Actually the guy Churchill had studying the effects of bombings found that that vast majority of the bombs missed their targets. And his definition of 'hitting a target' meant landing within a mile and a half! He said that a better description of what the bombers were doing would be "exporting explosives." By the time of Dresden, Churchill claimed the point was to drive the civilians out of the cities to block the roads and interfere with troop movements.

They didn't give a flying crap one way or another. As was well-known to their political superiors, and should have been known to them, it wasn't so much an issue of ignoring military targets to aim at civilians, as their sheer inability to actually make that distinction meaningful.

Additionally, they were middle-aged to elderly men whose careers were heavily invested in being experts at bombing. Damned if they were going to admit the situation called for anything other than more bombing. To confess that they had no clue what they were doing, and that it was an appalling waste of munitions, money & lives on their side, and to the other, an atrocity whose sole virtue was the ability of the performers to distance themselves from the results, would have meant admitting that they were responsible for all the men who were killed uselessly on bombing sorties, the civilians who were slaughtered indiscriminately, and the wasted resources that could have gone to something more useful. Like, say, equipment to better protect the ground troops who were doing the actual work of pushing back the Germans. The claims that the strategic bombing campaigns had an appreciable effect on production or morale cannot be taken seriously considering that German production actually accelerated during the height of the strategic bombing campaign, and did not noticable slow down until late in 1944 to 1945, when the last German sources of iron & oil (France & Romania, respectively) were out of their hands.

Of course. Collateral damage is perfectly acceptable, morally speaking (not having to run for re-election I am rather indifferent to the PR aspects). The question is actually whether or not they are collateral or the only damage. I'd have signed off on targeting an orphanage if I had reliable intelligence that Hitler was inspecting it, but not bombing random orphanages on the off-chance he might be in one of them. When the inefficacy of your weapons, such as that of high-altitude or night-time bombing, renders any sort of accurrate targeting impossible, and this is known at the highest levels during the conflict, the moral justification drops off sharply. And when the civilians are deliberately targeted, merely because they produce food or might work in factories that produce war materiel, or to dishearten the troops - terrorism. Period. And regarding that last, whenever I see dramatizations of WW2 on the Western Front I tend to want to smack the anglophonic troops. I imagine post-war a GI making friends with a former Wehrmacht conscript and talking about their tribulations.
GI:"I got a Dear John letter, and Ma says they're rationing sugar and butter, so she can't have a cake for me when I get home. I am so unhappy."
Fritz:"Ja, I understand where you are coming from. Mein parents were killed when our block was randomly bombed und my girlfriend was gang-raped by Russians, so I can totally commiserate."

Of course that scenario is silly. They wouldn't have been friends, since official Allied occupation policy was to forbid speaking to Germans as a punitive measure to dehumanize them, and ol' Fritz would have been starving in an internment camp, where he would have been re-classified as something other than a Prisoner of War, since we were not feeding German prisoners enough to meet the Geneva Convention standards for official POWs.

And while the horrors Germany inflicted on Poland on the Ostfront, as well as the entire history of Stalin's regime, combine to make Malmedy look like a practical joke, it simply does not excuse our conduct. Reciprocity would have been one thing, but there was no real attempt to use brutality to dissuage the Germans from the same.

One could argue we merely encouraged German terrorism, since the historically unprecedented unconditional surrender proclamation at Casablanca left them no way out. We basically announced our intention to utterly destroy them, which left them no recourse but a fight to the death. The rebuttal of overtures from German resistance movements and the strategic bombing campaign helped encourage that mindset among Hitler's followers and made them more likely to stick by him, believing that if they could not throw him to the lions, they might as well try to help him stave them off.

Meh. Politicians & their court historians are irrevocably committed to the highly complex scale of nomenclature determination which might best be summed up as "Them" and "Us."

"Father and Mother and me,
Sister and Auntie say,
And all the nice people like Us are We
And everyone else is They." - Kipling