Category Archives: Shot

1919: Heinrich Bosse

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German pastor Heinrich Bosse died for the evangelium at Bolshevik hands 100 years ago today.

Bosse followed his grandfather and father into the clergy and took up a posting to Riga in the last years of the 19th century. Today Riga is the capital of Latvia; at the time, it was a port in the Russian empire — but the former Hanseatic city was heavily German-populated, as it had been for centuries.

This was not an ideal vocation when Latvia’s declaration of independence at the end of World War I triggered Bolshevik invasion. By March 1919, Red forces controlled most of the country. Now, over the months to come the civil war would expel the Communists and secure independence for Latvia, at least for the interwar period.

But none of that big-picture stuff would help Reverend Bosse.

Latvian Bolsheviks had a grudge against Bosse for (so they believed) informing on one of their number who’d been executed by German forces occupying the city during the late World War. A revolutionary tribunal accordingly condemned him to death after a bout of torture; he was taken out of his cell on February 16, 1919, and shot in an unknown location.

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1831: Vicente Guerrero, former President of Mexico

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Vicente Guerrero, late the president of Mexico, was executed on this date in 1831.

He was once a rebel soldier under Jose Maria Morelos in the Mexican War of Independence against Spain.

The Afro-Mestizo Guerrero (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) cinched that conflict by successfully appealing to his royalist opposite number, Agustin de Iturbide, to switch sides. Their combined forces rode into Mexico City together in September 1821 but the conservative Iturbide and the liberal Guerrero soon parted ways.

Iturbide was elevated to emperor of Mexico; Guerrero by 1823 had returned to the field to rebel against the strongman. When Iturbide was deposed (and eventually executed), Guerrero became one of the ruling triumvirs and a national political figure. He contested the 19281828 presidential election which he lost at the ballot box but won in the ensuing street battles — an affair that featured the intervention on Guerrero’s side of Santa Anna.

He was quick about abolishing slavery and he had to be, for this mixed-race populist was deposed by his conservative vice president within months — beginning another round of civil conflict that was dishonorably resolved when an Italian sea captain arranged with the Mexico City government to lure him aboard and arrest him. For this gambit Judas received 50,000 pesos and Guerrero a summary court-martial and a firing squad at Cuilapam.

The cruel treatment of Guerrero requires an explanation. Bravo had been defeated in 1827 but was merely exiled and there were other similar cases. It is reasonable to ask, therefore, why in the case of Guerrero the government resorted to the ultimate penalty. The clue is provided by Zavala who, writing several years later, noted that Guerrero was of mixed blood and that the opposition to his presidency came from the great landowners, generals, clerics and Spaniards resident in Mexico. These people could not forget the war of independence with its threat of social and racial subversion. Despite his revolutionary past, the wealthy creole Bravo belonged to this “gentleman’s club’, as did the cultured creole, Zavala, even with his radicalism. Hence Guerrero’s execution was perhaps a warning to men considered as socially and ethnically inferior not to dare to dream of becoming president. (Source)

The southern Mexico state of Guerrero is named for him; its slogan, mi patria es primero (my fatherland is first) is the legendary reply that the young Vicente Guerrero made to his Spain-supporting father when asked to foreswear the independence movement.

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1945: Walraven van Hall, banker to the Resistance

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Wally van Hall, the Dutch banker, fraudster, and national hero, was executed by the Nazi occupation on this date in 1945.

Walraven — to use his proper given name — was born into a well-heeled family, the brother of eventual Amsterdam mayor Gijs van Hall.

The man’s expertise in the occult crafts of banking gained an unexpected heroic cast during World War II when Wally became the “banker to the Resistance,” quietly sluicing the funds needed to support anti-occupation movements.

Notably, he plundered the present-day equivalent of a half-billion Euro from the Dutch National Bank by swapping fraudulent bad bonds for good ones.

