Sirhan Sirhan may be released tomorrow

[Richard Smith]

Sirhan was never behind Kennedy but Kennedy was shot from behind.

The fact that he was arrested on the scene with a gun doesn’t prove others weren’t involved.

One of the men he shot, Paul Schrade, believes it was a conspiracy and lobbied for Sirhan’s parole…

https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Featured_Paul_Schrade_at_Sirhan_Sirhan_Parole_Hearing.html

RFK turned away when he saw Sirhan pointing the gun at him. There is no credible proof of a second shooter.  None.  But even if you believed that, Sirhan was an assassin.  A second shooter would not absolve him of that guilt.

[Charles Collins]

Gascon was kicked out of SF for being too liberal.  That should tell you something.  Crime in that city increased 50% while he was there.  He is an empty the prisons socialist.  Relying on Newsom to do the right thing is an act of desperation.

I agree that the governor will most likely want to set him free. But I wonder if he will be recalled before he gets around to it. If he proceeds to set him free before the recall vote, will it tend to “add fuel to the fire” of the recall movement? I usually stay away from politics, but I firmly believe that politics is the motivation behind the LA DA’s ridiculous decision to not oppose the parole.

[Jon Banks]

RFK turned away when he saw Sirhan pointing the gun at him. There is no credible proof of a second shooter.  None.  But even if you believed that, Sirhan was an assassin.  A second shooter would not absolve him of that guilt.

Life is so much simpler when you can dismiss inconvenient evidence.

It's broadly agreed that the LAPD did a shoddy investigation. Evidence was destroyed or disappeared. The autopsy suggests that RFK was shot from behind at close range.

Most witnesses say Sirhan wasn't close enough to shoot RFK behind the ear.

The Washington Post has done surprisingly great coverage on RFK's murder:

"Sirhan was captured in the pantry, but seemed unusually calm in police custody and seemed to have no idea why he was arrested, authors who have listened to his taped statements have said.

In addition, his .22-caliber pistol could hold only eight bullets. But in addition to the four shots into Kennedy and five into the victims — one bullet was theorized to have hit two people — other bullets were found in the wood frames of doors in the pantry. Los Angeles police criminalist De Wayne Wolfer would later say that there were no bullets in the frames and that the holes had been made by the impact of kitchen carts. In 1969, the police destroyed the frames, even though the case was on appeal.

Pease and others argue that there were simply “too many holes” in the pantry for Sirhan to have been a lone gunman, and that witnesses were certain the holes in the frames were caused by bullets. She even found a video in an archive at the University of California at Los Angeles that appears to show bullets in the frames. Wolfer’s work as a crime scene analyst was later harshly discredited by California authorities.

But Sirhan’s defense team elected not to challenge any of the physical evidence, ignoring the autopsy report by famed coroner Thomas Noguchi showing the Kennedy shots were fired just inches from his back and head...

Not long after the trial, a ballistics expert examined the three bullets recovered from the scene and found that they did not match Sirhan’s gun. A subsequent retesting was done, but the bullet removed from Kennedy’s neck by Noguchi had vanished, and no ballistics match was ever made between the bullets and Sirhan’s eight-shot pistol."


https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/02/09/cia-may-have-used-contractor-who-inspired-mission-impossible-kill-rfk-new-book-alleges/

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Being driven out of your native country due to war is a good reason for hating Israel the same way Cuban exiles have good reasons for hating Fidel Castro.

There were 10-14 shots fired. Sirhan’s gun only held 8 bullets. There were powder burns on RFK’s clothes and head but Sirhan never got within 5 feet of Kennedy.

Where's the evidence that he was "driven out" of his native land by Israel? Jordan was in control of the West Bank where he lived in 1956 when he left not Israel. What did Israel have to do with his departure? And he was 12 when he left. He went with his family. Do you think he knew anything about politics at that age?

Cuban exiles left Cuba to escape repression after Castro hijacked the revolution and became a dictator.

So the analogy doesn't work for me. I'm sure it's my problem <g>.

As to the shots: Do you think he just happened to have a revolver in his hand at the same time RFK was shot? And while being subdued he continued trying to fire it? None of that had anything to do with RFK's death?

