From: WhoWhatWhy
By Russ Baker on Apr 5, 2013
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. 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.
Frontal Assault—From the Back
Pepper, who first filed for a new trial in 2011, wants the chance to
present a court with his new evidence: the Pruszyinski tape, impartial
eyewitness accounts, (i.e., all twelve witnesses who say Sirhan always
was in front of the Senator), and other evidence, including testimony
from Dr. Daniel Brown of Harvard, a specialist in hypnosis and trauma
memory, who has spent more than 70 hours examining Sirhan since 2008.
Among the intriguing elements the magistrate did not mention in his
report: some question exists about the original trial evidence—which is
crucial to establishing whether Sirhan was the assassin or whether
someone else killed Kennedy. Indeed, Sirhan’s trial counsel did not ask
the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner to confirm that the bullet slug
presented as evidence was the same one he removed from Senator Kennedy’s
neck. At the time of the autopsy, the examiner had marked the slug
“TN31.” In the intervening years, Pepper says, Sirhan’s defense has
learned that the slug introduced during the trial appears to have had
the mark “DWTN”—suggesting it was not from the same gun.
If forensic evidence does indicate that Kennedy was killed by shots
from behind, how can that be squared with the sworn statements of 12
witnesses who assert that they saw Sirhan in front of the
senator, with the senator facing in his direction. In addition, one of
the bullets that went into Kennedy’s head was fired from just inches
behind his right ear, but no witnesses saw Sirhan behind Kennedy, much
less close enough to have fired at that range. (All five witnesses who
testified at Sirhan’s trial stated that he was in front of Kennedy.)
One witness, Karl Uecker, a maître d’ at the hotel, was leading
Kennedy by the hand through the crowded pantry. After Kennedy stopped to
shake hands with a dishwasher, Uecker again took him by the hand and
began moving forward. It was while they were on the move that Uecker
heard a shot, saw Sirhan in front of him, grabbed for the gun and forced
Sirhan onto a steam table.
Even the magistrate who opposes giving Sirhan a new trial accepts
that Sirhan was in front of Kennedy. His explanation of the discrepancy
is that Kennedy turned his head at the last minute to shake hands with
people in the crowd, making it possible for Sirhan’s bullets to enter
the back of his head. Two of the other three shots that hit Kennedy
entered his back at powder-burn range from less than an inch away. (The
bullets in the back appear to have been fired before the head shot,
since that one brought Kennedy instantly to the floor.)
So, according to the magistrate’s Report, Sirhan somehow got several bullets into Kennedy’s back from close range and the fatal bullet into the back of his head—even though Uecker himself was between Kennedy and Sirhan, and
Uecker asserts that at no point could Sirhan’s gun have been closer
than a foot-and-a-half from Kennedy. The magistrate, having accepted
that Sirhan’s hand was pinned to a table soon after several frontal
shots missed, asserts that he nonetheless was able to get off the
successful rounds from that position.
Pepper minces no words in expressing his outrage at the magistrate’s narrative of the assassination:
The scenario put forward by the Report is
errant nonsense. It is embarrassing to say the least and though it may
have been due to the Magistrate’s reliance upon uninformed Clerks, it
should not see the light of day, much less be submitted to the habeas
Judge.
But if that long-accepted scenario makes no sense, the implication is clear:
The question remains as to who fired the
other three previous shots at close range from the rear. Once again, the
Report ignores this critical fact.
Significantly, Pepper brings in the recent testimony of Nina Rhodes-Hughes,
who says that Kennedy was not turned around, but was facing forward,
when the shots were fired. Rhodes-Hughes is certain there was a second
shooter.
I’ve discussed the case on several occasions with Pepper, as well as
with former union official Paul Schrade, who was walking six to eight
feet behind Kennedy and was himself wounded by a stray bullet. Schrade
insists, and told the FBI at the time, that Kennedy was facing Sirhan
when the shooting began.
Hypno Programming and a Second Shooter
The Sirhan case was always, on the surface at least, open-and-shut.
As if being apprehended with a gun at the scene wasn’t enough, police
found Sirhan’s highly incriminating diaries, replete with declarations
that RFK should die.
