Arguably if they really were trying to land at JFK it wouldn't even be an issue of collateral damage. It would be an accident. Well maybe not it would be collateral damage from the hijacking. Even in the counter-factual where they were not trying to destroy buildings, its not as if they didn't do anything wrong. But if you want to continue along silly counterfactuals, if they had taken control of the plane because the pilot and co=pilot were ill and they where trying to save everyone, but did a poor job of piloting, then it would have been an accident. Of course there isn't any real point in bringing it up, since they were aiming for the buildings in reality, so it was terrorism, or if you want to say they were waging war, then it was a war crime.
Its a simple definitional issue. A war crime is when your trying to kill or maim, or abuse, innocent non-threatening non-belligerents in the context of a war ("non-belligerents could include those who where belligerents but have surrendered or are trying to surrender) Collateral damage is when your trying to destroy/injure/kill/disperse/render ineffective a target, and you injure or kill people who aren't your target or destroy something you didn't intended to destroy. An accident is when your not trying to kill, harm, abuse, or destroy anything, buy you unintentionally cause such damage.
I'm not sure whether you can't get the standard definition, where collateral damage is not a war crime, or that your so convinced that actual war crimes are endemic among the US military that your convinced some incident is one without solid evidence. If the former look up some online dictionaries. If the later, not only are war crimes not the typical action of the US military (which is not to say they don't happen), but even if they where that wouldn't show that some particular action was a war crime. |
