Summary Execution Quotes

Our men ... have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later... stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses

Several loafers were lynched in Natchez last week upon various charges instituted by the Kangaroo court. The times grow warm; we can see another storm coming, not unlike that which prevailed in the days of the Murrel excitement. In Natchez, as in New Orleans, they are driving away all of the free negroes. What is a Kangaroo court, neighbor?

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.

Root out the counterrevolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps... Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.

Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy but also in order to shake up our own ranks, to show them that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin.

[Madness] happened so frequently. I think what I was most maddest about - and it's in the book [Speaking Freely: A Memoir] - when the House and the Senate, back in 1984, were debating a bill that would - at least delay and maybe stop some of the ex - summary execution of disabled children - infants. And the Down syndrome kids and other kids had been, in some cases, routinely let die, to use the euphemism.

The terrorist war has a particular difficulty, which is that the temptation to break the rules -- to torture, to execute in a summary way, to assassinate, etc., all the tools of dirty war -- are almost inevitable in a terrorist war, partly because in a terrorist war there is a fundamental erasing of the boundary between war and crime…. once you're fighting people you don't accept are also enemy combatants, once you make them illegitimate the way the administration has declared our enemies in the terrorist war illegitimate, then anything is possible. And I see a kind of moral disaster.

A fellow who squats down on his knees to clean your boots at a café or in the street is bound to be a communist, so why not shoot him right away and be done with it. There is no need for a trial. His guilt is self evident.

Out here, due process is a bullet.

Wherever there is evidence of a considerable number of partisan groups a proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the event of an act of violence being committed these men will be shot.

Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.

By this flexible method a victorious nation may convict and execute any and all leaders of a vanquished foe, depending on the prevailing degree of vengeance and the absence of any objective judicial review.

Your mother all but accused me of something that is, among my kind, the highest crime a man can commit. There is no trial, only punishment, because it is considered better to let an innocent man die than let a guilty one live." (Page 79.)