But some wondered whether he wasn’t too textbook-perfect a culprit.
Indeed, the cumulative evidence that has come out over the years
suggests that things were far more complicated. Witnesses saw Sirhan
with a woman in a polka-dotted dress; she was seen fleeing the scene,
and heard to brag about having participated in the Kennedy hit. A man
also was seen fleeing, gun in hand. And of course there was all that
evidence that Sirhan could not have fired the fatal shots.
The clincher was Sirhan’s amnesia. What could that be about? As for
Sirhan’s ranting in several spiral notebooks, some experts came to
wonder if he had produced them while in a hypnotic state. In 1969, in
the presence of several experts/witnesses, Sirhan, under hypnosis,
engaged in “automatic writing.” After he was awakened, he remembered
none of it.
This leads us to the recent work of Daniel Brown, a Harvard
psychologist. Based on having spent more than 70 hours interviewing
Sirhan at Pleasant Valley State Prison in California, Dr. Brown has
concluded that, for some time prior to the events at the Ambassador
Hotel, Sirhan had been hypnotized—and not just hypnotized but
“hypno-programmed”.
In his filing with the district court, Pepper notes that both Brown
and a collaborator, former Georgetown Law Professor Alan Scheflin, are
specialists in the fields of brainwashing, mind control, coercive
persuasion and the anti-social uses of hypnosis. Brown, also an expert
on memory and trauma, has testified before the Hague Tribunal on war
crimes. Brown and Scheflin have studied the use of hypnosis by the CIA
and other government agencies. Their conclusion: hypnosis can be, and
indeed has been, used to induce anti-social behavior.
Even the hypnosis researcher cited by the magistrate in opposition to
Sirhan getting a new trial, says that “participants, regardless of
whether hypnosis is used, are highly motivated to respond to the demands
of the particular context…and will readily perform what appear to be
dangerous and antisocial acts if required to do so.”
Brown concludes that the widely believed assertion that Sirhan was
schizophrenic is incorrect—and two prison psychologists concur with that
opinion. Instead, Brown has identified Sirhan as uniquely suited to
mind control, one of the very small minority of the public deeply
susceptible to programming. Brown further suspects that Sirhan was
subjected to a combination of drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and
suggestive influence. It’s interesting to note that two years before the
Kennedy killing, Sirhan had fallen from a horse, and saw at least nine
doctors over the next 15 months. Much of Sirhan’s activity in the year
before the assassination remains murky to this day. Under hypnosis by
Dr. Brown several years ago, Sirhan recalled a sort of handler with a
distinctive mustache who spoke with a foreign accent. He also remembered
going to a gun range to learn to shoot at vital human organs. A police
report actually corroborates Sirhan being at that same gun range with a
man of exactly that description.
Although it would seem to Sirhan’s advantage to provide Brown with
the recollections he produced, clinical hypnosis doesn’t work that way.
In recent years, Dr. Brown was able to repeat the experiment with
“automatic writing” and go much further with this research. Among other
things, Brown learned that Sirhan had been a ham radio enthusiast, going
on air nearly every evening prior to the assassination—and would often
enter a hypnotic state while doing so. This gave rise to the possibility
that Sirhan received hypnotic suggestions via short wave radio. In a
test, Brown was able to get Sirhan, while in a trance, to write
incriminating things—which he denied writing when out of the trance.
***
Writes Pepper in his most recent submission:
Will the [district court] accept the
magistrate’s report and quash the request for a new trial? Or will we
see a break in the case? As my French colleagues, who have reviewed this
file say—Les jeux sont faites. The game is up.
But is it? The judge handling the case will presumably be under
intense pressure not to permit a new trial. Consider the Pandora’s box
that could open. If the public were to learn to distrust the official
version of yet another assassination that changed the course of American
history, where would this all end? Before long, people might wonder
what happened to Martin Luther King, to labor leader Walter Reuther, to
all of the leading lights that were extinguished one after another in
the last century.
It will take the active interest of the public and the media—and some
improbable heroism on the part of the latter—to keep up the pressure
until “justice” becomes more than just another word for blind acceptance
of the government-sanctioned status quo.
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