Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (48 page)

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Authors: Richard Belzer,David Wayne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #Political Science, #History & Theory, #Social Science, #Conspiracy Theories

BOOK: Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups
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Chief Psychiatrist Bernard Diamond:

“Let me specifically state that it was immediately apparent that Sirhan had been programmed.”
422
12.The cover-up was blatant. For example, LAPD Criminalists denied claims that they had themselves clearly delineated in previous statements. They said they recovered bullets and then later denied having recovered them. They stated that there were bullet holes in the pantry walls and door. Then they later denied that there ever were any, after they were the ones who had originally claimed that there were!
423

Not true,
according to an expert in such matters, who viewed the bullet holes with his own eyes. FBI Agent William Bailey, who was at the crime scene shortly after the shooting, investigating it in preparation for witness interviews, stated :

“As I toured the pantry area I noticed in a wood doorframe, a center divider between the two swinging doors, two bullet holes. I’ve inspected quite a few crime scenes in my day. These were clearly bullet holes; the wood around them was freshly broken away and I could see the base of a bullet in each one.”
424
“The arithmetic here is devastatingly simple: the gun taken from Sirhan Sirhan held a maximum of eight bullets; thus, with at least eight bullets already accounted for, there could be no bullets in the walls or doorframe, if only one gun was firing. Any bullets or bullet holes in the walls would be irrefutable proof of a second gun.”
425
Crucial evidence, such as the doorframes cited above, promptly disappeared into LAPD’s “evidentiary black hole” and was literally never seen again. They were later described as “accidentally destroyed.” Photographs of the crime scene vanished. Testimonies were dramatically altered.
U.S. Congressman Allard Lowenstein summarized the obvious cover-up bluntly:
“I do not know why those responsible for law enforcement in Los Angeles decided to stonewall the RFK case. But once they had made that decision, the rest followed: facts had to be concealed or distorted and inconvenient evidence done away with, inoperative statements had to be replaced by new statements, until they in turn became inoperative; people raising awkward questions had to be discredited, preferably as self-seeking or flaky.”
426
13.Harassment of witnesses was commonplace. As one witness later summarized the effects of her “harassment” (her word) at the hands of LAPD:
“ ... I was just twenty years old and I became unglued. I said what they wanted me to say.”
427

Griffin also told police that he saw Sirhan on three different occasions that night. On two of those occasions he saw him with an attractive woman who seemed to be his companion that evening. He noticed the two of them because they somehow seemed like they were “out of place.”

“When the first shots were fired Griffin was standing just outside the pantry. He noticed the woman and another man whom he had seen earlier with Sirhan run out of the pantry. Something in their motion and demeanor made Griffin blurt out, ‘They’re getting away!’”
428

Other eyewitnesses saw the same two individuals, an attractive well-built young woman and an Arab-looking man, running out of the pantry while everyone else was heading in, or toward Senator Kennedy. Their descriptions matched. Some noted that the Arab-looking man was perspiring profusely and held a gun visible beneath a newspaper. Other eyewitnesses reported that once outside, the same two individuals yelled “We got him! We shot him!” More than one witness saw and heard that. Again, their descriptions matched.
429

For some reason, LAPD found it necessary to discredit Griffin and his statement.

“The
LAPD Summary Report
would dismiss Booker Griffin by stating that Griffin confessed “that the story of the male and female escaping was a total fabrication on his part.” This allegation has no basis whatsoever in any of the tapes, transcripts, or summaries of Griffin’s law enforcement interviews. It is so transparent in its goal of discrediting a witness that it serves as further evidence of a hidden agenda on the part of those producing the final
Summary Report
alleging he had admitted he had lied.”
430

Griffin was furious and rightfully so. There was obviously an agenda, and people were going to great lengths to support that agenda.

It was against that backdrop that Sirhan was found guilty “alone and not in concert with anyone else” of Murder in the First Degree. Sirhan later told his attorney:

“Even Jesus Christ couldn’t have saved me.”
431

From a standpoint of being framed by the “justice” system, he was apparently right. Incredibly, over forty years after the murder, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan still sits in prison for a crime he could not have committed: Murder in the First Degree requires willful, that is, conscious premeditation and, as we show above, he scientifically and literally could not have fired the shot that killed Senator Kennedy. Either no one has been able to find a federal judge who will look fairly at the exculpatory evidence, or the case is simply too hot to handle—probably the latter.

POSSIBLE SCENARIOS

Some very interesting evidence exists that Sirhan may have somehow been “mentally manipulated.”

