United States Department of Defense

The U.S. Department of Defense oversees the country’s armed forces and appears in this archive in connection with two episodes decades apart: the abuse of detainees at a U.S.-run prison in Iraq, and a large-scale herbicide program during the Vietnam War.

Role in Documented Cases

In 2004, photographs surfaced showing U.S. Army military police personnel abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, including forced nudity, physical assault, and staged humiliation. An internal Army investigation led by Major General Antonio Taguba, completed in early 2004 and later leaked to the press, found that military police had committed “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” of detainees. Separately, between 1962 and 1971 the U.S. military conducted Operation Ranch Hand, spraying herbicides — most notably Agent Orange, which contained the contaminant dioxin (TCDD) — over large areas of Vietnam to strip forest cover and destroy crops. The program’s long-term health effects on U.S. veterans and the Vietnamese population became the subject of extensive scientific and legal scrutiny in the decades that followed.

Accountability

Courts-martial arising from Abu Ghraib resulted in convictions of a number of low-ranking soldiers, including Specialist Charles Graner, who received the longest sentence of ten years; no officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel was criminally convicted in connection with the abuse, and human-rights organizations argued that accountability stopped short of the command decisions and detention policies that shaped conditions at the prison. On Agent Orange, U.S. veterans pursued a class-action lawsuit against herbicide manufacturers that was settled in 1984 for $180 million, and in 1991 Congress passed the Agent Orange Act, establishing a presumptive service connection between herbicide exposure and a list of specified diseases, entitling qualifying veterans to disability compensation and care through the Department of Veterans Affairs. The U.S. government has not established a comparable compensation program for Vietnamese civilians affected by the spraying.

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