List of US atrocities

The United States government has been involved in national and international atrocities at various points throughout its history. These include genocide, bombings, massacres, systematic use of torture, imperialist geopolitical practice, and so on. The following is a list of known atrocities committed by US authorities.

Imperialism

The US empire currently maintains an imperialist network of over 800 military bases in 70 countries. (For comparison, all other countries combined have only 30 bases)

Middle East

In 1949, the US aided a Syrian coup d'état. The democratically elected government of Shukri al-Quwatli was overthrown by a junta led by the Syrian Army chief of staff at the time, Husni al-Za'im,who became President of Syria on 11 April 1949. The exact nature of US involvement in that coup is still highly controversial. However, it is well documented that the construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which had been held up in the Syrian parliament, was approved by Za'im just over a month after the coup.
In 1953, the CIA in Iran overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo. After the initial coup failed and the Shah and his family fled to Italy, the CIA payed millions of dollars to bribe military officers and pay gangsters to unleash violence in the streets of Tehran.
In 1958, Eisenhower authorized Operation Blue Bat, an invasion of 14,000 US troops in the ongoing civil war in Lebanon. This was the first application of the Eisenhower Doctrine under which the U.S. announced that it would intervene to protect regimes it considered threatened by international communism. The goal of the operation was to bolster the pro-Western Lebanese government of President Camille Chamoun against internal opposition and threats from Syria and Egypt.
Since the 1960s, the US has given immense economic and military aid to Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has taken 100,000 - 200,000 lives. The US has used its UN veto power to block a two-state solution countless times.
From 1979-89, the CIA begins supplying arms and money ($630 million per year by 1987, and a total of 5-6 Billion USD) to factions fighting against the soviets in their invasion of afghanistan, In what was known as Operation Cyclone. the U.S. government secretly provided weapons and funding for the Mujahadin Islamic guerillas of Afghanistan fighting to overthrow the Afghan government and the Soviet military forces that supported it. Supplies were channeled through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan.[[[ Although Operation Cyclone officially ended in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, U.S. government funding for the Mujahadin continued through 1992. Fanatical extremists now possess state-of-the-art weaponry, including Sheik Abdel Rahman, and Osama Bin Laden, who were later responsible for the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center bombings in New York. The architect of the war, Zbigniew Brzezinski, an advisor to president carter, admitted in a 1998 interview with the Parisian publication Le Novel Observateur, confirmed that Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the Mujahadin against the soviet-supported Kabul government, before the soviet invasion.
In 1980, the US funded and sold weapons to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, hoping to destabilize the region and create a puppet regime favorable to US interests. Over 500,000 people died in the conflict.
In 1980, the US helped Turkish armed forces in the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, including supplying them with American-made Sikorski helicopters.
In 1988, a US navy cruise missile shot down Iran Flight 655, killing its 290 civilian passengers. In 1996 As part of the settlement, the US did not admit legal liability or formally apologize to Iran but agreed to pay on an ex gratia basis $61.8 million.
In 1990, The U.S. liberates Kuwait from Iraq in the Gulf War. Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was formerly backed by the US when his regime invaded Iran in 1980, and before that was hired by the CIA in a botched assassination attempt on the then Iraqi president. During this costly eight-year war, the CIA built up Hussein’s forces with sophisticated arms, intelligence, training and financial backing, cementing Hussein’s power at home, and allowing him to crush the many internal rebellions that erupted from time to time, sometimes with poison gas. 20,000–35,000 Iraqis were killed in the Gulf War, along with 75,000+ wounded. A vindictive U.N. embargo followed that several years later still denied Iraq the technological resources to recover its food production, medical services, and sanitation facilities. As late as 1993, CNN reported that nearly 300,000 Iraqi children were suffering from malnutrition. Deaths exceeded the normal rate by 125,000 yearly, mostly affecting ‘the poor, their infants, children, chronically ill, and elderly’. Iraqi citizens, who previously had enjoyed a decent living standard, were reduced to destitution.
