Unwanted Facts: Facts that Most Books on the Lincoln Assassination Ignore

[mikegriffith1]

(12-02-2018 09:28 AM)Gene C Wrote:  I'm doubtful the government was laminating pages in the 1860's. When did that happen? To do that effectively, they would have to remove the page from the diary.

Uh, yes, and the FBI report describes exactly that being done with some of the pages, as I discussed earlier. Again, this editing job was clearly a time-consuming, detailed revision and redaction. Between 4/17 and 4/21, three days were removed (4 pages and 2 blank pages). Some pages were only partially cut. In some cases, only one or two pages were cut. Some pages were moved to other parts of the diary. Some of the pages were laminated, so whoever did this had the means to laminate. Six pages were removed from the middle of Booth's confession and apology. The middle of the diary was glued back together. Etc., etc., etc. Clearly, somebody went through the diary very carefully and excised pages and partial pages that they found unacceptable, and moved other pages to create a false record.

I again urge you to read Dan Thomas's 13-page analysis of the FBI report.

(12-02-2018 09:28 AM)Gene C Wrote:  You have yet to show any proof or evidence that it was someone in the government, and not Booth, who tore or cut out the missing pages. Since it was a diary/notebook for 1864, Booth had ample opportunity to write in it and remove pages before he died.

Well, if you can't bring yourself to at least admit that the editing was clearly a detailed, sophisticated redaction that must have been done after the War Department got the diary, I don't know what to tell you. I guarantee you that Booth didn't cut pages from the middle of his confession, which he wrote during his flight, and then glue the whole diary back together in the middle section of the book, much less do the other editing that was done to post-4/14 pages.

And the idea that in 1864 Booth did any of the kind of editing that we're talking about strikes me as strained silliness and, in my view, is indicative of the inclination to see the Emperor's New Clothes that one encounters so often in defenses of the War Department's story.

You don't want to admit that the War Department tampered with and redacted the diary because you know that would indicate a cover-up, that it would clearly suggest that the original diary contained information that Stanton, Holt, Baker, etc., did not want revealed.

Even after the redaction, Stanton and his comrades decided that the diary was still unacceptable, so they suppressed its existence and did not enter it into evidence at the conspiracy trial. They didn't want the world to know that Booth denied foreknowledge of the attack on Seward, that Booth said that he did not contemplate killing Lincoln until the day of the murder, that Booth said he was considering going back to Washington to at least partially clear his name. These revelations would have thrown a hand grenade into the prosecution's case and would have raised all kinds of disturbing questions. So they suppressed the diary. If Baker, in an act revenge, had not revealed the diary's existence in his 1867 book, we still might not know it ever existed.