Scott Horton on a high horse at Balkanization and Huffpo, makes the case for drumhead trials and summary executions of unlawful combatants … although that isn’t exactly what he intended to do.
Horton, in a lofty, principled but accuracy challenged* review of “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” gets all George Washington on George Bush.
Well, at least we can assume Horton's on board with fighting domestic terrorism ... and tax cheats. I give you The Whiskey Rebellion - a great read if you care about taxes and governmental elitism.
In suppressing the rebellion, Washington and Hamilton disregarded the Bill of Rights’ guarantees for those accused and arrested. Civilian courts were administered under military direction, and the military was empowered to arrest people at will. In short, any adult male was subject to being rounded up without the least amount of evidence (and the commanding general ignored the government’s promise of amnesty). Two people died due to the army’s repression. One innocent boy was killed because he was too weak to follow an officer’s orders to remain standing, and the officer accidentally shot him. Another man who praised the rebels got into a scuffle with a soldier, who accidentally stabbed him to death.
In November, troops roused Pittsburgh residents from their beds at gunpoint. General “Blackbeard” White had prisoners tied and placed into the cold mud of a tavern cellar open to the winter elements for more than two days. The prisoners were denied food and water, and were told they would surely hang. The freezing and hungry prisoners were then marched 12 miles to a jail where they were held without charges for questioning by the military. The harshness of the mass arrests terrified the population. Despite the fact that Judge Peters, who had to make the rulings in these cases, could not find any evidence to detain those arrested, Hamilton and the army demanded that some prisoners be paraded back to Philadelphia to legitimatize the use of force.
By Christmas 1794, the frozen and ragged suspected rebels arrived in Philadelphia for a sad display. None of the prisoners were informed of the charges against them before trial. Despite judges instructing the juries to convict the prisoners, only two were found guilty: one who was thought to be simple-minded and another, David Bradford, a poor subsistence farmer who had robbed the mails to find government communications. Since hanging these hapless individuals would have only produced sympathy for the rebels, Washington decided to pardon the condemned.
In the wake of the crushing of the rebellion, together with the defeats suffered by the Indians on the frontier, Washington saw the value of his own land leap by 50 percent. Federal authority was established and national finance flourished. The whiskey tax, though, proved difficult to collect (many setters eluded it) and was repealed by Thomas Jefferson in 1800.
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