be found)
--------------

[The above quote was pasted from an old ssh post from two years ago.]


~ CT