Why
Everything You Think You Know About the
Lincoln Assassination is Wrong,
Part XII ~ their "playbook" hasn't changed 1 single fucking ...bit & STILL we keep fall~in 4 it ...un~fucking~believ~able.. oh ah, o yea & them dot's just keep cum~in up 2 our ...time Oops ... thum pesky fuck~in ...dot's ....hey look K's titty is show~in or was that J's or L's or ...who's titty is that ..........ummmmmmm
July 20,
2015
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/
Before
resuming where we left off, I need to tack on some info here
that should have been included in earlier installments. First
off, there were, as it turns out, at least three additional
suspicious deaths that followed closely on the heels of the
Lincoln assassination, so let’s take a quick look at those.
And as I’m sure it will be recalled, these deaths are in
addition to all the other curious deaths and confinements that
have previously been discussed.
First up
for review is Colonel Levi C. Turner, who was appointed
Assistant Judge Advocate for the Army on August 5, 1862, which
positioned him to be second-in-command to Judge Advocate Holt
during the farcical ‘trial of the conspirators.’ The colonel
also worked closely with notorious NDP chief Lafayette Baker
during and after the Civil War to investigate suspected
subversive activities. Turner died of unstated causes on March
13, 1867, less than two years after Lincoln was slain and
about sixteen months before Baker himself turned up dead.
Also up for review is our old friend Silas
Cobb, the guy who was in charge of guarding the Navy Yard Bridge
and enforcing the curfew on the night of the assassination. Cobb
was the accommodating gent who allegedly allowed both Booth and
Herold to escape from Washington and then failed to offer any
reasonable explanation for his actions, and of course suffered
no repercussions for those actions. Cobb turned up dead in
November 1867, two-and-a-half years after Lincoln was shot.
According to reports, he was the victim of a drowning accident.
Finally we
have Henri Beaumont de Sainte-Marie, the chap who was credited
with tipping off authorities to the whereabouts of John
Surratt, ultimately leading to Surratt’s arrest, extradition,
and failed prosecution. De Sainte-Marie died at the relatively
young age of forty-one while still awaiting a claims court
decision on the hefty reward promised for information leading
to Surratt’s capture.
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I also
discussed in a previous post the fact that former British
First Lady Cherie Blair is a descendant of the Booth clan,
thereby demonstrating that the Booth family has continued to
wield political power into the modern era. What I didn’t know
at the time was that another member of the Booth dynasty
wielded considerable power on this side of the Atlantic
right up until her death at the infamous Watergate Apartments
on October 9, 1987.
She was
hiding right in plain sight, disguised only by the “e” that
her branch of the family had added to the Booth name to mask
the association. That wielder of power was none other than
Clare Boothe Luce, who, along with her husband Henry Luce – a
Skull and Bonesman who became a publishing magnate, launching
such influential magazines as Time, Life, Fortune,
and Sports Illustrated – was a longtime asset of the
Central Intelligence Agency.
Boothe was
born on March 10, 1903 to unmarried parents who lived a
shadowy life and moved around a lot. Her mother was known to
use at least three aliases and her father used at least two.
Clare briefly flirted with being an actress before embarking
on a career as a journalist, war correspondent, politician and
diplomat. Curiously, another woman born in 1903 and also known
as Claire Luce also became an actress, creating a good deal of
confusion after Clare Boothe became Clare Luce.
Clare Boothe Luce
Clare
Boothe Luce had the distinction of being the first American
woman named to a key diplomatic post, serving as the US
Ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956. In 1959, she very
briefly served as the US Ambassador to Brazil before
resigning. From 1943 to 1947, she had served in the House of
Representatives, representing Connecticut. During that time,
she served on the House Military Affairs Committee, because
she naturally knew a lot about military affairs.