This profession was no less dangerous for being so esoteric. He was betrayed by an informer who was himself executed in revenge by the Resistance; van Hall has posthumously received his country’s Cross of Resistance as well as Israel’s recognition as Righteous Among the Nations for his aid to Dutch Jews. He’s the subject of the 2018 film The Resistance Banker.

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1944: Franz Kutschera, by underground justice

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On this date in 1944, the Nazi governor of Warsaw was “executed” by assassination.

The Austrian Sudeten German Franz Kutschera had parlayed his early Nazi party membership into various posts in the Third Reich after it absorbed Austria into Greater Germany.

The last of his several stations on World War II’s Eastern Front was SS and Police chief of occupied Warsaw. He did not hesitate to brandish the iron fist, intensifying arrests of perceived subversives and carrying out public executions of civilians to avenge German casualties.

We enter ambiguous territory for this here site here, for Kutschera’s punishment, while delivered by ambush, was decreed by a court — the illicit (to Germany) “Special Courts” of the Polish government in exile. Needless to say, the defendant was judged in absentia.

Such courts asserted the legitimate governance of an occupied nation but they had to shift for themselves when it came to enforcing their underground writ. An orchestrated commando hit, uncontroversially titled Operation Kutschera, was required for this one since the SS chief wasn’t a fellow that an opportunistic assassin could just catch with his guard down in some cafe. Instead, Poland’s internal Home Army units under the command of Emil Fieldorf put a 12-person team on the job.

On the morning of February 12, 1944, Kutschera’s “executioners” blocked with another car the limousine carrying the doomed SS-man to work. In an instant three men, codenamed “Lot” (Bronislaw Pietraszewicz), “Kruszynka” (Zdzislaw Poradzki) and “Mis” (Michael Issajewicz), sprang onto the street brandishing submachine guns and efficiently slaughtered Kutschera and his driver. Meanwhile, other members of the team swooped in with getaway vehicles and covering fire for the resulting shootout with surprised German guards. Though all escaped the scene, Lot and another team member both succumbed hours later to their wounds; two additional members of the backup group were trapped escaping across the Kierbedz Bridge and died hurling themselves into the Vistula under a rain of German bullets.

The Reich paid Kutschera tribute in his customary coinage with the mass execution of 300 civilian hostages the next day, but the memory of this dagger to the throat of a national enemy has lived in glory for Poles ever since.

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1945: Angelo Chiappe

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French Nazi collaborator Angelo Chiappe was shot on this day in 1945.

A right-wing legislator and adherent of the fascist Action Francaise movement before the war, Chiappe copped an appointment as the Vichy prefect of the Gard department. There he made himself hateful to the war’s eventual winners by his enthusiasm for hunting French Resistance members, communists, and Jews for forced labor and deportation and worse.

Captured in August 1944, he was shot January 23, 1945 before the gorgeous Roman arena of Nimes.

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1867: Ciosi and Agostini, at the Polygone of Vincennes

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From the London Times, Jan. 23, 1867, under a January 22 dateline:

The two soldiers (Corsicans) who committed a murder and robbery some time since at Neuilly, and were sentenced to death by court-martial, were shot yesterday morning, in presence of a large crowd, at the Polygone of Vincennes. One of them, [Jean-Baptiste] Agostini, was so exhausted that he had to be tied to a post to keep him from falling to the ground. The other, [Jean-Antoine] Ciosi, was more courageous, and, having addressed the shooting party to this effect, — “Dear comrades, on my conscience, I committed the crime for which I die, but I committed no robbery. I ask pardon of God, and of you. Farewell!” he himself gave the word to fire. The troops marched past the bodies as they lay on the ground. The interment took place in the burial ground of Vincennes, under the supervision of the chaplain of the fort.

A longer French-language account of the crime and execution — including the necessity of a brain-splattering coup de grace to complete the sentence — can be found here. There’s some fuzziness with the date cited in different places but French press reports (for instance, from Le Figaro on January 22) unambiguously place it on Monday the 21st.

