The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (VWCWG) was a Pentagon task force set up in the wake of the

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and its media disclosure. The goal of the VWCWG was to attempt to ascertain the veracity of emerging claims of war crimes by U.S. armed forces in Vietnam allegedly committed during the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam a ...

period. The investigation compiled over 9,000 pages of investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military officers, indicating that 320 alleged incidents had factual basis.Civilian Killings Went Unpunished
by

Nick Turse Nick Turse (born 1975) is an American investigative journalist, historian, and author. He is the associate editor and research director of the blog TomDispatch and a fellow at The Nation Institute. Education Turse earned an MA in history from R ...

and Deborah Nelson,

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...

, August 6, 2006

Working Group Files

The group's files document 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...

investigators—not including the 1968

. The documents are housed by the United States

National Archives and Records Administration The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an " independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It ...

(NARA) and were declassified in the mid-1990s. Journalists such as Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson have written about the files, using them to claim that atrocities were more extensive than had been officially acknowledged.

Declassification and access

In 1990 Kali Tal, the editor of a small-circulation journal called ''Vietnam Generation'', was tipped off to the existence of the Vietnam Working Group records by an archivist at NARA. She sent in a

Freedom of Information Act Freedom of Information Act may refer to the following legislations in different jurisdictions which mandate the national government to disclose certain data to the general public upon request: * Freedom of Information Act 1982, the Australian act * ...

(FOIA) request and eventually received access to some of the records in 1992. After viewing them, she wrote a brief article about their content in a ''Vietnam Generation'' newsletter, but did not have the resources to pursue the matter. The records were declassified in 1994, after 20 years as required by the FOIA, and relocated to the National Archives in

College Park, Maryland College Park is a city in Prince George's County, Maryland, United States, and is approximately four miles (6.4 km) from the northeast border of Washington, D.C. The population was 34,740 at the 2020 United States Census. It is best known ...

, where they went largely unnoticed.

, a freelance

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...

, rediscovered the archive while researching his

doctoral dissertation A thesis ( : theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: ...

for the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. He managed to examine most of the files, and obtained copies of about 3,000 pages—representing roughly a third of the total—before government officials removed them from the public shelves in 2002, stating they contained personal information that was exempt from the FOIA.

''Los Angeles Times'' exposure

Nick Turse collaborated with

Deborah Nelson Deborah Nelson is a Pulitzer prize-winning freelance journalist at Reuters and the Associate Professor of Investigative Reporting at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Nelson earned her B.S. in Journalism from N ...

, a former staff writer and current

Washington D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...

investigative editor for the ''

'', to employ these documents to form the core of a series of articles. They were augmented by Army

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records in the National Archives;

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and Army Criminal Investigation Division *(CID) records; documents shared by military veterans; and case files and related records in the Col. Henry Tufts Archive at the

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; as well as interviews with participants, witnesses, survivors and former Army officials in both the United States and Vietnam. While the archive contains 320 substantiated incidents, the records also contain allegations of more than 500 atrocities that investigators could not prove or were otherwise discounted. At 9,000 pages, the archive is the largest collection of such documents to have surfaced to date. It includes investigation files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for senior military officers. In total, the documents describe a seemingly endemic violent minority within U.S. Army units throughout the Southeast Asian theater during this period, in contrast to the official picture of "rogue units", with widespread duplicity at various levels of the command structure. This official documentation lends credence to widespread anecdotal evidence as presented by unofficial investigations of the time, such as the

Russell Tribunal The Russell Tribunal, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal, Russell–Sartre Tribunal, or Stockholm Tribunal, was a private People's Tribunal organised in 1966 by Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner, and ...

, the National Veterans Inquiry, the Citizens Commission of Inquiry, and the Winter Soldier Investigation. They also were used for a book by Nelson entitled ''The War Behind Them'', which includes stories about how the interviews were conducted, transcripts, and descriptions of travels to Vietnam for further investigations. One interviewee was

Lawrence Wilkerson Lawrence B. Wilkerson (born June 15, 1945) is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since the end of his military career, Wilkerson has criticized many aspects of the Iraq ...

, who described the situation surrounding '

free fire zone A freedom zone to fire in U.S. military parlance is a fire control measure, used for coordination between adjacent combat units. The definition used in the Vietnam War by U.S. troops may be found in field manual FM 6-20: :A specific designated a ...

s'.

Partial list of substantiated cases

*Seven previously unacknowledged massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died. *Seventy-eight other attacks on

noncombatant Non-combatant is a term of art in the law of war and international humanitarian law to refer to civilians who are not taking a direct part in hostilities; persons, such as combat medics and military chaplains, who are members of the belligerent a ...

s in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted. *One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers

torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogational torture, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. definitions of tortur ...

d civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock (sometimes using

Field telephone Field telephones are telephones used for military communications. They can draw power from their own battery, from a telephone exchange (via a central battery known as CB), or from an external power source. Some need no battery, being sound-powere ...

s). Two hundred and three soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners were found to warrant formal charges after investigation, and were subsequently referred to the soldiers' superiors for official action. Of the 203 cases, 57 of them stood a

court martial A court-martial or court martial (plural ''courts-martial'' or ''courts martial'', as "martial" is a postpositive adjective) is a military court or a trial conducted in such a court. A court-martial is empowered to determine the guilt of memb ...

. Only 23 were convicted, of whom 14 received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years; most received significant reductions on appeal. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all. The stiffest sentence went to a

military intelligence Military intelligence is a military discipline that uses information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to assist commanders in their decisions. This aim is achieved by providing an assessment of data from a ...

interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967. The records show that he served seven months of a 20-year term.

Preventing communication to Congress

The VWCWG also tried to intercept communications by U.S. officers in the field revealing atrocities by U.S. forces to prevent them reaching Congress.Los Angeles Times, 6 Aug. 2006
"Civilian Killings Went Unpunished"
/ref>

References

External links

Vietnam - The War Crimes Files ''
\
''Permanent Mirror''
'

'' coverage
''The Secret History of the Vietnam War''
Interview with Nick Turse detailing the discovery {{DEFAULTSORT:Vietnam War Crimes Working Group Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War Vietnam War crimes United States military law United States Army in the Vietnam War Torture in Vietnam