My Journey on Lincoln's Assassination

[mikegriffith1]

(10-15-2018 06:50 PM)L Verge Wrote:  [quote='mikegriffith1' pid='73414' dateline='1539636251']I quote from Thomas Bogar’s book Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination:

One day that week John Ford overheard an egregious instance of “witness preparation” in the prison yard: [Lafayette] Baker going at Rittersbach, putting words in his mouth. Whereas Rittersbach had actually heard Ned Spangler that night [April 14] say, “Hush your mouth. You don’t know whether it’s Booth or not,” Baker now told him to add that Spangler had slapped him across the face and warned, “For God’s sake, shut up! And don’t say which way he went.” If Rittersbach would not so testify, Baker threatened, he would be thrown definitely into the general prison population at Old Capitol. This approach by Baker, Ford believed, would unnerve anyone, “and cause him to think he believed he heard what did not.” Even though Rittersbach was self-motivated to testify and required little prodding, he was hauled before Colonel Burnett on the eve of the trial for another conversation. No notes exist of its nature.

Ford, his brother Harry, and Gifford witnessed the same sort of pressure brought to bear within the prison on a terrified Louis Weichmann, a Booth associate who had boarded at Mrs. Surratt’s. Weichmann would in due course provide exceedingly incriminating testimony, which led to the conviction and execution of several of the conspirators. A day later, Maddox, Gifford, and Carland overheard an officer in Old Capitol tell Weichmann “if he didn’t swear to more than he had told, he would be hung.” (Weichmann shortly after the trial would confess to Carland that he had perjured himself to save his skin, and tell Gifford “I’d give a million dollars if I had had nothing to do with it.”) As John Ford recorded in his ever-lengthening jail house manifesto, “Another damnable feature in this prison is that if a prisoner will not or cannot give such information as may be demanded of him, he is ordered to his room or cell and handcuffed and tortured into a more compliant witness or informer.” (pp. 180-181)

(10-15-2018 06:50 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Such interrogation techniques were routinely used for centuries in cases large and small and by a variety of ethnic and religious communities across the globe - some much more violent than those used on the Lincoln conspirators.

In other words, you will defend whatever the War Department did, no matter what, even when they threatened witnesses with death to get them to swear that they heard and saw things that they did not hear and see?

To judge strictly from your words, you seem to be saying that the immoral and illegal attempts to get witnesses to lie and falsely implicate others that Ford and others witnessed are no big deal because in some places around the globe even worse "interrogation techniques" were used.