RFK Assassination Legal Case Update

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.  

See GRAPHIC Info here.