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1863: Antonio Locaso

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On this date in 1863, the famed Italian bandit Antonio Locaso was shot in Castellaneta at the tender age of 22.

A former goatherd, Locaso supposedly embarked his career in brigandage in the classic style of the social bandit, impetuously intervening to fight off an agent of the law who was bent on ill-treating some penniless neighbors.

He thereafter was compelled to conceal himself in the wildernesses near Castellaneta,* down at the hinge of the Italic boot’s heel.

No mere highwayman, he fell in as a lieutenant of the ex-Bourbon officer turned outlaw/rebel Sergente Romano. This brought a violent crackdown by the Kingdom of Italy.

In a Christlike turn, he was betrayed by a comrade for the price on his head — and found slumbering amid his repast where “bread, cheese and salami there was also a bottle of narcotized wine.”

* Although it’s hardly a city on the front rank of the world’s conscience, it’s on the credit scroll of every episode of The Simpsons as it confers the municipal ancestry and the surname on Homer Simpson voice actor Dan Castellaneta.

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1870: Sylvain Salnave, deposed Haitian president

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Former Haitian president Sylvain Salnave was executed on this date in 1870.

Salnave was a general who in 1866 overthrew and replaced president Fabre Geffrard — an act which “profoundly unsettled the country.”

Salnave stood at the head of a triumvirate that promulgated a new and more democratic constitution in 1867, abolishing the president-for-life position that his predecessors had asserted — but the political rearrangement collapsed within months and saw the the president and legislature at loggerheads, and then at outright civil war as regional risings multiplied against Salnave.

The president held out under bombardment in the capital of Port-au-Prince until the last days of 1869, when he fled to what he believed was the safety in the Dominican Republic — only to be arrested by the Dominican general Jose Maria Cabral and handed back over to the now-triumphant Haitian rebels. They had Salnave tried on January 15 and immediately executed that same day.

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1739: Two French youths who murdered Choctaws

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On this date in 1739, two French youths were executed by musketry in the French Louisiana colony for the murder of two Choctaws — a gesture of juridical diplomacy that didn’t work out as the musketeers hoped.

Our source for this unusual event is Patricia Galloway’s “The Barthelemy Murders: Bienville’s Establishment of the ‘Lex Talionis’ as a Principle of Indian Diplomacy” from the Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, Vol. 8 (1985). The “Bienville” of Galloway’s title was Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the French Colonial Governor of Louisiana. It was a post he had held intermittently since 1701, which was back when he and his brother Iberville were still exploring the region.*

Bienville was noted for his deft touch with the native inhabitants of the colony he proposed to govern; in Galloway’s words, he “seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the Indian concept of honor and to understand tribal power structures as no other governor did. In addition, he made it his business to learn and use Choctaw or the Choctaw-like Mobilian trade language in his dealings with the Indians — the only governor to do so.”

Be he ever so empathic, Bienville had a sticky wicket with this case of international violence, when each of the nations involved would have disposed of it very differently had it been a purely internal affair.

On the side of the Choctaw and indeed for all of the tribes of the southeast, the available evidence points to blood vengeance as the accepted response to homicide, but there was no governmental institution to carry it out, so the responsibility for the execution of a murderer fell upon the relatives of the victim … the European notion depended upon handing over regulatory powers to a legal institution; the Indian notion, on the other hand, assumed that familial sanctions would keep individuals in line.

It was a situation that demanded the full measure of Bienville’s diplomatic acumen. The Choctaw people were the largest of several native nations in the French colony, dominating the territory of the latter-day state of Mississippi. Years before the events in this post, Bienville had put them on his team by arming them against the British-allied Chickasaw … but in the late 1730s, Bienville was coming off a failed campaign against the Chickasaw, and with the British making diligent trading inroads with the Choctaw, it wasn’t necessarily a given that they would stick within the French sphere of influence. Indeed, there was a chief of rising stature within the Choctaw nation named Red Shoe whose calling card was pushing a bro-British turn.

