The Pentagon just changed the rules of war to include legitimizing the killing of any journalists they deem “belligerent.”

The new “laws of war” were released as part of a book of instructions on legitimate warfare practices approved by the United States military.

This “rule book” of sorts details what the US government deems the acceptable ways of killing those they claim are the “enemy”… including journalists whose reporting they do not approve.

The manual explains that the Pentagon considers such journalists “unprivileged belligerents,” even though they are not “enemy combatants.”

This distinction is important for the Pentagon, since the battles against Muqtada as-Sadr’s “Jaysh al-Mahdi” militia was a fight the US picked over a newsletter America did not approve of. When the military tried to stop the presses, Sadr’s army took up arms against the US forces.

We don’t hear a lot about that in the media or government these days, because those battles didn’t exactly end in the US’s favor…

Now, the American 1,176-page “Department of Defense Law of War Manual” says that it is perfectly legitimate to shoot, explode, bomb, stab, or cut journalists they deem “belligerent.”

Read the full article here.