During the
1960s, her and her husband busied themselves with sponsoring
anti-Castro groups seeking to return Cuba to its former status
as a US puppet-state. In 1973, she was appointed to the
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, because she
obviously also knew a lot about foreign intelligence. In 1983,
she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Boothe Luce
was also a Dame of Malta.
It is a
strange world indeed when well over a century after the first
acknowledged assassination of a sitting US president
(historians don’t generally have much to say about the
untimely deaths of William Harrison, who served for just one
month, or Zachary Taylor, who served for some sixteen months),
members of the alleged assassin’s family were still wielding
considerable political power on both sides of the Atlantic.
Last time I checked, there weren’t any members of the Guiteau,
Czolgosz, Oswald or Sirhan families occupying such positions
of power.
And now,
we return to our regularly scheduled programming ….
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While
Booth and Herold were supposedly taking their time getting
from Washington to Garrett’s farm (traveling a distance of
less than 100 miles in a week-and-a-half), the largest manhunt
in the young nation’s history was underway, coordinated by our
old friend, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. From the outset,
Stanton’s goal seemed to be to avoid actually apprehending
John Wilkes Booth and some of the other alleged conspirators.
Stanton
had considerable manpower at his disposal, including idle US
military forces in Washington, the Metropolitan Police,
Lafayette Baker’s detective force, US Cavalry forces, and
provost marshals. Working closely with Stanton were Metro
Police Superintendent A.C. Richards, Washington Provost
Marshall Major James O’Beirne, and General Christopher
Columbus Augur, commander of US military forces in Washington.
To say that Stanton misappropriated the available manpower
would be a rather charitable assessment.
A.C. Richards
According
to Bill O’Reilly’s error-filled bestseller, Killing
Lincoln, there were three routes leading out of
Washington into Virginia – the Georgetown Aqueduct, Long
Bridge, and Benning’s Bridge – and just one, the Navy Yard
Bridge, leading into Maryland. The Confederacy-friendly path
into Maryland was by far the most likely route for an assassin
to take, so it naturally was completely ignored.
The first
troops to find themselves accidentally on the correct route
were led by a David Dana. Dana just happened to be the brother
of Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana, who served
directly under Stanton and who decided that the patrol’s
presence on the trail of the alleged assassins was pointless
and instead sent his brother’s troops on a wild goose chase.
Major O’Beirne also found himself accidentally on the right
trail, so he of course was recalled to Washington.
As
previously mentioned, Stanton’s first dispatch after the
shooting of Lincoln was not written until 1:30 AM and was not
sent until 2:15 AM, about four hours after the shot was fired.
That dispatch made no mention of John Wilkes Booth, despite
the fact that numerous witnesses supposedly (but not actually)
immediately identified Booth as the assailant. Booth’s name
didn’t appear in a telegram until 4:15 AM, conveniently too
late to make the morning papers. A telegram sent to the police
chiefs of northern cities contained no mention of the name
Booth.
Initial
press reports, based on information leaked by Stanton himself,
identified John Surratt as the perpetrator of the fictional
attack on the Seward family. When it later became known that
Surratt was nowhere near Washington at the time of the attack,
Lewis Powell/Paine, who bore no physical resemblance
whatsoever to John Surratt, was substituted in as the
perpetrator of the alleged assassination attempt.
Christopher Columbus Augur and James O'Beirne
The first
telegram dispatched by the War Department was a curiously
worded message to General Grant, which read: “The President
was assassinated tonight at Ford’s Theatre at 10:30 tonight
& cannot live. The wound is a pistol shot through the
head. Secretary Seward & his son Frederick, were also
assassinated at their residence & are in a dangerous
condition.” One would think that it would go without saying
that someone who had been “assassinated” would be in “a
dangerous condition.” Luckily though, neither of the Sewards
were actually assassinated, although news of their ‘deaths’
quickly circulated around Washington.