Approximately 250,000[ of the 697,000 U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War are afflicted with an enduring chronic multi-symptom illness called Gulf War Syndrome. From 1995 to 2005, the health of combat veterans worsened in comparison with nondeployed veterans, with the onset of more new chronic diseases, functional impairment, repeated clinic visits and hospitalizations, chronic fatigue syndrome-like illness, posttraumatic stress disorder, and greater persistence of adverse health incidents.[. Suggested causes have included depleted uranium, sarin gas, smoke from burning oil wells, vaccinations, combat stress and psychological factors.
The September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, provoked an international military campaign of Middle East imperialism known as The War on Terror. Conflicts include the Nato led involvement in Afghanistan (2001–2014), the Insurgency in Yemen (1992–2015), the Iraq War (2003–2011), the War in North-West Pakistan (2004–present), and the International campaign against ISIL (2014–present). The enemy combatants of the war have mostly been people of the Middle East. Casualty numbers are in the millions, detailed here.
The attacks precipitated the signing into law in 2001 of the Patriot Act, which expanded the powers of the NSA to perform mass surveillance, allowed indefinite detention of immigrants, allowed warrant-less searching of phone and email records without a court order, . Thousands of people were jailed, and questioned under the new power the act granted to law enforcement agencies. Susan Lindauer, a congressional staffer turned activist, imprisoned from 2005-09 for violating the "acting as an agent of a foreign government" provision of the patriot act; the charges were later dropped after it was discovered no evidence ever existed. 1
Since 2001, many enemy combatants have been held at the Guantanamo bay detention camp, a prison camp in Cuba in which suspected enemies are jailed indefinitely without trial. Several inmates have been severely tortured, leading much of the world to decry its existence as a human rights abuse. The military acts as interrogators, prosecutors and defense counsel, judges, and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners. All trials are held in private. Trump has vowed to keep the prison open, saying, "[...] I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding... Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works... if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing to us." At least 108 detainees have died while in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo bay, with at least 20 being declared by the Army as murder.
On December 10, 2002, US military police, aided by the CIA, tortured and killed Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver, at Baghram prison, highlighting a scandal of torture and murder at the prison. Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell, and suspended by his wrists for four days. His arms became dislocated from their sockets, and flapped around limplywhenever guards collected him for interrogation. During his detention, Dilawar's legs were beaten to a pulp. They would have had to have been amputated because damage was so severe. The murder and US torture complex is chronicled in the 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.
Starting with the Iraq war, the US increasingly began contracting private mercenary companies to do military operations. These private companies are authorized by the US to use lethal force. Blackwater, one such company known for its ruthless reputation for killing civilians, has been involved in various scandals, such as in Fallujah, and Nisour square. Its founder, Erik Prince, has close ties to the Trump administration.
In april, 2004, the US military lied to the family of Pat Tillman, a famous American athlete turned soldier, surrounding his death by friendly fire, and used a fake heroic story about his death as a recruiting poster. The jingoistic media coverage was created by the spin of several top US generals and Bush administration officials, who dictated a memo about how best to handle the embarrassing death of such a high profile soldier. This is chronicled in the documentary, A Tillman Story.
On April 14, 2004, Lieutenant Ilario Pantano of the United States Marine Corps, killed two unarmed captives. Lieutenant Pantano claimed that the captives had advanced on him in a threatening manner. All charges were dropped, and he received an honorable discharge. 1
On May 20, 2004, A US airstrike killed 42 civilians attending a wedding, in the Mukaradeeb wedding party massacre. 1
In 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture (whitewashed as enhanced interrogation techniques), rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to public attention, revealing a systemic policy of torture during the Iraq war, primarily perpetrated by US Military police, and the CIA. Many of the torture techniques used were developed at Guantánamo detention centre, including prolonged isolation; sensory deprivation to induce psychosis, a sleep deprivation program whereby people were moved from cell to cell every few hours so they couldn’t sleep for days, weeks, even months, short-shackling in painful positions; nudity; extreme use of heat and cold; the use of loud music and noise and preying on phobias. Many, such as Manadel al-Jamadi, were tortured to death. 1
On November 19, 2005, a group of US marines killed 24 unarmed men, women and children in the city of Haditha in Western Iraq. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich admitted to telling his men to "shoot first and ask questions later". The eight marines were found not guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
Beginning in 2005, the U.S. government secretly encouraged and advised a Pakistani Balochi militant group named Jundullah that is responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran.[ ABC News learned from tribal sources that money for Jundullah was routed to the group through Iranian exiles. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture," according to Professor Vali Nasr.[ U.S. intelligence sources later claimed that the orchestration of Jundallah operations was, in actuality, an Israeli Mossad false flag operation that Israeli agents disguised to make it appear to be the work of American intelligence.[
On March 12, 2006, US Soldiers gang raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, and murdered her parents, and her six year old sister, in the Mahmudiyah rape and killings. 1
On March 15, 2006, 11 Iraqi civilians were bound and executed by US troops in the Ishaqi incident. 1
On April 26, 2006 in the Hamdania incident, US troops killed an unarmed civilian, staging a fake firefight to cover it up. Members of the squad shot the stolen AK-47 rifle into the air to make it sound like a firefight was occurring, and after the Iraqi man was dead, the Marines scattered the expended AK-47 brass next to the body, removed the plastic restraints, and placed the rifle next to the body.