[Jon Banks]

Where's the evidence that he was "driven out" of his native land by Israel? Jordan was in control of the West Bank where he lived in 1956 when he left not Israel. What did Israel have to do with his departure? And he was 12 when he left. He went with his family. Do you think he knew anything about politics at that age?

He was born in Jerusalem. Why did he end up in Jordan before moving to the US? The 1948 war.

Are you that unfamiliar with the events that led to the creation of the modern State of Israel? There were wars and massacres of Arab villagers.

It’s presumed that Sirhan was radicalized by the 1967 war when Israel took over the West Bank.

Cuban exiles left Cuba to escape repression after Castro hijacked the revolution and became a dictator.

So the analogy doesn't work for me. I'm sure it's my problem <g>.

My point is, people who end up on the losing end of wars or colonization have the Right to hate the winning side.

All I'm saying is, it shouldn't be assumed to be anti-Semitism if a Palestinian has negative opinions of Israel. It's a very polarizing issue for both Palestinians and Zionist Jews.

As to the shots: Do you think he just happened to have a revolver in his hand at the same time RFK was shot? And while being subdued he continued trying to fire it? None of that had anything to do with RFK's death?

He doesn't know how he got to the hotel. He doesn't remember shooting RFK. If he wasn't mentally aware of what he did when he did it, then yeah, there's a case to be made that he is innocent. He also recanted his confession. I don't think it can be dismissed that he may have either been drugged or under hypnosis. Both seem plausible based on the known information (he was given drinks by a woman in a polka-dot dress who was seen by several other witnesses).

The forensic evidence certainly suggests that there may have been more than one shooter.

[Robert Reeves]

Sirhan granted parole!

'I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn't commit.' Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

'I'm overwhelmed just by being able to view Mr. Sirhan face to face,' he said. 'I think I've lived my life both in fear of him and his name in one way or another. And I am grateful today to see him as a human being worthy of compassion and love.' Douglas Kennedy

[Jon Banks]

Great summary of the evidence in the RFK case in this documentary

[Tom Scully]

Some details to consider... and I think there is an absence in this thread of consideration of Eugene McCarthy being rivals and the heavy "CIA presence" in the creation of McCarthy's candidacy and in the campaign. Is it coincidence RFK was taken out literally minutes after the pinnacle achievement in his short political career, and in a property managed by a man so close to Roy Cohn, who RFK nearly physically fought when the two were Sen. Joe McCarthy's staffers before the Army McCarthy hearings which were about the Ambassador Hotel's general manager, Schine?

RFK, Jr. suspected security guard Thane Eugene Cesar's involvement.
https://aarclibrary.org/thane-eugene-cesar-rfk-jr-calls-him-possible-assassin/

Dan Moldea's account of Cesar's cooperation, including consenting to a lie detector test, and the results.:
(Moldea mentions he was discouraged from hypnosis because of reliability vs risk and went with polygraph.)
https://www.moldea.com/Cesar-polygraph.pdf
Dan Moldea on the polygraph test he arranged for Thane Eugene Cesar. From his book, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive Means, ...


Convicted RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan says girl in polka-dot dress manipulated him
Updated: Mar. 25, 2019, 3:31 a.m. | Published: Apr. 28, 2011

By LINDA DEUTSCH
AP Special Correspondent
LOS ANGELES — Convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot to shoot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his bullets did not kill the presidential candidate, lawyers for Sirhan said in new legal papers.

The documents filed this week in federal court and obtained by The Associated Press detail extensive interviews with Sirhan during the past three years, some done while he was under hypnosis.

The papers point to a mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress as the controller who led Sirhan to fire a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. But the documents suggest a second person shot and killed Kennedy while using Sirhan as a diversion.

For the first time, Sirhan said under hypnosis that on a cue from the girl he went into "range mode" believing he was at a firing range and seeing circles with targets in front of his eyes.

"I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy," Sirhan was quoted as saying during interviews with Daniel Brown, a Harvard University professor and expert in trauma memory and hypnosis. He interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours with and without hypnosis, according to the legal brief.

