TV station bombing illegal?

[chamo]

Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday March 26, 2003

Questions are being raised about the legality of the bombing of Iraqi television's main station in Baghdad. The attack appears to have been triggered by Washington's determination to pull the plugs on a vital propaganda weapon of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Amnesty International said that the bombing could be a breach of the Geneva Conventions. "The bombing of a television station, simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda, cannot be condoned. It is a civilian object, and thus protected under international humanitarian law," it said.

"To justify such an attack, coalition forces would have to show that the TV station was being used for military purposes, and that the attack properly balanced the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated with the incidental risk to civilian life", Claudio Cordone, Amnesty's director for international law, added.

Full Story (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,922445,00.html)

[Pete]

It is also in violation of American ideals.

[Subcomandante Marcos]

of course is ilegal, just like this whole war. The only way the U$ had to weaken the irak goverment is by killing ther media, just like if the Americans didnt know how their hitlerian hordes are doing, this is not going to affect the rampage of the U$ in any way, since they'll probably just step on it like they did with the UN...

[alphaduc]

I thought Hussein was using the TV to threaten those Iraqi's that didn't fight with death? Doesn't that make the TV station a C&C target?

Not that I'm defending the U.S.; after all, Iraq is a dictatorship, and as the dictator, Hussein ownes Iraq and everything in it is his personal property. But that brings us back to that old slavery question, if you kill a slave is it murder? Is Hussein guilty of genocide if he killed his own property? And is the U.S. guilty of murder if it kills Sudam's slaves?

Things would have been much easier if the Iraqi people had just killed Hussein years ago.