The purposefull targetting of civillians has been one of the primary methods of making war for the US in its two largest wars in its history.
In The Civil War it was an explicit part of the Union strategy to eliminate Confederate infastructure which included a scorched earth policy right through the hearland of the south up to the doorsteps of Charleston. The weakest part of the Confederacy was its support structure and so it made perfect sense to attack that rather than the formidible Confederate Army. Although there was no outright order to kill Confederate civillians, burning their homes, farms, towns, etc was effectivly the same thing.
One of the only ways we were able to keep the upper hand against both Germany and Japan during WWII was an explicit policy of targetting civillians and civillian infastructure. The goal was to remove both the enemies ability to produce instruments of war AND to remove the will to fight out of a battered citizenry. We killed more Japanese civilians and caused more damage to Japanese infastructure with conventional bombardment of Tokoyo then we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
In the hardest and most important wars the US has ever fought a major component of how we won was a policy of deliberatly targetting enemy citizenry even when the citizens were our own.
Organizations worth supporting:
Electronic Frontier Foundation | Defending your rights in the digital world (Protect Privacy and Security)
Home | American Civil Liberties Union (Protect Civil Rights)
AAUP (Protect Higher Learning)
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