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, said prosecutors were unaware of the legal filing and could not comment.

The story of the girl has been a lingering theme in accounts of the events just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy was gunned down in the hotel pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.

Witnesses talked of seeing such a female running from the hotel shouting, "We shot Kennedy." But she was never identified, and amid the chaos of the scene, descriptions were conflicting.

Through the years, Sirhan has claimed no memory of shooting Kennedy and said in the recent interviews that his presence at the hotel was an accident, not a planned destination.

Under hypnosis, he remembered meeting the girl that night and becoming smitten with her. He said she led him to the pantry.

"I am trying to figure out how to hit on her.... That's all that I can think about," he says in one interview cited in the documents. "I was fascinated with her looks .... She never said much. It was very erotic. I was consumed by her. She was a seductress with an unspoken unavailability."

Brown was hired by Sirhan's lawyer William F. Pepper.
Pepper's associate, attorney Laurie Dusek, attended the interviews. and Brown said in the documents they both took verbatim notes because prison officials would not let them tape record nearly all the sessions.

Sirhan maintained in the hypnotic interviews that the mystery girl touched him or "pinched" him on the shoulder just before he fired then spun him around to see people coming through the pantry door.

"Then I was on the target range ... a flashback to the shooting range ... I didn't know that I had a gun," Sirhan said.

Under what Brown called the condition of hypnotic free recall, he said Sirhan remembered seeing the flash of a second gun at the time of the assassination. Without hypnosis, he said, Sirhan could not remember that shot.

Pepper, a New York lawyer with an international practice, previously tried to prove that James Earl Ray was not the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.
The lawyer said he is convinced that Sirhan was a victim of a mind control project such as those used by the CIA in the 1960s. He is seeking an evidentiary hearing to exonerate Sirhan in Kennedy's killing.

Dusek said in an interview that Sirhan was hypnotized for perhaps 30 percent of the interviews, most of which had to be done through a glass partition with Brown talking to him on a phone.

Only when Sirhan was moved from the state prison at Corcoran to his current location at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga were they allowed face-to-face visits, she said, and a few of those were recorded.

Other portions of the motion allege suppression of ballistics evidence and the autopsy report, and claim ineffective assistance of counsel. It contends previous lawyers for Sirhan accepted from the start that he was the lone shooter, settled on a defense of diminished capacity and did not seek other avenues of defense.

During the trial, Sirhan tried to confess to killing Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought," but the judge rejected the blurted statement.

A large portion of the new documents seek to prove the bullets that hit Kennedy came from a different direction than the spot where Sirhan was standing. The papers do not name any other possible shooter.

Sirhan was denied parole in March by a panel that said he had not shown sufficient remorse for the killing."

June 4, 2018 :
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/06/04/the-assassination-of-bobby-kennedy-was-sirhan-sirhan-hypnotized-to-be-the-fall-guy/
"Even as Sirhan Sirhan was being captured, seconds after the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, he behaved oddly. A group of men had tackled him, held him down and tried to wrest the gun out of his hands. But “in the middle of a hurricane of sound and feeling,” wrote one of those men, author George Plimpton, Sirhan “seemed peaceful.” Plimpton was struck by Sirhan’s “dark brown and enormously peaceful eyes.” A Los Angeles police officer who had rushed in recalled, “He had a blank, glassed-over look on his face — like he wasn’t in complete control of his mind.”

At the same time, the short, slim Sirhan — 5 feet 5 inches, about 120 pounds — exerted superhuman strength as one man held his wrist to a steam table in the Ambassador Hotel pantry, firing off five or six more shots even as he was held around the neck, body and legs by other men, witnesses said. It took a half-dozen men to wrench the .22-caliber pistol out of Sirhan’s grip. At the police station, Sirhan was preternaturally calm, officers later said. “I was impressed by Sirhan’s composure and relaxation,” Sgt. William Jordan wrote in a report later that morning. “He appeared less upset to me than individuals arrested for a traffic violation.”

Two who were close to RFK and attempted to neutralize Sirhan, are of uneven loyalties, Grier voted for Obama and then for Trump, Plimpton accepted CIA funding on behalf of Paris Review.

Continued...