On May 9, 2006, U.S. troops executed 3 male Iraqi detainees at the Muthana Chemical Complex, called the Iron Triangle Murders.
On July 12, 2007, US AH-64 Apache helicopters bombed and killed ~15 Iraqi civilians, including two reuters journalists, and wounding two children, in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad. The attacks received worldwide coverage following the leaking of 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage, in a video released by wikileaks titled collateral murder. 22-year-old American Army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning) was arrested for leaking the video, along with a video of another airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables, to WikiLeaks. She was being held in prison under the Espionage act, a law used to jail dissidents, intended to prohibit any interference with military operations, until early 2017. 1 On March 8, 2019, Manning was held in contempt of court by a United States District Court judge for refusing to testify to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning said she was objecting to the "secrecy of the grand jury process". Except for a brief period of release between May 9 and May 16, she continues to be held in the Alexandria City Jail until she agrees to testify. Julian Assange, the founder of wikileaks, has also been the target of the CIA, who (aided by a spanish security firm) continually spied on him while in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.
On September 16, 2007, employees of Blackwater (since renamed Academi), a private military company, killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 more in the Nisour Square massacre, revealing a wide-spread policy to employ and enable private security firms to use deadly force.
On July 6 2008, the US bombed a wedding party and killed 47 Afghan civilians in the Haska Meyna Wedding party airstrike. The first bomb hit a group of children who were ahead of the main procession, killing them instantly. A few minutes later, the aircraft returned and dropped a second bomb in the center of the group, killing a large number of women. The bride and two girls survived the second bomb, but were killed by a third bomb while trying to escape from the area. Hajj Khan, one of four elderly men who were escorting the party, stated that his grandson was killed and that there were body parts everywhere. 1
On 22 August 2008, A US airstrike killed ~90 civilians, mostly children, in the village of Azizabad, Afghanistan. 1
On 3 October 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130U gunship attacked and killed 42 people and wounded 30 more in the Kunduz Trauma Centre operated by Doctors Without Borders, in northern Afghanistan. The airstrike constitutes a war crime (attacks on hospitals are considered war crimes), and is the first instance of one Nobel peace prize winner (Obama) bombing and killing another (Doctors without borders). CNN and the New York Times deliberately obscured the US's responsibility for the bombing, with the headline, "US is blamed after bomb hits afghan hospital". 1,2
From 2000 up to the present day, the US has been carrying out a campaign of drone strikes and asassinations in the Middle East and Africa, including Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths, including women, children, and US citizens. 1 Drone strikes are used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill people the Obama administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. Drone strike targets are usually pinpointed through cell phone usage. The Obama asassination complex is detailed in the drone papers.
