Problems with the official version of the Robert Kennedy assassination:
- More bullets were recovered than could fit in Sirhan’s gun;
- Nitrite deposits and powder burns indicate that shots were fired at point- blank range, but witnesses are consistent that Sirhan’s gun was never closer than two or three feet;
- Sirhan was seen before the shooting with an associate or handler who has never been found;
- Evidence suggests that he was in a hypnotic trance during the shooting;
- The LAPD suppressed or destroyed evidence, and intimidated witnesses who contradicted the official line.
The “robot assassin” angle in this assassination seemed incredible in 1968, but since then we have learned much more about the CIA’s long history of research into mind-control. It’s no longer easy to dismiss such a possibility, nor is it easy to accept it. (From WorldAffairsBrief)
The RFK assassination gives a good idea of the capability of this system. Bobby Kennedy knew that his brother had been killed by a conspiracy. He had a vague sense of the outlines of this conspiracy, but trapped within the Johnson administration, he lacked the power to determine the truth for sure. Bobby’s plan was to wait until he could attain the presidency, and then with the full power of the presidency, he would relentlessly hunt his brother’s killers and avenge JFK’s death.
The Cabal could not allow RFK to become president, and worked relentlessly to build the mechanism to kill Bobby Kennedy and cover up the truth behind his killing. The Cabal acquired a variety of mechanisms to kill their enemies. One such mechanism was to use Special Forces operatives from the US Military who had been trained to obey orders unquestioningly, and once told that someone was an enemy of the state, they would ignorantly and dutifully dispatch this person. Since WWII, the mafia and the CIA had developed a close and mutually supportive relationship, in many cases, mob hit men could be deployed on behalf of their intelligence and political masters. Within the CIA and other intelligence organizations were cold blooded hit men who knew well that they were part of a criminal network embedded within the government. In addition, many alliances existed between international intelligence agencies. Assassination capabilities were often traded between these agencies. In cases of a high profile killing where a patsy was needed, brainwashed killers from the CIA’s MKUltra program could be deployed. Since the early 1950’s, the CIA’s MKUltra program had been using drugs, hypnosis, and a combination of other techniques to produce robot assassins.
Not long after Bobby Kennedy declared his candidacy for president, an assassination team stalked and killed Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. This assassination team was composed of the primary shooter, Thane Eugene Cesar (dressed as a security guard), MKUltra subject Sirhan Sirhan (who discharged his gun wildly), and a network of handlers and other helpers.
In case the lone nut cover of Sirhan Sirhan did not hold, the RFK killing was designed to be blamed on first the Palestinians, and then a combination of the Russians and Aristotle Onassis. Onassis hated Bobby Kennedy and wanted him out of the way so he could marry Jackie Kennedy. Onassis was brought into the plot by intelligence operatives, and he did fund some of the assassination plot. Although Onassis was involved in the plot to kill RFK, the hierarchy behind the assassination was headed by LBJ. Just as with the killing of JFK, the cover up of RFK’s assassination was a larger operation than the killing itself. During the early 1960’s, the CIA engaged in joint training exercises with local police departments across the country. Nominally, the training was intended to improve federal/local cooperation on intelligence matters. In reality, these exercises provided a mechanism for the CIA to control local police investigations across the country.
Manuel Pena, the LAPD officer with control of the RFK assassination, had previously worked doing special ops for the CIA. He had worked closely with David Morales, a CIA hit man who had a significant operational role in the JFK assassination. Beyond developing assassination and cover up capabilities, the five years between the Coup of ’63 and RFK’s killing had allowed the Cabal to consolidate their control of the press. CIA agents were inserted as reporters and editors at all of the major media outlets in the country. The meme that “conspiracy theorists” were kooks was developed within the CIA and deployed with great effectiveness. During the 1960’s, the overwhelming mass of news information reaching the eyes and ears of Americans came from 15 organizations: NBC, ABC, CBS, AP, UPI, Time-Life, McGraw Hill, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, NY Times, Washington Post, Metromedia, Westinghouse, Capital Cities, the North American Newspaper Alliance, and the Saturday Evening Post. The Cabal was successful in co-opting the top management at each of these organizations and enlisting them into active involvement in the cover-up of the Coup of ’63.