Those who saw Sirhan after the murder noted with great surprise that both his facial expression and his demeanor were
dramatically
opposite his actual situation.

“Writer George Plimpton, who had helped in the struggle to disarm him, was taken aback by his ‘dark brown and enormously peaceful eyes.’ Another witness recalled that he looked ‘very tranquil.’ His detachment seemed almost transcendal, as if he had an inner life that had no relation to the hysteria around him.’
432

The LAPD Night Watch Commander who had read Sirhan his legal rights, Sgt. William C. Jordan, was also shocked by the serenity of the defendant in such a hysterical situation. Jordan said:

“There was more than a touch of mob hysteria in the kitchen after the shooting.” Yet the suspect remained less agitated than “individuals arrested for a traffic violation.”
433

Legal precedent
does
exist for murder-by-proxy via hypnosis.
434

The linkage between powerful billionaire Aristotle Onassis, known simply as “The Greek,” and the Kennedy family is one that is both curious and possibly very important. The animosity between the two was historically well-documented and extreme in nature:

“When Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. ... asked Bobby what they proposed to do about Onassis’s invitation, the Attorney General answered grimly,
‘Sink the fucking yacht.’”
435

As investigative journalist Peter Evans points out, the links can be made from Onassis all the way to Sirhan. The missing portion of Sirhan’s history known as his “white fog” period, coincides exactly with the trips to California of a strong link to Onassis, Mahmoud Hamshari, who also had links to terrorist networks.

Onassis and Hamshari both also link up directly to the infamous hypnotist, Bill Bryan, whose work was even the basis of the film,
The Manchurian Candidate,
for which Bryan also served as technical consultant.

Bill Bryan was a “hypnosis superstar,” possibly the best there ever was. He apparently worked on the CIA’s MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE mind control programs and it was verified that, believe it or not, he could make patients “bleed on cue”; he actually did precisely that at a hypnosis seminar for trial lawyers in San Francisco in 1961; the event was witnessed by many and was not sleight-of-hand.
436

Onassis was a patient of Dr. Bryan and often referred friends and associates to the famous hypnotist. Most of the records for the CIA behavioral research programs MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE were secretly destroyed and it is not officially known whether they succeeded in creating a successful
Manchurian Candidate
(programmed assassin) at the time of the projects’ termination in 1964. However, Milton Kline, an expert who worked on the secret projects (and was President, American Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis), summarizes the capability as follows:

“It cannot be done by everyone, it cannot be done consistently, but it
can be done.

437

Therefore, the relationship between Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis is not only of historical importance, it also seems somehow linked to the murder of Robert Kennedy.

LBJ reportedly loved hearing news of the marriage because it gave him the revenge against Bobby Kennedy that he craved:

“Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy were going to be married.
This would have been raw meat to Johnson. Three days before, he had announced that he would not run for another term, and he was still seething at the Kennedy camp’s slur that Bobby’s challenge had driven him back to the ranch.
When Johnson planned to play this card we shall probably never know. But shortly after Karr’s visit to the Oval Office, Eugene McCarthy saw Johnson, and when he brought up the subject of Bobby’s presidential run,
‘The president said nothing; instead he drew a finger across his throat, silently, in a slitting motion.”‘
438

The world was shocked when Jackie publicly announced her plans to marry Onassis, and everyone wondered the same thing:
Why?
It seemed such an odd alliance and, frankly, true love was about the last reason that came to anyone’s mind. A friend and associate of Onassis noted a very revealing statement that Onassis had made once; one that he never forgot:

“He then made this interesting remark: He said, ‘A marriage of interests can solve many problems, my dear fellow.’
I missed its significance at the time; it only struck a chord when he married Jackie Kennedy.”
439

Reactions to the marriage were predictably bleak. Consider the following newspaper headlines of the time:

Jack Kennedy Dies Today for a Second Time
440

The Reaction Here is Anger, Shock and Dismay
441

The pages of Sirhan’s notebooks contained two other names written by Sirhan under a hypnotic trance that specifically linked to Aristotle Onassis: Fiona Thyssen, the lover of Ari Onassis’ son, whom Onassis had threatened to have killed; and Stavros Niarchos, Onassis’ arch-enemy of many decades with a competing business empire.

“On the first page, Sirhan had written at the center of a roundel,
amid Arabic writing, the single name,

Fiona.

And on another page:

2 Niarkos!

On a third page, between the lines

One Hundred thousand dollars and Dollars-One Hundreds,

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