The Ledger We Don’t Keep

A working inventory of U.S. war crimes from the Indian Wars through the drone era: what the records show, who was charged, and what almost nobody served time for.

Every empire keeps two sets of books. There is the one in the high school textbooks, full of D-Day and the Berlin Airlift and the Marshall Plan and the moon landing, and there is the ledger nobody wants to balance: the one with the names of the villages, the bridges, the prisons, and the children. This article is an attempt to open that second book. Not in a screed, not as anti-American polemic, but as journalism: incidents recorded in U.S. military investigations, congressional hearings, court-martial records, federal court rulings, declassified cables, inspector general reports, and the reporting of mainstream wire services and newspapers of record. The facts here are not contested. The accountability is. Taken together, they point to one conclusion: the failure to punish these crimes is not accident or aberration. It is the system working as intended.

What Counts as a War Crime

A “war crime” is not a vibe. It is a defined category in international and U.S. law. The relevant frameworks include the 1863 Lieber Code (the first modern U.S. law of land warfare, issued by Lincoln during the Civil War); the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols; the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 (18 U.S.C. § 2441); and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs the conduct of American service members on every battlefield.

The core prohibitions are simple. You do not kill non-combatants. You do not kill prisoners. You do not torture. You do not attack hospitals, religious sites, or surrendering forces. You do not use weapons that cannot distinguish between soldier and civilian. You do not impose collective punishment. You do not destroy a population’s ability to survive as a means of forcing surrender. Violations are war crimes. Done as policy, they become crimes against humanity. Done with intent to destroy a people, they become genocide.

The inventory is organized by conflict. For each incident, GSR provides a scorecard: date, location, the U.S. unit or program responsible, the victim toll, and the actual accountability outcome.

I. The Indian Wars (1830s–1890)

The U.S. campaign of conquest against Indigenous nations is, in aggregate, the longest and bloodiest sustained military operation in American history. Modern legal scholars (and, in 2021, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative) increasingly describe pieces of it in genocide terms. The selected incidents below are not the whole record. They are the cases with the clearest contemporary record.

Sand Creek Massacre (1864)

Black Kettle’s village at Sand Creek was camped where the U.S. government had told them to camp, flying both an American flag and a white flag of truce, when Chivington’s volunteers attacked at dawn. Captain Silas Soule refused to fire his men’s weapons and later testified against Chivington. Soule was murdered in Denver before the investigation concluded. The killers were never prosecuted. In 2014, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper formally apologized to the Cheyenne and Arapaho. No federal apology has ever been issued.

Washita Massacre (1868)

Wounded Knee Massacre (1890)

II. The Philippine–American War (1899–1902)

America’s first overseas colonial war was also its first large-scale counterinsurgency. It generated a then-unprecedented Senate inquiry into U.S. military conduct: the Lodge Committee hearings of 1902. The written record is extensive. Estimates of Filipino civilian deaths from the conflict range from 200,000 to upwards of 750,000.

The “Water Cure” (1899–1902)

U.S. soldiers systematically used a torture known as the water cure on Filipino prisoners and suspected insurgents: pinning the subject down, forcing a tube or funnel into the mouth, pouring large quantities of water into the stomach until the body distended, then striking the abdomen to expel it. Survivors who lived through it described it as drowning by installments. Multiple soldiers admitted to the practice in sworn testimony before the Senate Lodge Committee in 1902. A handful of low-ranking soldiers were court-martialed; sentences were generally light, and many were reduced or remitted by President Theodore Roosevelt. The technique reappears more than a century later, refined and rebranded as “waterboarding,” in CIA black sites.

The Samar Campaign (1901–1902)

After Filipino fighters killed 48 American soldiers at Balangiga in September 1901, Smith ordered Waller to turn the interior of Samar into “a howling wilderness.” Asked by Waller for the age limit on who could be killed, Smith pegged it at ten. The exact phrasing, “kill everyone over ten,” is preserved in Waller’s court-martial testimony and reproduced widely in contemporaneous press and subsequent military histories.

