Robert Kennedy's assassination - what do you think? [View All]

Since we’ve been talking about JFK’s assassination, I’m wondering what people think of RFK’s. It gets much less attention, but the case, I’d say, is far from closed that Sirhan Sirhan was the lone gunman.

Some of the reasons why I say so:

RFK was shot from behind at an upwards trajectory, the gun nozzle no more than an inch from his skin. Sirhan was standing a foot to a foot and a half in front of Kennedy.

Photos of the crime scene show many more bullet holes than can be accounted for by Sirhan’s gun. (The LAPD subsequently removed the wood panels and ceiling tiles and destroyed them.) Five people were shot, one twice, besides Kennedy, who himself was shot four times. To account for Sirhan hitting them all, requires several "magic" bullets with astonishing trajectories.

Sirhan's last memory before the shooting is of having coffee with a woman in a polka dot dress. He was seen in her company, with another man, entering the Ambassador hotel. After the shooting, a number of witnesses saw a woman in a polka dot dress flee with a man, and separate accounts have the woman saying "We shot him! We shot Kennedy!"

Bullets fired cannot be matched to each other or to Sirhan's gun, and the chain of evidence shows gross tampering.

Sirhan was found to be extremely suggestible to hypnosis, and exhibited evidence of having been hypnotized previously, with hypnotic blocks still impeding his memory of the events. There's plentiful evidence that he was in an altered state at the time of the killing, only coming out in the police station.

Multiple witnesses saw only flashes and paper residue flying from Sirhan's gun, suggesting he was firing blanks. Witnesses who had heard many gunshots said it sounded more like a cap pistol.

Sirhan is still alive and imprisoned, and still cannot remember the evening. Experts provided by the state have found that Sirhan truthfully cannot remember.

Security guard Thane Eugene Cesar was standing slightly to RFK's rear, at the location of the shots. He claimed to have sold a gun of the type which killed Kennedy before the shooting, but a receipt found later proved it had been sold afterwards. His security work involved partner corporations of the CIA.

In his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks writes of the CIA's efforts to create a programmed killer via MKULTRA. He quotes a CIA veteran who says the program was unnecessary, as a mercenary can be found to kill anyone for a price. What is more useful is a programmed patsy. Marks writes further of a "programmed patsy":

"The purpose of this exercise is to leave a circumstantial trail that will make the authorities think the patsy committed a particular crime. The weakness might well be that the amnesia would not hold up under police interrogation, but that would not matter if the police did not believe his preposterous story about being hypnotized or if he were shot resisting arrest."

Even before Sirhan was identified as a subject, hypnotist William Joseph Bryan said on air in Los Angeles that the assassin was probably mind-controlled, and later bragged to prostitutes about his work for the CIA and having hypnotized Sirhan.

For more on RFK’s murder, I highly recommend the recent anthology The Assassinations. There’s much more on "the girl in the polka dot dress," including a very plausible ID (Iranian national, her father worked for the Shah’s secret police and had CIA links.) Portions of two of the books RFK essays are reproduced here:

http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/collections/assassinations/rfk.htm