The Intercept, 7 October 2026
In the spring of 2023, (…) an Army veteran of the Afghanistan War walked into the (…) police headquarters in Banning, California […] and acknowledged, according to exclusive criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept, that he killed an unarmed man and wounded a woman (…) in Afghanistan’s Arghandab River Valley in 2010 (…). (…) There may also have been a baby or child present as well — CID’s redactions make it impossible to know for certain. (…) he said that he “needed to be held accountable for his actions.” He told CID that he had “committed a war crime.”
When investigations began, there were no unit records for this incident; “the company commander — by then a lieutenant colonel — said the incident did not sound familiar to him” while “others recalled the incident in detail but excused it.”
Army CID concluded — within six weeks — that there was not “probable cause to believe that any soldier committed the offense of murder.”
The report found:
A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents [caused by US personnel, not only in Afghanistan] found most have gone uninvestigated. (…) In the 151 cases in which investigators found probable cause that a crime had occurred, that the rules of engagement had been violated, or that a use of force hadn’t been justified, true accountability was rare. While 572 alleged perpetrators were involved in these cases, only 130 were convicted (…).
It concluded:
The rules of engagement in Afghanistan in 2010 were so lax that a man was killed for no reason and with no repercussions.
It was so unremarkable that no record of the engagement could be located. It was so commonplace that senior unit members couldn’t recall it.
It was so typical that only one man even thought to report it — and he waited 13 years.
It was so characteristic of U.S. military policy that no inquiry was conducted into the rules of engagement in force at the time.
And the incident was so in keeping with U.S. military tradition that, despite a murder confession and little question that an unarmed man was gunned down, Army CID and the 82nd Airborne’s chief of military justice quickly concluded there was no probable cause for charges, and the investigation was closed.
Revisions:
This article was last updated on 13 Oct 2026
