by Jeffrey Phillips | Feb 13, 2016
Despite
the fact that Sirhan Sirhan shot him in the head nearly 50 years ago,
Paul Schrade attended the convicted assassin’s parole hearing this week
to both forgive Sirhan and defend the shooter’s innocence in the
assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. After decades of research into
the assassination and witnessing the event first-hand, Schrade continues
to assert that Sirhan physically could not have fired the fatal bullet
that killed Kennedy.
Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, two months after the assassination of MLK,
Kennedy entered the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when
Sirhan stepped towards him and opened fire. While Kennedy shook hands
with the hotel kitchen staff, Schrade stood six to eight feet behind
him. As the labor chairman of Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Schrade
followed the senator through the kitchen until Sirhan emerged in front
of Kennedy and shot Schrade about an inch below his hairline in the
center of his forehead. The bullet struck Schrade’s skull but didn’t
enter his brain.
Standing
three feet in front of Kennedy, Sirhan fired a second bullet that
missed completely. Hotel maîtres d’ Karl Uecker and Edward Minasian
grabbed for Sirhan’s gun and began choking him, but not before he could
fire the remaining six bullets from his .22-caliber revolver, wounding
four more people.
Although
Sirhan’s pistol only held eight bullets, four shots struck Kennedy
while another five bullets wounded others. Hours after the shooting, FBI
Agent William Bailey found two more bullets
in the center divider of the pantry door frame. After analyzing an
audio recording of the assassination, audio expert Phil Van Praag
determined that 13 shots had been fired, indicating a second gunman.
“No witness saw Sirhan’s gun close to Robert Kennedy or behind him,” Schrade told the Saratogian last year. “He was three feet in front of Kennedy. We need to take the evidence we have in the files and try to find out who the second gunman was and if there was a connection with Sirhan. If all else fails, I’m going to have to go public and accuse the justice establishment of not bringing justice to RFK. He deserves it and the family deserves it.”
According
to L.A. County Coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, one bullet grazed the
senator’s jacket and three bullets hit Kennedy from behind with the
fatal bullet fired from only an inch away at an upward trajectory.
Witnesses recalled Sirhan’s gun never came within two to five feet of
Kennedy, who remained standing in front of him.
In
advance of Sirhan’s recent parole hearing, Schrade wrote, “The LAPD and
LA DA knew two hours after the fatal shooting of Robert Kennedy that he
was shot by a second gunman and they had conclusive evidence that
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan could not and did not do it. The official record
shows that [the prosecution at Sirhan’s trial] never had one witness –
and had no physical nor ballistic evidence – to prove Sirhan shot Robert
Kennedy. Evidence locked up for 20 years shows that the LAPD destroyed
physical evidence and hid ballistic evidence exonerating Sirhan, and
covered up conclusive evidence that a second gunman fatally wounded
Robert Kennedy.”
Less
than three months after the assassination, the LAPD incinerated
thousands of documents and pieces of evidence related to Kennedy’s
death. Besides destroying physical evidence, including door jambs and
ceiling tiles taken from the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, the LAPD
also burned 2,140 police photographs
related to the murder. Calling for a reinvestigation into Kennedy’s
murder in December 1974, Schrade led the campaign to eventually
declassify the remaining LAPD documents in 1988, after 20 years of being
suppressed.
Included
among the exposed LAPD documents were multiple witness testimonies
regarding a young woman in a polka dot dress speaking with Sirhan before
the shooting. Many of the witnesses, including Sandra Serrano and Evan
Freed, reported seeing the young woman escaping with a different man
while exclaiming, “We shot him! We shot him!”
After
interviewing Sirhan over the course of two years and ruling out any
major mental illnesses, including dissociative identity disorder and
paranoid schizophrenia, renowned Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Brown
determined Sirhan had likely been subjected to coercive suggestive
influence and hypnotic programming. At the time of Kennedy’s
assassination, the CIA had been running mind control experiments under
the codename MKUltra.
Securing thousands of government documents under the Freedom of
Information Act, Dr. Brown’s colleague, former Georgetown Law Professor
Alan Scheflin discovered at least three redacted documents describing
“successful assassinations in other countries using the unconscious assassination method…
The documents also demonstrate that a combination of sensory
deprivation, hallucinogenic drugs, and hypnosis were used in training
unconscious assassins.”
During
his sessions with Dr. Brown between 2008 and 2010, Sirhan recalled the
bartender, a young woman wearing a polka dot dress, and a man wearing a
suit at the Ambassador Hotel making strange hand gestures and squeezing
his shoulder in an odd manner. Psychologists and hypnotherapists have
discovered that visual cues and tactile signals along with trigger words
can often activate post-hypnotic suggestions in a person with very high
hypnotizability. When asked how he could have known Kennedy’s official
route had been changed at the last minute without even his bodyguard’s
knowledge, Sirhan explained that the woman in the polka dot dress led
him into the kitchen.
Although
Sirhan’s first bullet nearly killed him, Schrade appeared at his parole
hearing this week to defend the shooter’s innocence regarding Kennedy’s
death. Sentenced to death in 1969, Sirhan’s sentenced was commuted to
life in prison when the California Supreme Court briefly outlawed
capital punishment in 1972. After the parole hearing, Schrade apologized
to Sirhan and attempted to shake his hand, but the guard blocked them.
Another
person who pulled out a gun on the night of Kennedy’s assassination was
a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar. Hired by Ace Guard Service
to protect Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel, Cesar also worked at the
Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank, a job that required a security
clearance from the Department of Defense. Although Cesar claimed he had
sold his .22 pistol before the assassination, a receipt with his
signature revealed he actually sold the revolver three months after
Kennedy’s death.
With
all eyes focused on Sirhan, Cesar remained standing behind the senator
and slightly to the right when he drew his revolver. All of Kennedy’s
entry wounds were fired at close proximity from behind and slightly to
the right.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/witness-asserts-sirhan-assassinate-rfk/#MWWsQGRsAxOl3IOE.99