Onto this delicate stage barged two Creole half-brothers, whom Galloway identifies as Philippe Alexandre (born in 1710) and a youth of whom we know only the surname Barthelemy (born in 1723): as Barthelemy was the name of the (step-, to Philippe) father who stood patriarch to the whole family, it’s the name by which the affair is known. According to the notes taken on the trial** by the colonial official Etienne Salmon as quoted by Galloway, their crime was motivated by nothing but opportunism and racial animus.

They went in a pirogue from Mobile to the Pascagoulas with a Negro slave to look for some food supplies, and there they found a Choctaw and his wife who were proposing to go to Mobile to trade some bear oil and a few deerskins, and who asked them for passage which they granted them. Contrary winds having cast them ashore on some neighboring islands, they went hunting there. The elder of the two brothers proposed to the Negro that he kill the husband and wife, saying that the savages were dogs, and that if they ran across Frenchmen in the same straits in their country they would not object to killing them. The Negro having rejected the proposition, saying that he had [no] reason at all to kill them, that they had done him no wrong, the two brothers discussed the same thing, and the elder told the younger that he would be doing a valorous deed, and that he would be regarded as a true man, if he made the attack; this child allowed himself to be so persuaded that on the following day at sunrise, while everyone was sleeping, or pretending to, the younger shot twice at the husband and his wife, and killed them.

This happened sometime during 1738. It took some months for the disappearance of these hunter-traders to become known to their communities, and for suspicion to fix on the young men involved. The French colony arrested the culprits and Bienville promised his allies “that justice would be done and would be carried out in Mobile before their appointed witnesses.” For Bienville, this meant the strict application of lex talionis through the French judicial mechanism.

The trial took place on January 10 … the two young men were condemned to die, while the Negro was dismissed as guiltless. The original sentence called for hanging, but to spare the dignity of the boys’ family it was changed to death by a firing squad. Salmon reported that the younger brother had no notion of guilt and was convinced that in the dangerous times then prevailing, he had performed a deed worthy of praise. Even Salmon believed that had the situation been different Bienville would have allowed the younger to escape death. But this was not to be, and the young men were returned to Mobile for execution, which took place before Choctaw witnesses on January 14.

The executions placated the Choctaw and, Bienville hoped, established an understanding that crimes between their nations would be properly satisfied by the offender’s nation more or less on the basis of lex talionis: an orderly and reciprocal life-for-a-life punishment.

Seven years ahead and Bienville had been retired to France when at last there came a Choctaw-on-Frenchmen murder to test the precedent. The new governor, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, invoked the principle of this Barthelemy case: “We ask nothing of you but justice, since M. de Bienville had justice done you in 1740 [sic] for a man and woman that some Frenchmen had killed.”

The trouble that the French encountered here in having their claim recognized lay in their failure to understand the distinction made by the Choctaw between domestic and international law in a homicide case. The evidence is quite clear that the Choctaw were prepared to accept the notion of setting off the French deaths by an equal number of Choctaw deaths, but they expected the French, as the injured party, to carry out the killings themselves. If the French wanted the Choctaw to carry out the killings, they said, the French would have to persuade close relatives of the required victims to do it, or else there would be an unending train of vengeance set loose in the nation.

The French didn’t know who had actually murdered their three people and “the usual procedure in such cases was to substitute people who were of little use to the tribe or who for some reason already deserved death.” However, the French greedily bid for a political coup by demanding not a marginal victim but the pro-British chief Red Shoe himself. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t find any of Red Shoe’s relatives willing to turn executioner. The only thing left for the Choctaw to try was

killings committed against a group that was the enemy of both French and Choctaw. Therefore, to set off the deaths of three Frenchmen at the hands of pro-English Choctaws, the pro-French Choctaws attempted to fulfill the French demands in part by killing English traders. This was done in a raid on an English convoy which was being escorted by Red Shoe. After Red Shoe was murdered by stealth, two Englishmen were killed in an open attack, making up the required three deaths.

