List of atrocities committed by the United States of America

This is an ever-growing list of atrocities committed by the United States of America. What constitutes an atrocity does not have a universally accepted definition. However, a framework used by the United Nations describes atrocity crimes as a violation of international criminal law that falls under the historically three legally defined international crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Crimes against humanity are certain acts that are purposefully committed by a state, or on behalf of a state, as part of a widespread or systematic policy, typically directed against civilians, in times of war or peace. Ethnic cleansing is considered by many to constitute an atrocity crime. Mass killing is a concept which has been proposed by genocide scholars who wish to define incidents of non-combat killing which are perpetrated by a government or a state.

There is little consensus on how to officially and universally define such acts, and in many cases there can be overlap in the conditions and contexts where such acts occur, making it possible to classify them in multiple ways. Therefore a broad term such as "atrocity" may be used to describe a wide variety of acts which, when examined individually, may be described with more precision in their proper context.

North America

North America is part of the American continent and is commonly defined as the landmass north of the Colombia-Panama border and includes the islands of the Caribbean. The current territory of the United States is located primarily in North America, although some of its currently claimed territory, such as Hawaii, is located in Oceania. The activity of the United States in North America is characterized by its violent settler-colonial expansion across the continent in which acts of genocide against the indigenous North American people were committed to secure ever-increasing amounts of territory and natural resources for the Euro-American settlers, as well as the continued occupation and degradation of their land by the U.S. settler-state. Another key characteristic of the U.S. influence in North America is the legacy of U.S. involvement in and perpetuation of the Atlantic slave trade, a lengthy period in which enslaved African peoples were brought to the Americas to be used and exchanged as property by Euro-American settlers in order to work on the lands which were being methodically wrested from the indigenous population. The United States is also responsible for many atrocities outside of its present-day borders, largely in the Central American and Caribbean regions, which, along with many South American countries, have seen numerous campaigns of political destabilization, acts of terror, and economic and political coercion perpetrated against them by the United States regime.

Genocide of indigenous peoples of the United States

The territory of what today is the United States was occupied by European colonizers since 1492, and through brutal violence realized the slavery and extermination of indigenous peoples. Together with disease spread by Europeans, up to 95% of the indigenous populations of the Americas were exterminated. This systematic brutal violence against indigenous peoples would later express itself ideologically in the United States through "manifest destiny", which was the belief that the United States was meant to expand its territory through conquest.

Indian Removal Act

A map of the process of Indian Removal, 1830–1838. Oklahoma is depicted in light yellow-green.

On March 28, 1830, US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, beginning the forced relocation of thousands of Native Americans in what became known as the Trail of Tears. The forced relocation placed more than 25 million acres of fertile, lucrative farmland into the hands of the mostly white Euro-American settlers in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. More than 46,000 Native Americans were forced by the US military and other settler groups to abandon their homes and relocate to "Indian Territory" which eventually became the state of Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died on the journey from various causes, including disease, starvation, and exposure to extreme weather.

In the case of the Cherokee, removal was implemented by 7,000 troops commanded by General Winfield Scott. Scott's men moved through Cherokee territory, forcing many people from their homes at gunpoint. As many as 16,000 Cherokee were thus gathered into camps while their homes were plundered and burned by Euro-American settlers. Subsequently those refugees were sent west in 13 overland detachments of about 1,000 per group, the majority on foot, enduring inadequate food supplies, shelter, and clothing, suffering especially bad conditions after frigid weather arrived. Escorting troops refused to slow or stop so that the ill and exhausted could recover. Additionally, the refugees had to pay farmers for passing through lands, ferrying across rivers, and even for burying their dead.

California Genocide

In 1848, what is now California came under the rule of the United States, which was soon followed by the California genocide, in which the California settler-state and federal authorities incited, aided, and financed violence against the Native Californians. Between 1846 and 1873, it is estimated that non-Natives killed between 9,492 and 16,094 California Natives. Hundreds to thousands were additionally starved or worked to death. The California Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was enacted in 1850 (amended 1860, repealed 1863). This law provided for "apprenticing" or indenturing Indian children to Whites, and also punished "vagrant" Indians by "hiring" them out to the highest bidder at a public auction if the Indian could not provide sufficient bond or bail, effectively legalizing a form of slavery targeting Native Californians. In An American genocide: the United States and the California Indian catastrophe, 1846-1873, author Benjamin Madley writes that the "organized destruction of California's Indian peoples under US rule was not a closely guarded secret" and that "California newspapers frequently addressed, and often encouraged, what we would now call genocide, as did some state and federal employees." Madley also quotes US Indian Affairs commissioner John Collier as saying, "The world's annals contain few comparable instances of swift depopulation--practically, of racial massacre--at the hands of a conquering race."