Concentration (“Reconcentration”) Camps

U.S. forces in Batangas Province and elsewhere forced rural Filipino populations into garrisoned camps under Gen. J. Franklin Bell. Disease, starvation, and overcrowding killed tens of thousands. The U.S. had condemned identical Spanish tactics in Cuba only three years earlier as a justification for the Spanish–American War.

III. World War II (1941–1945)

The American war against fascism remains, in the broad sweep, a war the United States was morally and strategically right to fight. That does not exempt specific incidents and policy decisions from the law of armed conflict. The cases below are on the record; the legal characterization of some, particularly the strategic bombing campaign, remains contested in international law scholarship.

Biscari Massacre (1943)

Chenogne Massacre (1945)

On January 1, 1945, soldiers of the 11th Armored Division shot approximately 60 surrendered German prisoners outside the Belgian village of Chenogne, in reprisal for the Malmédy massacre committed by Waffen-SS forces against American POWs two weeks earlier. The incident was internally recorded but no one was ever court-martialed. The Inspector General investigation was closed without charges.

Dachau Reprisals (1945)

On April 29, 1945, U.S. troops of the 45th Infantry Division liberated Dachau concentration camp. Encountering what they found, railcars of corpses, mass graves, surviving prisoners in skeletal condition, some American soldiers executed an estimated 30 to 50 SS guards who had surrendered. Gen. George Patton, then commanding Seventh Army, ordered all charges dropped and the investigation papers destroyed.

Strategic Bombing of Japanese Cities (1944–1945)

Under Gen. Curtis LeMay, U.S. Army Air Forces conducted a campaign of low-altitude incendiary bombing against more than 60 Japanese cities. The deadliest air raid of the war was not Hiroshima. It was the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9–10, 1945 (Operation Meetinghouse), in which an estimated 100,000 civilians were killed in a single night, and roughly one million more were wounded or made homeless. Mass deliberate targeting of civilian residential districts with incendiary weapons is, under any modern reading of the laws of armed conflict, a war crime. LeMay himself reportedly told an aide, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945)

The Unit 731 Immunity Deal (1945–1948)

U.S. occupation authorities granted immunity from prosecution to members of Japan’s Unit 731, the Imperial Army biological warfare program that conducted lethal experiments on Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Allied POWs, killing thousands, in exchange for transfer of their research data to the U.S. Army at Camp Detrick, Maryland. The Soviet Union prosecuted twelve Unit 731 personnel at the 1949 Khabarovsk trials. The United States prosecuted none. This is preserved in the U.S. National Archives and was confirmed by the 1999 final report of the Interagency Working Group on Nazi War Criminal Records.

Japanese American Internment (1942–1946)

Executive Order 9066 authorized the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of them U.S. citizens, in concentration camps across the western United States. The U.S. government formally apologized and paid reparations under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan. The original Supreme Court decision upholding the policy, Korematsu v. United States, was formally repudiated by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii (2018).

IV. The Korean War (1950–1953)

The Korean War remains the most under-investigated major American conflict. The South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2005, registered more than 200 cases of alleged large-scale civilian killings by U.S. forces between 1950 and 1951, mostly involving air attacks. The 1999 Pulitzer-winning Associated Press investigation by Sang-hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley, and Martha Mendoza forced the first official U.S. acknowledgment.

No Gun Ri Massacre (1950)

The Muccio letter is the key document. Its existence proved a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching civilians, not an isolated panic at one bridge. The Pentagon excluded it from its investigative report.

Air Campaign Against North Korea (1950–1953)

U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay (the same commander who oversaw the firebombing of Japan) directed a sustained strategic bombing campaign against North Korea. By LeMay’s own later admission to the Office of Air Force History, the campaign destroyed every city of significant size in the North, killing what he estimated at 20 percent of the North Korean population. U.S. forces also bombed major hydroelectric dams in 1953, with the explicit purpose of destroying rice cultivation, an attack on the means of feeding the civilian population. No prosecutions.

