Silence is Not so Secretive: History of American War Crimes

During the Philippine-American War, from 1899 to 1913,  indiscriminately shot, g  thousands of women and children. Brutal dehumanization took place, in which Americans compared Filipinos to animals. This was the American justification for committing the war crime of killing citizens. The American military formed concentration camps for Filipino civilians across the Philippines, mainly in the Batangas and Laguna provinces, in which many more were starved and killed via various illnesses. [2] [3]  

In the American occupation of Haiti, lasting nineteen years from 1915 to 1934, the occupation forces brought their racist views with them to the Black Haitian population, bringing back corvée–a form of forced, unpaid labor. Under corvée, poorer civilians could be forced to work on American projects. Anyone who tried to escape the corvée was murdered. [4]

During World War II, starting in 1942, per President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066,  120,000 Japanese Americans, 11,00 German Americans and 3,000 Italian Americans inside the country were rounded up and put in internment camps. The conditions in these camps were harsh and cramped with minimal privacy, where they were subjected to forced labor. [5] [6]  In North Korea, the U.S. bombed without distinction and killed almost 20% of the population, destroying civilian livelihoods, In Vietnam, the My Lai Massacre, where U.S. soldiers killed and raped hundreds of civilians. [7] [8]

Lastly, during the War on Terror, from 2001 to as recently as 2021, the U.S. committed abuses towards Middle Eastern and Southern Asian people. One of the infamous examples Abu Ghraib prison, in which prisoners were tortured and degraded by American soldiers. It wasn’t solely prisoners who were degraded and killed,– the most saddening example was the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, a fourteen year old Iraqi girl, The U.S. soldiers also murdered her mother, father and sister. [9]