The Stripling Episode - Harvey & Lee: A Critical Review

[W. Tracy Parnell]

4 hours ago, David G. Healy said:

Tracy, Tracy, Tracy -- we KNOW lone nutters speak for the 1964 WC conclusions, now they speak for David Lipton too?

No, I don't speak for David and he can chime in anytime. But when putting together my Palmer McBride piece I used some posts that he made to newsgroups. So, if I used them you can bet they were pretty much anti-Armstrong and I feel that his overall opinion of the theory is likely unfavorable.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Jonathan Cohen writes:

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I am pretty sure David Lifton is on record that the H&L theory is complete nonsense...

When a theory is dismissed by someone who once suggested that gunmen were hiding in papier-mâché trees on the grassy knoll, that's a pretty good sign that it's time to re-think the theory.

Perhaps the double-doppelganger nonsense was too ridiculous even for Lifton, or perhaps Lifton just resented the fact that his body-alteration theory had been out-crackpotted by Armstrong and White's invention.

[David G. Healy]

On 3/10/2021 at 3:07 AM, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

Jonathan Cohen writes:

[...]

Perhaps the double-doppelganger nonsense was too ridiculous even for Lifton, or perhaps Lifton just resented the fact that his body-alteration theory had been out-crackpotted by Armstrong and White's invention.

One doesn't need "crackpotted-theory..." for anything regarding the JFK assassination case. Simply read: Mark Lane's Rush to Judgement. That book alone put Lone Nut's on the sidelines. Further, and Oliver Stone, of course, delivered Last Rites...

[David G. Healy]

2 minutes ago, David G. Healy said:

One doesn't need "crackpotted-theory..." for anything regarding the JFK assassination case. Simply read: Mark Lane's Rush to Judgement. That book alone put Lone Nut's (and the 1964 WCR) on notice and on the sidelines. Further, and Oliver Stone, of course, delivered Last Rites to the 1964 WCR...

 

Edited March 12, 2021 by David G. Healy
date correction

[Paul Jolliffe]

At the end of the day, numerous independent witnesses believed (rightly or wrongly) that someone using the name "Lee Harvey Oswald" had attended Stripling Jr. High in Fort Worth for a brief period many years before the assassination.

The the first of these witnesses included the brother of the suspect should have been grounds for a serious investigation by the Warren Commission. Instead, they did nothing at all. Had they done even a cursory interview with any of the administrators at Stripling, they could have cleared this up. Had they asked the FBI to figure it out, we wouldn't be here now.

Instead, the Warren Commission completely failed to give us the answer to even the simplest of questions: where did the accused go to junior high school?

From the extant multiple witness statements, it appears very likely that someone using the name "Oswald" did indeed attend Stripling for at least a bit, years before the assassination. That is not "derp". 

While we can't know beyond any doubt whether "Oswald" did, the burden of proof is not on John Armstrong, nor Jim Hargrove nor anyone else to show whether "Oswald" did, or did not, ever attended Stripling Jr. High. 

That burden, that charge, that moral duty was on the Warren Commission alone. 

The Warren Commission did not want to know the answer - and that can hardly be comforting to those here desperate to avoid the high probability that there really was a deep intelligence operation, years in the making, involving multiple people using the name "Lee Harvey Oswald."

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

David G. Healy writes:

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One doesn't need "crackpotted-theory..." for anything regarding the JFK assassination case.

Exactly! The paranoid, super-conspiracy, everything-is-a-fake craziness is a distraction from the question of who planned or carried out the assassination.

As Mr Healy implies, the lone-nut interpretation fails for perfectly rational reasons, and doesn't require that Oswald was a fake, or that JFK's body was a fake, or that the Zapruder film is a fake, or that the Altgens 6 photograph is a fake, or any of the other paranoid clutter that has infested the topic.

When a political figure gets murdered, there's a pretty good chance that it happened for political reasons. The JFK assassination was a political killing, a fact often overlooked by our more paranoid brethren. 

The fact that more than one person was involved, and the uncertainty about exactly who was involved, have attracted far too many of the tin-foil-hat types whose motivation is to conjure up the biggest and most implausible conspiracy they can think of:

"Some bad guys shot someone who was in a slow-moving open-topped car and framed a patsy? Huh! Where's the excitement in that? Those home movies of the shooting, the bad guys faked them! Especially the one that proved there was a conspiracy! That's a fake!"

"Oh yeah? That's nothing! You know the photographs that were taken in Dealey Plaza? The lizard people faked them too! They had a mobile photography lab in Dealey Plaza! The world really is run by people with the power to do that!"

"Get real! The bad guys didn't just set up the patsy, they actually faked him! No, stop laughing! There were two of him, and both of them were in the book depository at the same time! And then both of them got arrested in the Texas Theater and each of them gave the game away by telling the cops his name was Oswald! The bad guys started that plot a decade before the assassination!"

"I can beat that! Kennedy's body, that was faked too! Our all-powerful overlords had a team of surgeons, and helicopters and everything! The surgery was done by the same people who operated on that alien from Roswell!"

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Paul Jolliffe writes:

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The the first of these witnesses included the brother of the suspect should have been grounds for a serious investigation by the Warren Commission. ... Instead, the Warren Commission completely failed to give us the answer to even the simplest of questions: where did the accused go to junior high school?

There was only one reason for the Warren Commission's interest in Oswald's biography. The utterly trivial matter of which school Oswald attended in 1954-55 gave them no ammunition to portray him as a lone-nut malcontent, so they ignored it.

