It would seem that the civilians would be the ones bearing the brunt of those decisions.

More importantly, the issue at hand is that we don't know whether that decision was as clean-cut as you suggest, precisely because of the lack of transparency of our .gov and .mil.

Now, there are very sound opsec reasons for not making that information public, but when we are the foreign aggressor I believe that it is not an unreasonable burden to place on ourselves; indeed, it may help encourage caution when considering military adventures abroad.