During the period 1964-68, internal research teams in several of these organizations reached the conclusion that the Kennedy Assassination had been a result of a conspiracy. In each and every case, management at the highest editorial and corporate level took actions to overrule, suppress, lock up, edit or otherwise alter these internal findings to back up the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Project Mockingbird was a CIA program to control the US press. The exact size of Project Mockingbird remains classified, but bits of information have slipped out over time that allow for budgetary estimates to be computed. In 1978, the CIA propaganda budget was estimated to be $265 million and involved 2,000 personnel making it larger than the combined budgets of Reuters, the Associated Press and United Press International. In 1977, Carl Bernstein reported that the CIA had over 400 reporters and editors at major US media outlets on its payroll. Decedents of this program continue up until the present day.
From a 2013 Article by WhoWhatWhy
Recent legal filings on behalf of Sirhan Sirhan, jailed 45 years ago in the death of Robert F. Kennedy, reveal new evidence suggestive of a larger conspiracy. The filings also enumerate examples of obstructive tactics by a government representative—contortions reminiscent of the Warren Commission’s incredible, acrobatic magic bullet that was essential in creating consensus for a lone wolf assassin in the death of RFK’s elder brother, John. (If you’d like to read those filings, we’ve posted them here and here.)
Another “Patsy”?
Sirhan, the man almost everyone believes killed Robert F. Kennedy (and did so alone), is seeking a new trial (2013). Sirhan’s current attorney, William Pepper, who also served as James Earl Ray’s final lawyer and believed that Ray had been set up, is seeking to convince the US District Court for the Central District of California not to accept a report from a magistrate judge, Andrew J. Wistrich, advising that the new trial request be dismissed. It’s up to the district court to decide whether to proceed.
Although Sirhan pled guilty at his original trial in 1969, Pepper contends that Sirhan was betrayed by a lead member of his original legal team, Grant Cooper, who Pepper notes was himself under federal indictment at the time for illegally possessing grand jury proceedings in another famous case, involving card cheating at the Beverly Hills Friar’s Club. Cooper, who faced possible jail time for that, ended up being let off with a $1000 fine. Intriguingly, his client in the Friar’s affair, John Roselli, was an organized crime figure with CIA ties often named as a possible conspirator in the death of President John F. Kennedy.
The defense had Sirhan admit guilt and sought to portray him as both mentally deficient and acting on impulse. Pepper notes that the attorney’s personal vulnerability was known to the judge and prosecution, and that they nevertheless said nothing while Sirhan’s real interests were not represented, and exculpatory evidence was suppressed. Although Sirhan confessed to shooting at Robert Kennedy, he later said that he could remember nothing at all of that tragic day.
Now, Pepper is requesting a chance to come to court and offer two kinds of evidence – facts known at the time but not presented to Sirhan’s jury, and facts that have come to light since the trial. The fundamental claim is that Sirhan was genuinely unaware of his actions on June 5, 1968 —when he did, in fact, bring a gun to the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and shortly after midnight fire at Kennedy from the front. Pepper wants to introduce expert testimony that Sirhan was a guinea pig in a super-secret program to hypnotize people and turn them into unwitting killers. As crazy as this may sound at first blush, the United States government is on record as admitting to research in broad areas of mind control, particularly with regard to the CIA’s MKULTRA program, which among other things wanted to determine whether people could be made into killing machines. (For more on MKULTRA historically, see this, and more recently, including threats to Obama’s safety, see this.)
Pepper and his experts believe that Sirhan was selected to be the patsy in RFK’s death, distracting everyone while a professional assassin fired the fatal shots unobtrusively from inches behind Kennedy—from a crouched position in the crush of people so his actions would not be noticed, milliseconds after Sirhan shot and missed and was immobilized.
Pepper’s key argument is that Sirhan, by all accounts, was positioned several feet in front of Kennedy (who was moving toward him), while forensic evidence and extensive eyewitness testimony shows that Kennedy was actually hit in the back from just inches away.