One of the
earliest actions taken by investigators was raiding the room
at the Kirkwood Hotel allegedly rented by George Atzerodt for
the purpose of assassinating Andrew Johnson. According to
Guttridge and Neff, writing in Dark Union, “The room
was registered as Atzerodt’s but had not been slept in. The
Kirkwood’s day clerk, who had entered Room 126 earlier that
morning, found nothing and said so. His testimony was
ignored.” When detectives entered that very same empty and
unused room, they allegedly uncovered a wealth of evidence.
Supposedly
recovered from the room were a bankbook issued to John Wilkes
Booth, a loaded revolver, three boxes of pistol cartridges, a
map of the southern states, a Bowie knife, and a handkerchief
with Booth’s mother’s name embroidered on it. Booth’s room at
the National Hotel, Room 228, was similarly raided with
additional evidence supposedly recovered, including a business
card containing John Surratt’s name and a letter from Samuel
Arnold conveniently implicating both he and McLaughlin,
despite the fact that Arnold and McLaughlin, like Surratt,
were nowhere near Washington at the time of the assassination.
“Wanted”
posters issued by the War Department were wildly, and probably
deliberately, inaccurate. John Surratt’s and David Herold’s
names were both spelled incorrectly, the photo of Herold was
of him as a schoolboy, which clearly wasn’t an accurate
representation of how he looked circa 1865, and the photo of
Surratt wasn’t John Surratt at all. In a blatant act of
historical revisionism, corrected posters were issued much
later. One widely circulated poster that was issued after
Lewis Paine was already in custody inexplicably offered a
reward for Paine and contained a richly detailed 160-word
description of the already incarcerated suspect, along with a
mere 42-word description of the guy who was still at large,
John Wilkes Booth.
Original and revised "Wanted" posters
The first alleged conspirator to be
arrested was the hapless Ned Spangler, who was taken into
custody at Ford’s Theatre on the night of the assassination.
Samuel Arnold and Michael McLaughlin, implicated through what
appears to have been planted evidence, were arrested on April
17, 1865, the former at Fort Monroe and the latter in Baltimore.
Later that night, Mary Surratt and Lewis Powell were both
arrested at Surratt’s boardinghouse. George Adzerodt was taken
into custody in the early morning hours of April 20 in Maryland,
following – by one account – a tip from his police detective
brother. Dr. Mudd was arrested on April 24, four days after
Captain William Wood, a close associate of Stanton and the
warden of the Old Capitol Prison, had begun watching his home.
Why
authorities drug their feet for several days before arresting
Mudd even while rounding up some 2,000 other suspects who
ultimately were not charged is another of the many unanswered
questions surrounding the Lincoln assassination and its
aftermath. In any event, that left just two of the alleged
conspirators at large, David Herold and John Wilkes Booth.
Finding them was going to require a specially assembled team –
a team that would uncannily know just where to go.
The elite
posse was assembled by NDP chief Lafayette Baker on April 24.
The group thereafter all but made a beeline to the area around
Garrett’s farm. How they knew to go there is a question not
often addressed by historians. For the record, Baker claimed
that he was tipped off by “an old Negro,” but said person was
never identified and he or she never stepped forward to
collect the substantial reward offered. A House Committee
noted that, “upon what information Colonel Baker proceeded in
sending out the expedition … is in no manner disclosed or
intimated in his official report.”
An 1867
Minority Report of the Judiciary Committee of the House of
Representatives offered what were, by today’s standards,
shockingly frank assessments of Baker’s character, such as,
“Although examined on oath, time and again, and on various
occasions, it is doubtful whether he [Baker] has in any one
thing told the truth even by accident,” and “there can be no
doubt that of his many previous outrages, entitling him to
unenviable immortality, he has added that of willful and
deliberate perjury; and we are glad to know that no one member
of the committee deems any statement made by him as worthy of
the slightest credit. What a blush of shame will tinge the
cheek of the American student in future ages, when he reads
that this miserable wretch for years held, as it were, in the
hollow of his hand, the liberties of the American people.”