Even if the Commission had been interested in finding out who killed JFK, which it wasn't, it would have dismissed Robert Oswald's inconsequential, off-hand remark for the same reason that every non-paranoid person dismisses it. Robert had no first-hand knowledge of where his brother went to school in 1954-55, since he was away in the Marines at the time. He was guessing, and he guessed wrong. No big deal.

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From the extant multiple witness statements, it appears very likely that someone using the name "Oswald" did indeed attend Stripling for at least a bit, years before the assassination.

Instead of "very likely", you should have written "not remotely likely".

If you had read the first post on page one of this thread, you would have seen Mark Stevens taking these "extant multiple witness statements" to pieces. There is no good reason to suppose that an Oswald doppelganger, with or without a 13-inch head, attended Stripling.

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the burden of proof is not on John Armstrong, nor Jim Hargrove nor anyone else to show whether "Oswald" did, or did not, ever attended Stripling Jr. High.

Seriously? If Armstrong, Hargrove, or anyone else claims that Oswald attended Stripling, the burden of proof is absolutely on them to support their assertion. As this thread demonstrates, no-one has come close to proving anything of the sort.

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the high probability that there really was a deep intelligence operation, years in the making, involving multiple people using the name "Lee Harvey Oswald."

"High probability"? There is a good argument that the one and only, real-life Lee Harvey Oswald was impersonated, ad hoc, in Mexico City and perhaps in Dallas, in the few weeks preceding the assassination. There isn't the remotest probability that a decade-long double-doppelganger scheme existed of the sort imagined by John Armstrong and Jack "the moon landings were faked" White.

[Andrew Prutsok]

You appear to believe Oswald was "impersonated, ad hoc,  in Mexico City and perhaps Dallas," but suggesting any other impersonation/operation is nuts? How's that follow, exactly?

[Jonathan Cohen]

8 hours ago, Andrew Prutsok said:

You appear to believe Oswald was "impersonated, ad hoc,  in Mexico City and perhaps Dallas," but suggesting any other impersonation/operation is nuts? How's that follow, exactly?

At the risk of speaking for Jeremy, I believe the point is not that "any other impersonation/operation is nuts," but rather, that John Armstrong's "Harvey & Lee" theory most certainly is.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Jonathan is correct. It goes like this:

(a) Small number of impersonation(s) in Mexico City and possibly also Dallas, done ad hoc a few weeks before the assassination to portray Oswald as a pro-Castro malcontent: quite likely to be true.

(b) Most of the stories of Oswald seen doing suspicious things in Dallas (e.g. at the firing range) : could be true, but more likely to be cases of honest, mistaken identity, as is common in newsworthy events.

(c) Decade-long project that could never have happened, involving two unrelated but virtually identical Oswalds (one of whom vanished without trace immediately after the assassination) and two unrelated but virtually identical Marguerites (one of whom also vanished without trace immediately after the assassination) : you've got to be kidding.

[Paul Jolliffe]

On 3/15/2021 at 7:04 AM, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

Robert had no first-hand knowledge of where his brother went to school in 1954-55, since he was away in the Marines at the time. He was guessing, and he guessed wrong. No big deal.

Huh.

So not only did Robert Oswald (and several other witnesses) get the school wrong, he got the state wrong. He was off by a mere 524 miles, but "No big deal" . . .

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/W.C.+Stripling+Middle+School,+2100+Clover+Ln,+Fort+Worth,+TX+76107/4621+Canal+St,+New+Orleans,+LA+70119/@31.2186706,-95.9869475,7z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x864e73ba1bbbb8e5:0x740a008b65e8d88f!2m2!1d-97.3791193!2d32.738844!1m5!1m1!1s0x8620af7c6fb33005:0xa1e0814f41f0f961!2m2!1d-90.1058227!2d29.9789342

 

[James DiEugenio]

And remember Paul, Ruth Paine did not know where her sister lived or worked in 1963.

No big deal.

[Ron Bulman]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

And remember Paul, Ruth Paine did not know where her sister lived or worked in 1963.

No big deal.

I. E. that sis was CIA?  But she knew where to drive to to see her that summer?  Then found her way to New Orleans to pickup Marina.  But not Lee's rifle.  How did it get back to her garage.  Maybe it never did.

No big deal.  Never mind. 

Edited March 17, 2021 by Ron Bulman

[James DiEugenio]

LOL.  I think its funny reading her testimony during Garrison's questioning before the grand jury.

First he asks her, we cannot find out where your sister works.  The government will not give us the info. So he asks her if she can do so.  Ruth draws a blank on that subject.

So then Garrison does the same with where her sister lives.  And again, Ruth seemingly forgot where she drove to in the summer of 1963.  Then he gets in a guessing game with her.  And she kind of leads him to think it was Falls Church, Virginia.

One of the things that is so neat about doing Len's show is that the listeners are smart and dedicated. Because, this is what I thought, that Sylvia lived in Falls Church.  One of the listeners dug up the information that this was not really true.  She lived in Maryland at the time..And we are supposed to think Ruth did not recall that.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Paul Jolliffe writes:

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So not only did Robert Oswald (and several other witnesses) get the school wrong, he got the state wrong. He was off by a mere 524 miles, but "No big deal" . . .

Of course it's no big deal! He made an off-hand assumption, a decade after the supposed event, about a trivial subject of which he had no personal knowledge, and he got his assumption wrong. What's so unlikely about that?

You could argue that Robert was only speaking one decade after the supposed event, unlike the other 'witnesses' whom Armstrong dug out four decades after the supposed event. But even one decade would be more than enough time for Robert's memory to become clouded, especially concerning something insignificant which he had no first-hand knowledge of in the first place.