In his filing, Pepper writes:
Inadvertantly [sic], the Report begins by actually supporting Petitioner’s claim of actual innocence. It states: “As Senator Kennedy stopped to shake hands with hotel employees, Petitioner walked toward him extending his arm. Instead of shaking Senator Kennedy’s hand, Petitioner shot him.”(CD 199 at p.1)
This recitation of the activity leading up to the shooting is a virtual admission of Petitioner’s innocence since Senator Kennedy was hit by three bullets, fired in an upward angle (indicating that the shooter may have been kneeling behind the Senator) from behind him, by a weapon pressed up against his back with the fatal shot fired about an inch behind his right ear. All shots left powder burns on the back of his jacket and on his skin behind his right ear.
The Report explicitly acknowledges, along with the statements of twelve eye witnesses, that Petitioner was, at all times, in front of the Senator, where, as the Report confirms, the Petitioner could have shaken hands with him.
Petitioner questions whether further comment is necessary in light of this embarrassingly absurd factual foundation for the recommendation that the Petition be dismissed.
Pepper contends that the magistrate, in arguing against a new trial, totally ignored the factual material while focusing on procedural issues. In essence, the dispute comes down to whether those procedural issues can or should trump the notion of “actual innocence.”
In support of their contention, Sirhan’s team wants to present an audio recording made by a freelance journalist, Stanislaw Pruszynski, in the Ambassador Hotel’s pantry at the time of the shooting:
The sounds on that tape, when analyzed with a computerized technology not available at the time of the assassination, clearly reveal that thirteen shots were fired, coming from two different directions –west to east and east to west.
The magistrate has criticized Sirhan’s team for not bringing the tape forward earlier, since it has been available since 1988. But Pepper says that this is an absurd objection since the technology to analyze the sounds on the tape only became available in 2005. In arguing against a new trial for Sirhan, the magistrate cites competing “naked ear” analyses of the tape by “experts” who did not have access to the computer program. Pepper, in turn, casts doubt on the ability, motive and track record of one of those “experts”.
Not the Ideal Attorney
The fact that at this late date we still can’t agree on what happened on June 5 goes back to the very beginnings of the case. If Sirhan had been represented by capable attorneys determined to learn the truth about the politically fraught second murder of a Kennedy brother in five years, things might have turned out differently. Instead, his attorneys persuaded Sirhan to plead guilty in hopes of avoiding the death penalty; Sirhan put up no resistance to this strategy since, as he would later reveal, he had zero recall of what happened on the night of the shooting. He was sentenced to the death penalty anyway, though several years later the sentence was commuted to life in prison after California abolished the death penalty.
Pepper, in his recent filing, directs much of his outrage at attorney Grant Cooper:
As a matter of record he accepted, without even the most perfunctory examination or challenge, all of the State’s ballistic evidence…. As a result, defense Counsel Cooper’s indictment [for illegally possessing grand jury proceedings in another case] went away. He was rewarded for obtaining the guilty plea and death penalty sentence….
Indeed, here’s what Cooper said in his closing remarks:
“Now, let me state at the outset that I want this to sink in if anything sinks in—we are not here to free a guilty man. We tell you as we always have, that he is guilty of having killed Senator Kennedy….we expect that under the evidence in this case, whether Mr. Sirhan likes it or not, under the facts of this case, he deserves to spend the rest of his life in the penitentiary….Don’t we know from dozens and dozens of witnesses that this defendant pulled the trigger that killed Senator Kennedy?…there is no question about that.”…“I wouldn’t want Sirhan Sirhan to be turned loose as he is dangerous, especially when the psychiatrists tell us that he is going to get worse and he is getting worse. There is a good Sirhan and a bad Sirhan and the bad Sirhan is nasty… we as lawyers owe the obligation to do what we think is right to the fullest extent of our ability but we also owe an obligation to society. And, I, for one, am not going to ask you to do otherwise than to bring in a verdict of guilty in the second degree.”
It takes a moment to realize that this is not the prosecutor, but the defense lawyer. No wonder most of us take for granted that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy—and acted alone.
Pepper again:
Throughout his closing argument, Petitioner’s Trial Counsel never lost an opportunity to praise the prosecution’s case and the prosecutors themselves. He, continually, strangely, elevated them, and the prosecution’s case in the jury’s eyes.
