Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

John Armstrong read my previous post about the difficulty of finding a time in which Oswald could have studied Russian, and he responded:

"I spoke for hours with Zack Stout, LHO's former Marine buddy, who took over Martin Shrand's guard duty after he was killed. Stout knew LEE from the time he arrived to the time Stout left Japan. Most of the time they were on maneuvers and carried nothing extra (no books, records, etc.). Zack said, exactly, "If he had studied Russian everyone would have known about it. I didn't see him study Russian and neither did anyone else." So much for Japan. The only time left for him to have studied Russian in the Marines was at book camp, ITR training, aviation fundamentals in Jacksonville, or radar school. And there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he studied Russian at any time. Don't forget, that at Santa Ana, CA. Harvey had a date with Roslynn Quinn, who had been studying Russian at the Berlitz School in anticipation of working for the State Dept. She said Harvey's Russian was far better than hers. She said he spoke it very, very well."

The fact is that the whole idea that Oswald could have taught himself Russian- at all- is preposterous. But logistically, there wasn't even a time that he could have done it. 

Let's look at his ability with English, which was poor. Here is his request for Soviet citizenship letter, and I shall detail its mistakes.

He misspelled "supreme" as "surpren". He didn't close his 9s, making them look more like 4s. Since he put a comma after his name, he should have had one in front of his name. He used a comma instead of a period after Soviet Union to end the sentence. His "O" in the word "ON" is entirely illegible. He has an errant comma after Oct 15, and he ends the sentence with a comma instead of a period. He has an errant period after "date" and his writing of "while" is illegible and is only understood through context. There is a missing comma after "AT PRESENT" which is glaring. There is an errant semicolon after "BECAUSE" and look how he wrote his A like an R in "CAPITRLIST". He drew his O like an S in "WSRKERS". Often he used a comma where a period was called for. For the word "served" he wrote what looks to me like "seyed". He says he is willing to give up his American citizenship, but "give" is completely illegible, and you understand it only through context. The word "MILITARY" is a mess with missing letters. Lots more errant commas. He spelled "indefinitely" as "INDEFINITLY". He spelled "RETURN" as "RETURE". Then, the next time he spelled it correctly except that he dotted the N. He misspelled "COUNTRY" somehow- it isn't legible. The word "REQUEST" got butchered somehow- it isn't legible. Then, he misspelled "SINCERELY" leaving out the last e. And finally, in signing his own name, he wrote the "s" backwards making it look like a "z". In fact, it looks somewhat like a "3" which is a letter in Russian which sounds like "z". Think about it: His name was spelt "Oswald" but it was pronounced "Ozwald". Is it possible that he was mixing English with Russian? 

It's hard to imagine that he could have drawn an O like that. But then the "s" in Oswald is just plain wrong. How could any English-speaking person write an "s" like that? Did he slip the Russian "3" in there which sounds like "z"? 

Here is Lee's signature when he was courtmartialed in Japan, so this was definitely Lee, the guy who was born in New Orleans.

What reason is there on God's Green Earth to think that those two signatures were signed by the same person?