15-03-2014, 09:44 PM
The following is excerpted from The Web of Conspiracy, by Theodore Roscoe, published by Prentice-Hall in 1959.
"...Historians know no more than the information made available to them, and for many years the United States War Department kept the records on Lincoln's assassination locked in files marked "secret." The War Department was in charge of the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices. It also assumed charge of the subsequent conspiracy trials. Although trial proceedings were published at the time, the Bureau of Military Justice sat on a great deal of conspiracy information, and the Army chiefs refused to release much of the data on the assassination and the pursuit of the conspirators. Not until the mid 1930's were pertinent War Department records placed in the public domain.
Accordingly, all previous accounts of the assassination were based on official Government statements and press releases angled, slanted and otherwise doctored to suit popular consumption, and on the sketchy (although voluminous) trial reports published by the official court reporters. Thus a towering edifice of so-called history was erected on sand. It made popular reading, but it lacked the exacting foundations of true historicity. How could the facts be known or assessed when the War Department withheld them from inquiring historians and even from such authorized investigators as senators and congressmen on contemporary Congressional Committees?
...The military censors had a field day with the Lincoln Murder case. From the outset [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton held that many of the facts relating to the assassination were "not in the public interest." Eventually so much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth. Thus an immense deception was imposed and a stupendous crime was covered.
Today the cover-up is conceded by at least one Government agency which tells us in its official literature that "confusion and mystery" cloak Lincoln's assassination and "we probably shall never know all the facts."
...For seventy years the War Department kept the official files on the assassination conspiracy, the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth, and the trial of Booth's accomplices under lock and key. One might assume that during the Reconstruction Era some legitimate purpose was served in this. But in decades long after the Civil War, what "national security" was protected by the military censors? As of 1890, for example, what strategic plans, operations, or weapons were safeguarded by this secrecy?
...In respect to the Lincoln murder case no modern intelligence device could be compromised. What could be compromised is the security of a myth, or the reputation of an institution, or the concealment of some figure or group who had been party to a heinous crime.
...Says the pamphlet issued by the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.: "Confusion and mystery still surround the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, and we probably will never know all the facts. One thing is sure...his murder was part of a larger conspiracy."
But the facts of the murder conspiracy are lost to history. Probably they will never be unearthed. All participants in the great conspiracy are now dead. The last surviving witness to Lincoln's assassination ... died in 1956. (He was five years old when his godmother took him to see the President at Ford's Theater...)"
"...Historians know no more than the information made available to them, and for many years the United States War Department kept the records on Lincoln's assassination locked in files marked "secret." The War Department was in charge of the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices. It also assumed charge of the subsequent conspiracy trials. Although trial proceedings were published at the time, the Bureau of Military Justice sat on a great deal of conspiracy information, and the Army chiefs refused to release much of the data on the assassination and the pursuit of the conspirators. Not until the mid 1930's were pertinent War Department records placed in the public domain.
Accordingly, all previous accounts of the assassination were based on official Government statements and press releases angled, slanted and otherwise doctored to suit popular consumption, and on the sketchy (although voluminous) trial reports published by the official court reporters. Thus a towering edifice of so-called history was erected on sand. It made popular reading, but it lacked the exacting foundations of true historicity. How could the facts be known or assessed when the War Department withheld them from inquiring historians and even from such authorized investigators as senators and congressmen on contemporary Congressional Committees?
...The military censors had a field day with the Lincoln Murder case. From the outset [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton held that many of the facts relating to the assassination were "not in the public interest." Eventually so much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth. Thus an immense deception was imposed and a stupendous crime was covered.
Today the cover-up is conceded by at least one Government agency which tells us in its official literature that "confusion and mystery" cloak Lincoln's assassination and "we probably shall never know all the facts."
...For seventy years the War Department kept the official files on the assassination conspiracy, the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth, and the trial of Booth's accomplices under lock and key. One might assume that during the Reconstruction Era some legitimate purpose was served in this. But in decades long after the Civil War, what "national security" was protected by the military censors? As of 1890, for example, what strategic plans, operations, or weapons were safeguarded by this secrecy?
...In respect to the Lincoln murder case no modern intelligence device could be compromised. What could be compromised is the security of a myth, or the reputation of an institution, or the concealment of some figure or group who had been party to a heinous crime.
...Says the pamphlet issued by the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.: "Confusion and mystery still surround the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, and we probably will never know all the facts. One thing is sure...his murder was part of a larger conspiracy."
But the facts of the murder conspiracy are lost to history. Probably they will never be unearthed. All participants in the great conspiracy are now dead. The last surviving witness to Lincoln's assassination ... died in 1956. (He was five years old when his godmother took him to see the President at Ford's Theater...)"