In 2010, Chelsea Manning's leak of the Iraq War Logs revealed US army reports on civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan; 66,081 out of 109,000 recorded deaths were civilians. They show that US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, and that US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill, and countless other atrocities.1
In 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with any crime, killing him with a September, 2011 drone strike. Two weeks later, a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen killed his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis. In January 2017, Trump ordered a SEAL strike, and reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar Awlaki, sister of the 16 year old killed by Obama. 1
US drone operator turned whistleblower Brandon Bryant told stories about his time as a drone operator in Afghanistan from 2006-2011. He estimates that he contributed directly to killing 13 people himself and says his squadron fired on 1,626 targets including women and children. He tells of one instance of killing a child, with his superiors telling him "it was a f**** dog, drop it". “That image on the screen is still in my head. Whenever I think about it, it still hurts me,” Mr Bryant said. “When I pulled the trigger, I knew that it was wrong. When the missile struck I knew in my soul I had become a murderer.” He tells of how his superiors would ridicule, punish, and threaten legal action against anyone who had misgivings about their orders. He believes that the US military is "worse than the nazis."
From 2011 up to the present day, the US ousted Mummar Gaddafi in Libya, and began conducting an extensive bombing campaign (>110 tomahawk cruise missiles) in the Libyan Civil Wars of 2011 and 2014. This includes 7,700 air strikes, resulting in 30,000 -100,000 deaths. Loyalist towns were bombed to rubble and ethnically cleansed, and the country is in chaos as Western-trained and armed Islamist militias seize territory and oil facilities and vie for power. The Misrata militia, trained and armed by Western special forces, is one of the most violent and powerful in the world.1 The country has since collapsed into a chaos of child soldiers, slavery, and violence between extremist groups, a haunting repetition of what US imperialism has left in its wake in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. An interview with Gaddafi's former spokesman about the US overthrow of Libya..
Since 2013, The US has intervened militarily in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, with airstrikes, naval bombardments, and funding and training Syrian Islamic and secular insurgents fighting to topple the Syrian government. Many have labeled the struggle as a proxy war between US and Russian interests in the Middle East, in a highly unstable region. Between 500-700 civilians , and over 50,000 ISIL militants and pro-bashad fighters have been killed. 1
In January 2015, the US killed 13-year-old Mohammed Tuaiman in Yemen with a drone strike. A month earlier, the guardian interviewed him, and he was quoted as saying: "“A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from them and some now have mental problems. They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep...In their eyes, we don’t deserve to live like people in the rest of the world and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain like all the other humans around the world.” In 2011 an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels.
In 2016, the US under Obama dropped 26,171 bombs in the Middle East and North Africa, up 3000 from the previous year. The countries bombed include Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia. He authorized 10 times more drone strikes than George W Bush. 1
On February 15th, 2017, US-backed Saudi planes bombed a funeral in Yemen, killing 5 women and wounding dozens more. In the 2015 - Present Yemeni Civil War, 16,200 people have been killed including 10,000 civilians, 3 million have been displaced and left homeless, and over 200,000 people are facing shortages of food, water and medicine. The US has used drone bombers in Yemen, and has supported Saudi interests in the region, with military contracts providing weapons and planes. The US has weapons contracts with Saudi Arabia valuing over $110 billion. In August 2018, Saudi planes bombed a school bus, killing 50, including 40 children, and wounding another 80.1, 2, 3
On March 17th, 2017, A US airstrike killed ~112 civilians in Mosul, Iraq. In response, US Defense Secretary James Mattis said, "There is no military force in the world that is proven more sensitive to civilian casualties." 1
On March 21st, 2017, A US airstrike killed at least 30 Syrian civilians in an airstrike on a school in the Raqqa province. The week before, 49 people were killed when US warplanes fired on a target in in the 2017 al-Jinah airstrike, a village in western Aleppo province. US officials said the attack had hit a building where al-Qaeda operatives were meeting, but residents said the warplanes had struck a mosque where hundreds of people had gathered for a weekly religious meeting. 1
On April 4th, 2017, following the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, Trump ordered an airstrike of 59 tomahawk cruise missiles (worth $70 million) fired at the Shayrat air base in Syria (one that Trump claims is the source of the chemical attack) in the 2017 Shayrat Missile Strike. This is the first attack by the US directly targeting Ba'athist Syrian government forces, who are closely allied with Russia. Russian Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev said the attack brought the U.S. "within an inch" of clashing with the Russian military, and could've sparked a nuclear war. The attack was praised by US politicians on both sides of the aisle, as well >30 countries. Over 700 children have been killed US coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014. The US conducted another airstrike against Syria on June 7th, 2017.1