The posse
assembled by Baker was led by his cousin, Lt. Luther Baker,
and Lt. Col. Everton Conger, who had served as an aide to
Lafayette Baker. Both had returned to civilian life and were
recruited specifically to lead the mission. They were joined
by Lt. Edward Doherty and a detachment of twenty-five
soldiers. After completing the mission, all involved signed
quitclaims and collected a substantial amount of reward money.
One of the troopers, as fate would have it, had met Booth
previously; some 33 years later, on April 20, 1898, he issued
the following published statement: “It was not Booth nor did
it resemble him …” Many Americans had reached that conclusion
years earlier.
Edward Doherty and Everton Conger
At the
Garrett home, the guy later identified as John Wilkes Booth
introduced himself as John W. Boyd. Herold was introduced as
his cousin, David Boyd. During the standoff in the barn with
the pair’s would-be captors, the name “Booth” was never
spoken. When Herold surrendered and exited the barn, leaving
his companion behind, he insisted that he did not know the
other man, who he claimed was named Boyd. Boyd/Booth was
wearing a Rebel uniform and did not have on a ring that Booth
reportedly always wore.
It was not
until he had been shot and lay dying that the suspected
assassin was addressed by Luther Baker as “Booth.” According
to Baker’s account, the mortally wounded man “seemed
surprised, opened his eyes wide, and looked about,” as if he
too was looking for the elusive John Wilkes Booth. At 7:15 AM
on the morning of April 26, 1865, Booth/Boyd drew his last
breath, some two-and-a-half hours after being shot, allegedly
by Boston Corbett.
Mainstream
authors and historians have labored long and hard to convince
readers that Booth’s body was positively identified, leaving
no doubt in the public mind that justice had been served.
James Swanson, for example, has written in Manhunt
that, “On the Montauk, several men who knew Booth in
life, including his doctor and dentist, were summoned aboard
the ironclad to witness him in death. It was all very
official. The War Department even issued an elaborate receipt
to the notary who witnessed the testimony. During a careful
autopsy …” The same James Swanson has also written, in Lincoln’s
Assassins, that, “When the assassin’s body was brought
back to Washington, the government took rigorous steps to
confirm the identity of the man killed at Garrett’s farm …
Witnesses who knew Booth in life were summoned to identify him
in death.” William Hanchett, in The Lincoln Murder
Conspiracies (his contemptible attempt to ‘debunk’
so-called ‘conspiracy theories’), has claimed that “Booth’s
body was identified beyond any possibility of a mix-up at a
coroner’s inquest on April 27, 1865.”
All such proclamations are rather brazen
and unconscionable acts of historical revisionism. The reality
is that the body was not autopsied and it was processed
in-and-out of Washington in record time. A mere forty hours
passed between the death of the man at Garrett’s farm and the
secret, late night disposal of his body, and that included the
time needed to transport the corpse back to Washington. To this
day, that initial burial site remains a mystery and several
different versions of the disposal of the body have been
published.
For
reasons never explained in the historical record, the body was
not transported back to Washington by the military detachment,
but was instead escorted by only three men: Luther Baker,
prisoner Willie Jett, and one unnamed soldier. Before reaching
Washington, Jett somehow managed to, uhmm, ‘escape.’ The body
was carried by steamer up the Potomac River, then transported
by tugboat to the Washington Navy Yard and placed aboard the
ironclad Montauk in the dead of night, at 1:45 AM on
April 27, 1865, bypassing normal procedures. Before the day
was done, the body would be covertly disposed of. The captain
of the Montauk would later say that he “was not
present at either time (arrival or disposal) or I should have
put a stop to it.” The commandant of the Navy Yard would add
that, “The removal of the body was entirely without my
knowledge, an unusual transaction.”