V. The Vietnam War (1955–1975)

Vietnam produced the fullest record of U.S. battlefield criminality in modern American history. The Army’s own Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, a Pentagon task force whose files were declassified and reported by the Toledo Blade and the Los Angeles Times in 2003–2006, substantiated more than 300 specific allegations of war crimes by U.S. personnel.

My Lai Massacre (1968)

Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., who landed his observation helicopter between U.S. troops and Vietnamese civilians and ordered his door gunners to fire on Americans if they continued the killing, was for decades publicly vilified by elements of Congress and the Army. He was not awarded the Soldier’s Medal until 1998, thirty years after the events.

Tiger Force Atrocities (1967)

Tiger Force, a 45-man reconnaissance platoon of the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, killed an unknown number of unarmed Vietnamese civilians over a seven-month campaign in 1967. The Army Criminal Investigation Division substantiated 18 specific atrocities, including the killing of farmers in their fields, the execution of detainees, the mutilation of corpses (collection of ears was recorded), and the throwing of grenades into bunkers sheltering women and children. The investigation, completed in 1975, was buried by the Pentagon for nearly three decades. It was exposed in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Toledo Blade series of October 2003. No one was ever prosecuted.

Operation Speedy Express (1968–1969)

The 9th Infantry Division’s pacification campaign in the Mekong Delta, commanded by Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, reported more than 10,000 enemy killed against the recovery of fewer than 750 weapons, a ratio that internal Army documents and a 1971 Newsweek investigation indicated reflected the systematic killing of unarmed civilians counted as enemy dead in body-count metrics. A 2003 declassification of the Army’s own internal report by Col. Henry Tufts estimated that as many as 5,000–7,000 of those killed may have been civilians. No senior officer was prosecuted. Ewell was promoted.

Phoenix Program (1965–1972)

A CIA-coordinated counterinsurgency program targeting the “Viet Cong infrastructure” through capture, interrogation, and assassination. According to testimony by program director William Colby to Congress in 1971, the program “neutralized” over 81,000 people; of those, more than 26,000 were killed. Independent estimates of those killed run substantially higher. Multiple participants subsequently testified that the program operated as a death-squad operation in practice, with quotas, fabricated denunciations, and the routine killing of detainees during “interrogation.”

Secret Bombing of Cambodia and Laos (1965–1973)

The United States dropped more than 2.7 million tons of ordnance on Laos, making it, on a per-capita basis, the most heavily bombed country in history, and more than 500,000 tons on Cambodia, in a campaign that President Nixon and Henry Kissinger concealed from Congress until exposed by the New York Times in 1969 and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1973. Civilian deaths from the Cambodia bombing alone are estimated at 50,000 to 150,000. Unexploded ordnance still kills Laotian and Cambodian farmers and children today.

Agent Orange and Chemical Warfare

U.S. forces sprayed approximately 20 million gallons of herbicides, principally Agent Orange, contaminated with the dioxin TCDD, over South Vietnam, Laos, and parts of Cambodia from 1962 to 1971. The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates 3 million Vietnamese have suffered illnesses from exposure, including hundreds of thousands of children born with birth defects. The United States compensated American veterans exposed to Agent Orange (after years of litigation) but, for more than fifty years, has refused to acknowledge legal liability to Vietnamese victims.

VI. The Cold War in Latin America (1954–1990)

The U.S. role in Latin American atrocities is largely indirect: training, funding, arming, and providing intelligence cover for foreign militaries and paramilitary forces that committed massacres of enormous scale. Under U.S. law and the doctrine of command responsibility, indirect participation is not automatically exculpatory. Multiple of the units involved were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001).

El Mozote Massacre (1981)

Guatemala (1981–1983)

During the dictatorship of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, whom Ronald Reagan in 1982 described as “a man of great personal integrity” who was getting “a bum rap,” the Guatemalan army carried out what the 1999 U.N.-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission later legally characterized as acts of genocide against the Maya Ixil people. An estimated 626 villages were destroyed; more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared over the broader civil war, the vast majority by state forces and U.S.-aligned paramilitaries. Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide by a Guatemalan court in 2013; the verdict was overturned on procedural grounds days later; he died in 2018 mid-retrial. The CIA’s long-running covert support for the Guatemalan military, including during the Ixil campaign, is laid out in declassified cables released to the National Security Archive.

