Mock Execution - Historical Instances

Historical Instances

• In 1849, several Russian dissidents of Petrashevsky circle, including the famous writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky became victims of a now famous case of a mock execution; the pardon of the Czar was not read to them until the moment when the firing squad was already aiming their rifles at them. This traumatizing experience also shows up in Dostoyevsky's literary works.
• In 1939 a Soviet general (later Field Marshal) Konstantin Rokossovsky was tortured including suffering several mock executions ordered by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
• In 1968, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, Commander of the USS Pueblo, was tortured and put through a mock firing squad by North Korean interrogators in an effort to make him confess; see USS Pueblo. Eventually, the Koreans threatened to execute his men in front of him, and Bucher relented. None of the Koreans knew English well enough to write the confession, so they had Bucher write it himself. They verified the meaning of his words, but failed to catch the pun when he said "We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung" ("We paean" sounds almost identical to "we pee on"). Following an apology, a written admission by the U.S. that Pueblo had been spying, and an assurance that the U.S. would not spy in the future, the North Korean government decided to release the 82 remaining crew members.
• The Iranian hostages of 1979 were subject to a mock execution by their detainers.
• Reports of mock executions carried out by the US Marines on detainees in Iraq surfaced in December 2004, as the American Civil Liberties Union published internal documents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents were written seven weeks after the publication of the photographs which triggered the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
• In April 2003, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Allen West (who later served a single term as a Congressman for Florida's 22nd congressional district) had an Iraqi police officer named Yehiya Kadoori Hamoodi seized and brought in for questioning based on allegations he was planning an imminent attack on Mr. West's unit. After Mr. Hamoodi was allegedly beaten by an interpreter and several U.S. troops, Mr. West took Mr. Hamoodi out of the interrogation room and showed him six U.S. troops with weapons in hand. Mr. West told Mr. Hamoodi, "If you don't talk, they will kill you." Mr. West then placed Mr. Hamoodi's head in a bucket used for cleaning weapons, placed his gun into the bucket and discharged the weapon near Mr. Hamoodi's head. Mr. Hamoodi then provided Mr. West with names, location and methods of the alleged ambush. However, the alleged ambush—supposedly scheduled for the following day—never occurred, and a search of Mr. Hamoodi's residence uncovered no evidence of any plans of attack. Mr. Hamoodi was subsequently released without charges. For his involvement in this incident, Mr. West was charged with violations of two statutes of the Uniform Code of Military Justice; however, charges were subsequently dropped after Mr. West was fined $5,000 for the incident and allowed to resign his position with the U.S. Army without court martial.