Prosecutor John Bingham (left) and Judge Advocate Joseph
Holt (center)
Dispatched
to the Montauk to oversee the identification of the
body were such disreputable characters as Surgeon General
Barnes, Judge Advocate Joseph Holt, prosecutor/persecutor John
Bingham, Stanton underlings Thomas Eckert and Lafayette Baker,
and two of Baker’s most trusted men, Luther Baker and Everton
Conger. Edwin Stanton had ordered Lafayette Baker and Thomas
Eckert to personally intercept the boat carrying the body and
clandestinely get it aboard the Montauk.
During the
alleged inquest, none of Booth’s peers in the theater
community, many of whom were present in Washington at the
time, were brought onboard to ID the body. No members of the
Booth family were enlisted to view the body. None of Booth’s
alleged co-conspirators, many of whom were being held on
the very same ship, were allowed to ID the body.
According to Dark Union, “thirteen people were
permitted to view the body. All but the war photographer
Alexander Gardner, his assistant, and a hotel clerk were
connected with the War Department.” If we’re being honest
here, that should read, “all but possibly the hotel clerk were
connected with the War Department.”
Even
within the government’s handpicked and limited cast of
witnesses, there was disagreement as to whether the body was
that of Booth. Dr. John Frederick May, who had previously seen
Booth as a patient, noted that “there is no resemblance in
that corpse to Booth, nor can I believe it to be him.” May
added that the corpse “looks to me much older, and in
appearance much more freckled than he was. I do not recollect
that he was at all freckled.” Dr. May would later write that
the corpse’s “right limb was greatly contused, and perfectly
black from a fracture of one of the long bones.” Surgeon
General Barnes’ report to Stanton, however, held that it was
“the left leg and foot” that were injured and “encased in an
appliance of splints and bandages,” thus clouding the waters
even on such straightforward issues as which of the corpse’s
legs was injured.
Dr. John Frederick May
After the
hasty identification charade, and without anyone who was
actually close to Booth in life having seen the body, and
without any public display of the body, and without any
photographs of the body that would ever see the light of day,
the corpse was quickly disposed of by either Lafayette Baker
and Thomas Eckert, or Lafayette and Luther Baker, depending
upon who is telling the tale. Following the announcement that
the body had been disappeared, shouts of “hoax!” rocked
Washington, with many convinced that Booth hadn’t been
captured or killed and was still free.
On July
28, 1866, Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky voiced his doubts
about the identification of Booth: “I have never seen any
satisfactory evidence that Booth was killed.” Senator Reverdy
Johnson of Maryland, who had played a role in the mock trial,
came back with: “I submit to my friend from Kentucky that
there are some things that we must take judicial notice of,
just as well as that Julius Caesar is dead.”
Davis
though remained decidedly unconvinced: “I would rather have
better testimony of the fact. I want it proved that Booth was
in that barn. I cannot conceive, if he was in the barn, why he
was not taken alive. I have never seen anybody, or the
evidence of anybody, that identified Booth after he is said to
have been killed. Why so much secrecy about it? … There is a
mystery and a most inexplicable mystery to my mind about the
whole affair … [Booth] could have been captured just as well
alive as dead. It would have been much more satisfactory to
have brought him up here alive and to have inquired of him to
reveal the whole transaction … [or] bring his body up here …
let all who had seen him playing, all who associated with him
on the stage or in the green room or at the taverns and other
public places, have had access to his body to have identified
it.”
Senators Reverdy Johnson and Garrett Davis
There was
no way the powers-that-be were going to allow that to happen,
of course, since the body clearly wasn’t that of John Wilkes
Booth. Had it been, the government surely would have taken the
actions necessary to convince a skeptical public. But such
actions weren’t really necessary in 1865, just as they aren’t
today. The omnipotent ones can tell us, for example, that
Osama bin Laden was killed and his body promptly disposed of -
and the majority of us will accept it as the gospel truth.
And those
malcontents who choose not to accept a proclamation that lacks
any objective proof? Well, they don’t really matter. Just as
the voices of reason didn’t really matter 150 years ago.
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