drumhead tribunal

plural drumhead tribunals

1. A drumhead court-martial.

   By mid-2006, Australia thus remained one of the few foreign nations that still accepted the legality of Guantanamo's endless detention and drumhead tribunals.

   2012, Alfred W. McCoy, chapter 6, in Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, page 207

   1 more example

   I never knew you, Christopher Okigbo, / I saw you when an actor screamed "The tribes! / The Tribes!" I catch / the guttering, flare-lit / faces of Ibos, / stuttering, bug-eyed / prisoners of some drumhead tribunal.

   1969, Derek Walcott, “Negatives”, in Collected Poems, 1948-1984, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, published 1986, page 124