Starting in June 2017, photos and videos from Syrian civilians in Raqqa showed that the US-backed coalition in Syria was illegally using white phosphorus in civilian areas. White phosphorus can burn human flesh down to the bone, and wounds can reignite up to days later. “No matter how white phosphorus is used, it poses a high risk of horrific and long-lasting harm in crowded cities like Raqqa and Mosul and any other areas with concentrations of civilians,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. One attack on an internet cafe killed at least 20 civilians, while other deaths are still being confirmed. One of those civilians killed was in the process of sending a report to Humans Rights Watch, when the cafe was struck. The US killed 273 syrian civilians in April, slightly more than the number killed by ISIS. A US attack in July killed another 50 civilians. In August, the US killed another 60+ civilians. On May 17th, 2020, the US firebombed over 200 acres of wheat fields in Syria, leaving many food insecure. 1,2,3
On April 14, 2018, the US, UK, and France launched 100 more missiles at 3 different targets in Syria, again claiming that the Syrian government used chemical attacks against its own citizens in douma as justification. On 10 April, the Syrian government again invited the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to send a team to investigate the sites of the alleged attacks. Trump, Macron, and May have all issued statements saying that this is not an intervention in the Syrian civil war. 1. In a leaked email in Nov, 2019, an OPCW whistleblower stated that the US fabricated the evidence, and used it justify the air-strike. 2
In early 2018, US Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher stabbed a defenseless teenage captive to death in Iraq. According to two SEAL witnesses, Gallagher said over the radio "he's mine" and walked up to the medic and prisoner, and without saying a word, killed the prisoner by stabbing him repeatedly with his hunting knife. Gallagher and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, then posed for photographs of them standing over the body with some other nearby SEALs. Gallagher then text messaged a friend in California a picture himself holding the dead captive's head by the hair with the explanation "Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.” After he was imprisoned, Gallagher's other crimes came to light: fellow soldiers said they witnessed Gallagher shooting and killing an unarmed old man in a white robe, as well as a young girl walking with other girls. Gallagher boasted that he averaged three kills a day over 80 days, including four women. In video interviews with investigators, multiple SEALs described how he would go on solo “gun runs,” emptying loads of heavy machine gun fire into neighborhoods with no apparent targets. “I think he just wants to kill anybody he can,” Corey Scott, a medic from the platoon, told Navy investigators. After his case went public, it became a conservative rallying cry: A website soliciting donations for his defense raised > $375k, and a prominent veterans’ apparel maker sold “Free Eddie” T-shirts. Spurred on by his family, 40 Republican members of Congress signed a letter in March calling for the Navy to free him, and soon after, US President Trump had him released from prison to house arrest. In July, 2019, he was acquitted of all charges. Gallagher was one of three military personnel accused or convicted of war crimes on whose behalf Trump had intervened to pardon or promote. Trump told a rally audience days after his intervention, "I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state." Gallagher has now started a chain of companies selling clothing and nutritional supplements.
In September 2019, the US killed at least 30 pine nut farmers, and injured 40 others via a drone attack in the nangarhar province in Afghanistan. Malik Rahat Gul, a tribal elder in Wazir Tangi, said the air raid happened at a time when tired workers, mainly daily wage earners, had gathered near their tent after harvesting pine nuts in a field nearby. "The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them". This marks the 18th year of war in Afghanistan.
On January 2nd, 2020, President Donald Trump ordered the drone assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani 2, in a blatant act of war against Iran. Soleimani was a beloved figure to the Iranian people, his death sending shockwaves among residents, and a 3-day national mourning period was declared. Hillary Mann Leverett, a former White House National Security official, said the killing of Soleimani was a "declaration of war" on Iran, and is "equivalent to the Iranians assassinating the US defence secretary". The drone attack was part of several targeted US airstrikes, and comes in the wake of turmoil following another series of US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria which killed 25 members of the Iraqi Kataib Hezbollah militia, after which outraged Iraqi protesters surrounded the US embassy in Baghdad. In response, the US blamed "Iranian infiltrators" for the embassy attack, and deployed an additional 750 troops, bolstering the 14k troops currently stationed in ~20 military bases surrounding Iran. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi militia commander, was also killed in a pre-dawn raid on the same day. That evening, another US airstrike in Iraq killed 6 people.