The Contras and Nicaragua (1981–1990)

The Reagan administration funded, armed, and trained the Nicaraguan Contras, in part through the illegal arms-for-hostages scheme exposed in 1986 as the Iran-Contra affair, in their war against the Sandinista government. The Contras carried out systematic attacks on civilian targets including schools, clinics, and agricultural cooperatives, recorded by Americas Watch and Amnesty International. In Nicaragua v. United States of America (1986), the International Court of Justice ruled that the United States had violated international law through its support of the Contras and its mining of Nicaraguan harbors, and ordered reparations. The United States refused to accept the court’s jurisdiction and vetoed United Nations Security Council enforcement of the judgment.

Operation Just Cause: Panama (1989)

The U.S. invasion of Panama to remove Manuel Noriega included the bombing and ground assault of El Chorrillo, a poor Panama City neighborhood adjacent to Noriega’s headquarters. U.S. government figures place Panamanian civilian deaths at roughly 200; independent investigations and a 1995 U.N. Truth Commission for Panama put the toll at 300 to over 1,000. The neighborhood was largely destroyed by fire. No U.S. compensation has ever been paid.

VII. The Gulf War (1990–1991)

The Amiriyah Shelter Bombing (1991)

Highway of Death (1991)

On the nights of February 26–27, 1991, U.S. and coalition aircraft attacked Iraqi forces and accompanying civilians retreating from Kuwait along Highway 80. Reporting by photographers including Kenneth Jarecke and on-the-ground journalists recorded miles of incinerated vehicles. The number of dead is disputed; estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. The carnage prompted unease within the U.S. command itself; it was among the factors that led Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and President George H.W. Bush to halt the ground war after 100 hours, amid questions over whether the attacks on retreating, no-longer-combatant forces crossed into hors de combat protection.

Depleted Uranium

U.S. forces fired an estimated 320 metric tons of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq and Kuwait during the Gulf War, and substantially more in the 2003 invasion. Iraqi medical literature and World Health Organization data have recorded sustained elevated rates of childhood cancer and congenital birth defects in cities including Fallujah and Basra. The U.S. has refused to acknowledge a causal link.

VIII. The Global War on Terror (2001–Present)

The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the global campaign of targeted killing in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and the operations of the CIA Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program produced the best-recorded battlefield criminality of any American conflict to date: courts-martial, two Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reports (one of which remains classified), the Pentagon’s own internal civilian casualty reports, federal court rulings, and an unprecedented volume of leaked official records.

Abu Ghraib (2003–2004)

The CIA Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program (2002–2009)

The 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA Torture (the “Torture Report”), of which only a 525-page executive summary has ever been declassified, in December 2014, details the CIA’s program of secret detention sites (“black sites”) and “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding, walling, confinement in coffin-sized boxes, sleep deprivation up to 180 hours, ice-water immersion, threats against family members, and rectal feeding. The Committee’s majority findings concluded that the techniques were more brutal than previously disclosed, did not produce unique intelligence, and that the CIA repeatedly lied to Congress, the White House, and the Department of Justice about both efficacy and methods.

Detainee Gul Rahman froze to death at the “Salt Pit” black site in Afghanistan in November 2002, chained to a concrete floor in his underwear. No CIA officer has ever been criminally charged for any death in the program. Two psychologists who designed the program, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, settled a civil suit brought on behalf of detainees in 2017 for an undisclosed sum without admission of liability.

Guantanamo Bay (2002–Present)

The United States has held approximately 780 men at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Of those, approximately 9 died in custody. Of the rest, the vast majority were released without charge after years, in some cases nearly two decades, of detention. As of mid-2026, a small number of detainees remain. Military commissions established to prosecute the cases have repeatedly been ruled to have used evidence obtained by torture inadmissible (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 2006; Boumediene v. Bush, 2008).