The French, however, completely missed the point of the Choctaw restitution and refused the two English scalps, insisting on two more Choctaw deaths … The deaths of the Englishmen did not go without notice on the pro-English side. Doubtless as a result of a symmetrical demand by the English, the [pro-English] Choctaw killed five French settlers on the Mobile River. These killings were followed by retaliatory raids by French-allied Choctaws on English trade convoys, killing two more English traders.

This is precisely the sort of blood vengeance spiral that Bienville had been trying to militate against, and it soon pulled the whole Choctaw nation into an outright civil war that killed some 800 people and brought the French into the field as well. Galloway once again:

Bienville’s intentions were good, and it is to the credit of the French that they carried out the execution of the half-brothers, against their inclinations, because this was the kind of justice that the Choctaw understood. Nor are the French to be blamed for expecting the Choctaw to make the same kind of concession to their notion of justice. The tragedy arose not because the Choctaw did not want to render justice at all, but because they had no vicarious legal mechanism to carry it out. In the end, therefore, they were forced into civil war because vengeance carried out by a Choctaw, on another Choctaw, in behalf of a third party not a Choctaw, did not leave the avenger free of punishment himself. Like other aspects of southeastern Indian culture, this one was so inconsistent with European understanding that it had to adapt or disappear, and although it did not actually disappear among the Choctaw themselves until 1823, the principle in dealings with white nations was firmly asserted in treaties from the time of the end of the Choctaw civil war. The Choctaw had dearly bought comprehension of Bienville’s principle with the weighty currency of culture change.

* Iberville and Bienville co-founded Fort Louis de la Mobile (present-day Mobile, Alabama) in 1702; this is where the executions in this post occurred. Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718.

** No original record of the trial survives; Salmon’s recollection is the best we’re going to do for primary sourcing.

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2003: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri mock-executed at CIA black site

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Around this time — “sometime between 28 December 2002 and 1 January 2003” — a CIA debriefer questioning Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a CIA “black site” in Poland mock-executed his prey.

The Saudi national had been captured in October of 2002 and vanished into the 9/11-mad empire’s dark heart of secret torture dungeons scattered across the globe.

He’d already been renditioned to Afghanistan, and then to Thailand, and then onward (for the events of this post) to a onetime Third Reich base in Poland. In Afghanistan he’d been stripped and hanged up by his shackled hands, his toes barely touching the floor. In Thailand, interrogators waterboarded him and locked him in a coffin.* Graphic videos of his treatment in Thailand, at least, once existed; they are among the evidence destroyed by the CIA in 2005 in its successful project to scotch any public accountability for its torture program.

Nashiri stands accused of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, although different intelligence officers characterize him as anything from the “mastermind” to “the dumbest terrorist I ever met.” The only judicial hearing he’s ever had on this matter occurred in abstentia in Yemen in 2004, and resulted in a death sentence. He resides today in America’s forever oubliette at Guantanamo Bay, where a supposed prosecution began in 2011 and has been formally ongoing ever since, mired like all other cases there in the place’s intrinsic juridical incoherence. It seems likely that Nashiri will spend the rest of his days at Guantanamo, his mind a wreck from his ordeals.

One such ordeal, the one qualifying him for consideration by Executed Today, was his feigned execution by handgun and then by power drill — as disclosed by the CIA Inspector General’s report; the quoted excerpt below appears as paragraphs 91 and 92, beginning on page 49 of this pdf. The incident is likewise described in a subsequent Senate Intelligence Committee report, which can be perused here (see p. 98). The name of Nashiri’s mock-executioner is among the many bracketed redactions in this text; it has been publicly reported that the man in question is former CIA and FBI linguist Albert El Gamil.

