It's forbidden to kill civilians. You can only kill non-civilians, and there's nothing allowing you to hide the bodies of civilians or interfere with their burial rites.
The US has signed treaties according to which it is forbidden and these treaties are additionally so special that they're treated as applying to even non-signatories, the so-called customary international law.
Specialist missions normally have custom RoE not always mirroring those in conventional theatre, but nevertheless appropriate for the mission specifics.
Yes, but this it's clearly forbidden to make civilians object of attack, and it doesn't matter whether you risk discovery or whatever. Surely the RoE should be at least as restrictive as IHL.
I think it might be legal to hide the body, but if you do so you must do something to ensure that it can be recovered, either informing the enemy afterwards or some other measure to that effect.
Does a civilian become a combatant or pose a threat if they could derail, though awareness of your presence, your mission to prevent NK making civilians the object of attack on massive scale with nuclear weapons?
I believe that respect for IHL is more important than anything.
If IHL were deeply ingrained in international political behaviour and absolutely established I could see deviations from it where such deviations could be justified on moral grounds as acceptable, but since the law is hardly even established it is more important that it be followed than that it minimizes suffering in the now.
Furthermore, I don't think that it mattered. Everyone places his tactical concerns very highly in the moment, but over time they are often irrelevant. Do you really think it matters now, whether that information was available or not?
I don't really believe there's anything useful that can be achieved when it comes to the North Korea's nuclear weapons. They have them, they'll probably try to build more of them. That sucks, but there's nothing that can be done.
Indiscriminate would be nuclear weapons on cities. This mission’s ultimate goal was to prevent NK doing that.
If you could stop NK doing that, would you pull the trigger? Would you make a targeted kill of a person who compromised that mission by discovering it?