Note 67 — Chapter XXVI · Murder As a Governmental Agency

“The justice of the United States was slow in its course; witnesses had to be examined, and before a notorious criminal could be punished it had to be proved that he had committed some particular crime. Unless the crime was proved to the satisfaction of a military commission by witnesses, the greater part of whose testimony had to be translated into English from some native language by an interpreter, who was almost never an American, the man whom a whole village knew to be an assassin would escape punishment and would return to avenge himself upon those who had denounced him. The justice of Aguinaldo was a different matter. The Americans might hang for murder, but he would bury alive for serving them. The Americans might send a man to prison for burning a town, only to release him when an error was found in the proceedings. There were no errors in the proceedings of the guerillas. There was usually no summoning of witnesses, no slow taking of testimony and no careful search for laches which would invalidate the finding of the court and inure to the benefit of the accused. It was sufficient for some native to be denounced as in the employment of the Americans, or as an agent, or as a civil officer under the United States, for a summons to be issued for his appearance before a court of summary procedure, which was a court in name only; or for a mandate to be sent ordering that ‘the serviceable method of dukut was to be employed in his case.’ That meant that he was kidnapped and murdered, usually after a priest had received his confession; or that he was sent back to the town hamstrung and with his tongue out, as a warning to the people that the justice of Aguinaldo was sharp and that his arm was long.”67