[     ] interrogation team members, whose purpose it was to interrogate Al-Nashiri and debrief Abu Zubaydah, initially staffed [     ] The interrogation team continued EITs on Al-Nashiri for two weeks in December 2002 [     ] they assessed him to be “compliant.” Subsequently, CTC officers at Headquarters [     ] sent a [     ] senior operations officer (the debrief) [     ] to debrief and assess Al-Nashiri.

[     ]The debrief assessed Al-Nashiri as withholding information, at which point [     ] reinstated [     ] hooding, and handcuffing. Sometime between 28 December 2002 and 1 January 2003, the debriefer used an unloaded semi-automatic handgun as a prop to frighten Al-Nashiri into disclosing information. After discussing this plan with [     ] the debriefer entered the cell where Al-Nashiri sat shackled and racked the handgun once or twice close to Al-Nashiri’s head. On what was probably the same day, the debriefer used a power drill to frighten Al-Nashiri. With [     ] consent, the debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded. The debriefer did not touch Al-Nashiri with the power drill.

Mock execution was not among the menu of torture techniques given legal imprimatur by the Agency, and other interrogators’ protests at his methods led to El Gamil’s removal from the case shortly thereafter.

Sanctioned or no, it is not the only mock execution known to have been inflicted by CIA torturers. Scrolling past seas of black redactions to paragraphs 169-174 of that same Inspector General’s report, we find that

The debriefer who employed the handgun and power drill on Al-Nashiri [     ] advised that those actions were predicated on a technique he had participated in [     ] The debriefer stated that when he was [     ] between September and October 2002, [     ] offered to fire a handgun outside the interrogation room while the debriefer was interviewing a detainee who was thought to be withholding information. [     ] staged the incident, which included screaming and yelling outside the cell by other CIA officers and [     ] guards. When the guards moved the detainee from the interrogation room, they passed a guard who was dressed as a hooded detainee, lying motionless on the ground, and made to appear as if he had been shot to death.

The debriefer claimed he did not think he needed to report this incident because the [     ] had openly discussed this plan [     ] several days prior to and after the incident. When the debriefer was later [     ] and believed he needed a non-traditional technique to induce the detainee to cooperate he told [     ] he wanted to wave a handgun in front of the detainee to scare him. The debriefer said he did not believe he was required to notify Headquarters of this technique, citing the earlier, unreported mock execution [     ].

A senior operations officer [     ] recounted that around September 2002 [     ] heard that the debriefer had staged a mock execution. [     ] was not present but understood it went badly; it was transparently a ruse and no benefit was derived from it. [     ] observed that there is a need to be creative as long as it is not considered torture. [     ] stated that if such a proposal were made now, it would involve a great deal of consultation. It would begin with [     ] management and would include CTC/Legal, [     ] and the CTC.

The [     ] admitted staging a “mock execution” in the first days that [     ] was open. According to the [     ] the technique was his idea but was not effective because it came across as being staged. It was based on the concept, from SERE school, of showing something that looks real, but is not. The [     ] recalled that a particular CTC interrogator later told him about employing a mock execution technique. The [     ] did not know when this incident occurred or if it was successful. He viewed this technique as ineffective because it was not believable.

Four [     ] who were interviewed admitted to either participating in one of the above-described incidents or hearing ab out them. [     ] described staging a mock execution of a detainee. Reportedly, a detainee who witnessed the “body” in the aftermath of the ruse “sang like a bird.”

[     ] revealed that approximately four days before his interview with OIG, the [     ] stated he had conducted a mock execution [     ] in October or November 2002. Reportedly, the firearm was discharged outside of the building, and it was done because the detainee reportedly possessed critical threat information. [     ] stated that he told the [     ] not to do it again. He stated that he has not heard of a similar act occurring [     ] since then.

* Gina Haspel oversaw the Thailand site at the end of 2002, and her countenancing torture against Nashiri and other detainees there made for a passing controversy when Donald Trump appointed her to direct the Agency.

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