Haditha (2005)

Mahmudiyah Rape and Killings (2006)

On March 12, 2006, five soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division attacked the home of the al-Janabi family south of Baghdad. They gang-raped 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, then shot her, her parents, and her six-year-old sister. They set Abeer’s body on fire to destroy evidence. Steven Green was convicted in federal court (after his discharge) and sentenced to life in prison; he died by suicide in prison in 2014. Three other soldiers were court-martialed and convicted; sentences ranged from 90 to 110 years, with parole eligibility after 10. One soldier received a 27-month sentence in exchange for testimony.

Nisour Square: Blackwater (2007)

On September 16, 2007, Blackwater Worldwide contractors guarding a State Department convoy opened fire in Nisour Square, Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqi civilians, including a 9-year-old boy, and wounding 20 others. The FBI investigation found that at least 14 of the killings were unprovoked. Four contractors were convicted in U.S. federal court: one of murder, three of voluntary manslaughter and other charges. All four were pardoned by President Donald Trump in December 2020.

Kandahar Massacre: Robert Bales (2012)

On the night of March 11, 2012, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales left his Forward Operating Base near Belambai, Kandahar Province, walked to two nearby villages, and over the course of several hours shot and stabbed 16 Afghan civilians to death, including 9 children, and burned several of the bodies. Bales pleaded guilty in 2013 in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. He is serving life without parole at U.S. Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth.

Kunduz Hospital Airstrike (2015)

On October 3, 2015, a U.S. AC-130 gunship attacked the Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 42 patients and staff, including children and medical personnel mid-surgery, over a sustained 30-minute attack despite repeated calls from MSF to U.S. and NATO command identifying the building as a functioning hospital. A U.S. military investigation called the strike a “tragic and avoidable accident.” Sixteen service members received administrative discipline. None were court-martialed or criminally charged. MSF’s call for an independent International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission inquiry was refused by the U.S.

Baghuz Airstrike (2019)

Kabul Drone Strike on the Ahmadi Family (2021)

The Drone Campaign at Large (2002–Present)

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation, and Airwars have, between them, attempted the most rigorous independent tracking of U.S. drone strikes outside declared war zones: in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Total recorded civilian deaths run into the low thousands, including hundreds of children. Of particular note: the “signature strike” doctrine, which authorized killing based on patterns of behavior rather than positive identification, and the practice of “double-tap” strikes that targeted first responders to an initial drone attack, the latter being a textbook war crime under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which protects medical personnel.

One corner of this ledger did see a rare assertion of congressional war powers. As of early 2026, the 1991 Gulf War and 2002 Iraq authorizations for the use of military force have been repealed, folded into the fiscal 2026 defense bill that President Trump signed in December 2025, the first time Congress has clawed back a war authorization since the 1971 repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The 2001 authorization that still underwrites the wider post-9/11 campaign of targeted killing remains in force.

The Pattern

Run the inventory in aggregate and the pattern is not an accident. In nearly every case, the same sequence repeats:

• Low-ranking personnel are prosecuted, if anyone is.
• Field-grade officers receive administrative discipline or letters of reprimand.
• General officers and policymakers are not investigated.
• Sentences for those convicted are routinely reduced, by appellate courts, by service secretaries, by presidents.
• Investigations begin only after exposure by external journalism or whistleblowers.
• Initial U.S. military statements are almost always wrong, and always in the direction of minimization.
• Apologies, when offered, are personal (“regret,” “condolences”) rather than institutional.
• Reparations to non-U.S. victims are rare and small. Reparations to U.S. veterans of the same operations are also rare and small.

The harder question is whether a country can sustain the kind of military empire the United States has run for the better part of a century without producing this ledger. The evidence in front of us points one direction: not toward a string of bad apples but toward a structure that manufactures impunity and then launders it through investigations built to find no one responsible. You cannot honestly weigh whether that structure is worth its cost until you have the ledger in front of you. Now you do.