I gave you proof that the US military itself publishes articles that admits the past practice of targeting civilians, that it was highly successful, and that the absence of the practice in Iraq and Afghanistan led to failure in those missions. That's not enough, LOL.
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Ongoing basis and orchastrated[sic] from the top"; well now you're in quite the retreat. Before you were claiming it didn't happen. Now you're implicitly admitting that it happens, but it's not orchestrated from the top? Doesn't really matter, does it. The top orders the military to win and the military does the best job it can.
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The same thing can be said about torture.
US policy is that prisoners of war are not to be tortured. It's a matter of military law, the "Law of Armed Conflict". And so it shouldn't happen and it certainly wouldn't be orchestrated from the top.
And then the pictures came out.
And we find that the White House had their lawyers orchestrate the definition of "torture" to exclude a procedure called "waterboarding".
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You have to be fairly stupid to assume that US law, the Geneva Convention, the UCMJ or the LOAC restricts US military actions, now or in the past.
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The religious prescription of "an eye for an eye" is uniformly violated by military actions by all countries. The first violation is that the "punishment" is not equal in magnitude to the "crime" in the sense of the number of eyes. The military kills as many of the opposing force as possible. In fact the military ideal is to kill lots while taking zero casualties oneself, if possible. And the US is extremely good at this. The second violation is that the revenge is not extracted from the perpetrator. Instead, war targets people whose relationship, to the person or group that caused the conflict, is largely only that they happen to live in the same country. That is, war is, at best, about "collective punishment".
The UCMJ, Geneva Convention and LOAC are all in conflict with the biblical limitation on revenge. All war is in violation of this. The targeting of civilians is no more evil than war itself. The enemy's sailors and soldiers are as innocent as the civilians who make their weapons, pay the taxes needed for the military, etc.
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As a practical matter, the "civilized" countries, (or maybe "more industrialized" is a better description) sometimes refrain from using certain techniques in warfare. A lot of time this is due to their unpleasant experience of it previously. So the great powers in the 2nd world war avoided the use of gas (at least against each others military forces) because the military had hated its use in the previous war.
But in the event of wartime (and I mean real war, not the little brush fires the world has experienced since 1945), the restraint exercised by the civilized countries evaporates when the opposing side fails to also exercise that restraint. A good example of this is the deliberate bombing of civilians. It would have been to Britain's great advantage to have started the bombing of Berlin on the first day of the war. It would have put the war onto a technological / industrial basis that was exactly where Britain was so much superior to Germany, and introduced attacks against civilians that produced almost no damage to Britain's war fighting ability. Instead, the Battle of Britain was postponed to the next year and Germany was able to concentrate entirely on the ground war. The result was that they were able to knock France out of the war.
The only way I could imagine that deliberate wide-scale targeting of civilians could occur in the "war on terror" would be if ISIS was somehow able to take control over a really large amount of territory. Then they would be a real threat and one of their most difficult tasks would be protecting their civilian population. The justification for the US using these methods would simply be that ISIS did it first. And the primary US weapon would be blockade leading to starvation which one can argue really isn't very military at all.
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But the targeting of civilians who happen to be relatives, friends and acquaintances of known terrorists, that's what I think is happening now. Israel does something similar, but Israel is not a great power and can't get away with the stuff the US does. So instead of killing the family of a suicide bomber, the Israelis will destroy the house he lived in. This leaves his family (usually parents and siblings) homeless.
In 1968, after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, Theodor Meron, then legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, advised the Prime Minister's office in a top secret memorandum that house demolitions, even of suspected terrorists's residences, violated the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in war. Undertaking such measures, as though they were in continuity with British mandatory emergency regulations, might be useful as hasbara but were 'legally unconvincing'. The advise was ignored. His view, according to Gershom Gorenberg, is shared by nearly all scholars of international law, prominent Israeli experts included.[13]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_demolition_in_the_Israeli–Palestinian_conflict
