Douglas Feith Quotes

According to the laws of war, a warring party can just walk away from civilian harm that they have caused.

The last thing we want to do is to go into an area and inflict unnecessary civilian casualties. One is too many.

Indiscriminate attacks on civilians ought, under all circumstances, to be illegal in war as in peacetime.

It is a rule of international law that weapons and methods of warfare which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians should never be used.

They target and try to kill as many of our civilians as they can. We do not target civilians..

You don't torture people. You don't indiscriminately attack civilians. You protect as good as you can the impact of your warfare on women and children.

Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not "unintentional" when you know it is inevitable.

An order to fire on people that do not fire on you is a completely illegal order.

What is and isn't justified by military necessity is, naturally, open to interpretation. One of the key concepts, though, is the law of proportionality. A military attack that results in civilian casualties - 'collateral damage' - is acceptable as long as the military benefits outweigh the price that is paid by humanity.

Perhaps the most basic rule of the law of armed conflict is that civilians and civilian objects must not be made the object of direct attack, although incidental injuries caused to such persons or objects in the course of a legitimate attack must be proportionate to the purpose of the attack.

For the most part, I think American armies are awfully good in the business of protecting civilians, of not going over the line.

Barack Obama commits war crimes - Somalia, Yemen. He commits war crimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to keep a spotlight on war crimes, to keep track of the innocents killed... There is a major clash.

Under our rules of engagement, if I were ISIS, what I would do is collocate my headquarters next to a school or a hospital and ensure that there would be collateral damage. They know our rules of engagement as well as we do. They operate with impunity.

Israel never targets civilians deliberately, period.

If you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realize that there's something called the Geneva Convention we're going to have to pull out of. It would defy every norm that is America.

Al Qaeda doesn't abide by the Geneva Conventions, so in my opinion, they should not be afforded the protections of them.

I think it is tragic that a situation should arise where civilians on any side are killed. But it is almost a cliche to say that it is virtually unavoidable and this isn't unique to us alone.

The world must know that America holds to the highest standards of military conduct and human rights protections. Anything less is unacceptable.

You've got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you're going to hit civilians.

All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.

The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.

More and more, we have been able to present the argument that recruitment of child soldiers is a social breakdown that leads to atrocities, because that's why they get them.

They were targeting those people I referred to as 'little Eichmanns.' These were legitimate targets.

It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.

This war no longer has anything to do with knightly conduct or with the agreements of the Geneva Convention.