Don’t be surprised if some of the dudes released after 12 years of our torture experiments at Guantanamo Bay Prison end up fomenting some horrific future acts of terror because when you manifest violence, blow-back is inevitable.
But similar techniques were employed at the end of the Civil War, and employed to secure the cover-up of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, whose murder was engineered by the leaders of his own party, along with funding and support from a secret entity in New York.
Although dozens of people aided and abetted Booth (and over a thousand immediately arrested and incarcerated for a month) the unlucky six who would soon be put on trial for their lives received very special treatment different from all the others.
Instead of a prison cell, they were moved to iron-clad ships located far away from listening ears, so nothing could be spoken from a prison window. Heavy canvas and leather hoods (above), with padding over eye and ear sockets were chained permanently over their heads, and only removed during the trial when inside the court room. Their hands were locked in cuffs that prevented independent motion. They remained in isolation for weeks prior to the trial, and could not see or hear anything, and had only flap revealing a small hole for breathing and feeding, a flap that could be kept sealed.
Some of the six undoubtedly began losing their minds quickly wearing these hoods in 90 degree summer heat. All interrogations were kept secret, but it’s evident the interrogations were designed to shape later testimony favorable to the government’s case. The purpose of this extreme inhumane treatment was to guarantee no prisoner revealed sensitive information, while rendering them helpless to marshal a competent defense. The initial confession given by George Atzerodt was destroyed and not allowed into evidence, and would not be located for 117 years. But after a few weeks of wearing that hood, Dirty George may have begun believing he was supposed to assassinate Vice President Johnson that night. In fact, three assassinations were invented by Edwin Stanton to shield himself, as he was an alleged target of his own fictional assassination plot.
According to the Pentagon, after being waterboarded hundreds of times, a Pakistani militant confessed to being the true mastermind of 9/11, as if testimony taken from someone tortured for a decade constitutes proof of anything other then another massive inside job and cover-up in place. But if you follow these trails up the chain of command, you’ll locate the true perpetrators of Lincoln’s murder and 9/11. Because the people stage-managing the sham trial of the patsies are always the same ones who engineered the crime in the first place.
The Conspirator shows how Secretary of War Edwin Stanton completely controlled the investigation into Lincoln’s assassination, which concentrated only on finding minor characters on the fringe of the conspiracy, but did nothing to locate the actual figures in command of the situation. I’ve written earlier about the possible involvement of Albert Pike, a Confederate General, in Lincoln’s assassination. At some point, the possibility of a much larger conspiracy will have to be addressed. Pike, after all, was the most powerful Mason of his time. Lincoln was not a member of the Masons. But Edwin Stanton certainly was.
There are many stories told that Booth escaped, though, and the others were just patsies, since some members of Booth’s famous family have always asserted Booth did not die in a fire in a barn outside Port Royal as the government asserts, but, instead, another’s charred body was substituted and Booth walked free. Booth’s dentist ID’d the teeth in those charred remains as being Booth’s and the corpse did have a broken ankle, which Booth may have suffered after jumping to the stage following the assassination, although his diary claimed that happened later, during the escape when his horse slipped and fell. The mysteries linger. But I believe it was Booth who died in the barn, and he was killed to prevent him from spilling the beans on who actually paid for the assassination. We just know it involved a New York element.