In 1851, Peter Hardenman Burnett, California state’s first governor, spoke of the "Indian foe" in his second state of the state address, describing how there had been many calls "to resist and punish the attacks of the Indians upon our frontier". Acknowledging that it was expected that the Indians would defend their own land, he added that "Our American experience has demonstrated the fact, that the two races cannot live in the same vicinity in peace." He continued, saying " The white man, to whom time is money, and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property; and after being robbed a few times, he becomes desperate, and resolves upon a war of extermination. This is the common feeling of our people who have lived upon the Indian frontier. [...] That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert."

Governor Burnett set aside state money to arm local militias against Native Americans. The state, with the help of the U.S. Army, started assembling a massive arsenal. These weapons were then given to local militias, who were tasked with killing native people. State militias raided tribal outposts, shooting and sometimes scalping Native Americans. Soon, local settlers began to do the killing themselves. Local governments put bounties on Native American heads and paid settlers for stealing the horses of the people they murdered. Large massacres wiped out entire tribal populations. In 1850, for example, around 400 Pomo people, including women and children, were slaughtered by the U.S. Cavalry and local volunteers at Clear Lake north of San Francisco.

Long Walk of the Navajo

Navajo (Diné) captives under guard at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, ca. 1864–1868, after having their homes destroyed by U.S. settler forces and being forced to walk 300 miles (500 km) to the Bosque Redondo internment camp.

The Long Walk of the Navajo, also called the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo (Navajo: Hwéeldi), was the 1864 deportation and attempted ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people by the United States federal government. Prior to the Long Walk, famous "Indian fighter" of the U.S. army Kit Carson instituted a scorched-earth policy, burning Navajo fields and homes and stealing or killing their livestock. The Navajo were forced to surrender because of the destruction of their livestock and food supplies. Navajos were forced to walk from their land in what is now Arizona to eastern New Mexico. Some 53 different forced marches occurred between August 1864 and the end of 1866. Around 8,000 Navajo people were forced to make the journey, with many causalities along the way. Once they arrived at the concentration camp, inadequate amounts of food and supplies and multiple crop failures caused near starvation, and tensions were high between the Navajo and other people, including 500 Mescalero Apaches, who were being held there. According to an article in Navajo Times, "Two thousand Diné internees — one out of four — died there, of dysentery, exposure or starvation, and are buried in unmarked graves on the northern quadrant of the present 250-acre historic site". Due to the massive failure, unmanageability, and extremely poor living conditions of the camp, the surviving Navajo were allowed to walk back home after having been there for four years, after signing a treaty. The treaty held that they would not oppose the building of a railroad through their land, and that they would send their children to government boarding schools, a system for stripping them of their native culture and assimilating them into the U.S. settler-state.

Extermination of buffalo population

Mound of American bison skulls circa 1892.

Calculated actions on the part of the United States were taken to to destroy the North American buffalo population in order to subjugate Native people. A combination of commercial and recreational hunting, plus the actions of the US Army targeted the buffalo population and brought it to near extinction in the process of U.S. expansion across North America and the ongoing campaign to remove the indigenous peoples ways of life and means of survival. Without buffalo, important values, beliefs, practices, as well as the diets of Northern Great Plains Nations suffered incredible loss. Before European arrival in North America it is estimated that thirty to sixty million buffalo thrived on the Plains. However, by 1900, populations numbered only in the hundreds.

Massive settler hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake. The railroads began to advertise excursions for “hunting by rail,” where trains encountered massive herds alongside or crossing the tracks.  Hundreds of men aboard the trains climbed to the roofs and took aim, or fired from their windows. Settlers would take aim at the bison from their windows and shoot down several at a time. The hunting train would then slow to a stop for people to skin the animals for coats, or cut out their tongues for culinary delicacies in the cities, then leave the bison to rot.

General Phil Sheridan, one of the foremost "Indian fighters" in the U.S. Army, framed the slaughter of the buffalo as a way to disrupt Native economies, erode their independence, and end their ways of life by forcing Native people into agriculture through the total extermination of the buffalo, saying: "I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect upon the Indians, regarding it rather as a means of hastening their dependence upon products of the soil". In The Encyclopedia of Native American Economic History, the entry on the economic impact of the mass buffalo slaughter describes how through the deliberate destruction of the buffalo population, the Plains Indians populations were reduced to paupers as was intended by the policies of the U.S. settler state: "By the early 1880s, the U.S. Army's version of total war against the Plains Indians had reached its goal: the buffalo were nearly extinct. Ten years earlier, some of the Plains Indians still had an ample supply of food; by the early 1880s, they were reduced [...] to the condition of paupers, without food, shelter, clothing, or any of those necessities of life that came from the buffalo."

Asia

Korean War

See also: Republic of Korea#Misconduct and killing of civilians by U.S. forces during the war

"Napalm Jelly Bombs Prove a Blazing Success in Korea". April 1951 edition of "All Hands" U.S. Navy magazine. Napalm was used copiously by the U.S. throughout the Korean war.

During the Korean War, U.S. troops killed large numbers of Korean civilians and engaged in copious firebombing with napalm, and, as was eventually revealed through declassified documents, had at certain times a policy of deliberately firing on South Korean refugee groups approaching its lines. In an article of the Asia-Pacific Journal, Kim Dong choon writes that "Few are aware that the Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War". There were also incidents of U.S. pilots ignoring their orders to stay within Korea and flying beyond its borders, strafing military targets in China and the Soviet Union.

In the words of the United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay, commander of the U.S.'s Strategic Air Command:

[W]e went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too. We even burned down Pusan—an accident, but we burned it down anyway. The Marines started a battle down there with no enemy in sight. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?

During the Korean War, The United States dropped "635,000 tons of bombs in Korea (not counting 32,557 tons of napalm), compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific Theater in World War II" and "at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North's twenty-two major cities were obliterated." According to U.S. Naval Captain Walter Karig, in his book Battle Report: The War in Korea, a compilation from official sources:

[W]e killed civilians, friendly civilians, and bombed their homes; fired whole villages with the occupants--women and children and ten times as many hidden Communist soldiers--under showers of napalm, and the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.

An anonymous U.S. officer's account of events of was aired to the U.S. public on the U.S. Defense Department radio program called "Time for Defense" during a time when the war was still being referred to as a "police action". In the call that aired on the broadcast, the U.S. officer states, "What makes it so difficult over here is that you can't tell the damn North Koreans from the South Koreans, and that's caused a lot of slaughter."(audio file)

Left: An unsigned Air Force memo from July 25, 1950 seeking alternatives on the policy of "strafing civilian refugees" which "is sure to receive wide publicity and may cause embarrassment to the U.S. Air Force and U.S. government." Right: A July 26, 1950 letter from the American embassy to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State saying, "If refugees do appear from the north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot."

Emblematic of the U.S. policy of firing on groups of refugees is the incident of the Nogeun-ri massacre, also written as No Gun Ri (Korean: 노근리). In July 1950, American soldiers "machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge" and according to accounts that came out after this story was revealed in 1999, U.S. veterans spoke of 100 or 200 or "hundreds" dead and described "a preponderance of women, children and old men among the victims", while Korean witnesses said 300 were killed at the bridge and 100 in a preceding air attack. One Korean witness commented that "the American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies." One of the U.S. veterans described it as "wholesale slaughter."

Although this incident had gone unacknowledged for decades, in 2001 the U.S. Army acknowledged the killings, calling them a "regrettable accompaniment to a war." In 2006, it was revealed that among incriminating documents omitted from the 2001 U.S. report, there was a declassified letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea, dated the day the Nogeun-ri killings began, saying the Army had adopted a policy of firing on refugee groups approaching its lines. U.S. veterans have also described other refugee killings as well, when U.S. commanders ordered their troops to shoot civilians as a defense against disguised enemy soldiers, and declassified U.S. Air Force reports from mid-1950 show that pilots also sometimes deliberately attacked "people in white," (referring to white peasant garb) apparently suspecting disguised North Korean soldiers were among them.

Vietnam War

See: Vietnam War#U.S. war crimes