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Re: Re:

PostPosted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 7:30 pm
by MinM
seemslikeadream wrote:Larry Teeter talks about the CIA and RFK

William Pepper, the lawyer that took on Sirhan following the untimely demise of Larry Teeter, was on Coast-to-Coast last week:


http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry251252
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In that Education Forum link there also happens to be a debate about the merits of NY Times book review of Dan Moldea's book by Gerald Posner:
Ron Ecker wrote:Posted Yesterday, 07:36 PM

http://www.moldea.com/RFKReviews.html

Impressive! Includes excerpt from a New York Times Book Review by Gerald Posner. Leave it to the NYT to choose Posner to write a review of a Kennedy assassination book. These people are beyond any decent description.

Actually, as I recall, Moldea's book did a good job of proving a conspiracy, then on the last page he strangely concludes that Sirhan did it alone. I wonder if someone had a gun to his head as he wrapped up his manuscript.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry251248

Of course the evidence suggests that Moldea was blackmailed into concluding that Sirhan acted alone:

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2007/08/ ... trust.html
I know from a first-hand source -- whom I will name, if legally pressed -- that Dan Moldea had privately complained that the major publishers had "blackballed" him after he wrote a book called Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football. The blackballing stopped the moment he agreed to write a book about the Robert F. Kennedy assassination pushing the "lone nut" hypothesis...

viewtopic.php?p=282075#p282075

Much the same way Norman Mailer was blackmailed into supporting the lone nutters...

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry218745
Jim DiEugenio wrote:Posted 31 January 2011 - 03:26 AM

In 1973, Mailer published a book, Marilyn, (really a photo essay) with the assistance of longtime FBI asset on the Kennedy assassination Larry Schiller. He recirculated the tale again, inserting a new twist. He added the possibility that the FBI and/or the CIA might have been involved in the murder in order to blackmail Bobby ( p. 242). In 1973, pre-Rupert Murdoch, the media had some standards. Mailer was excoriated for his baseless ruminations. In private, he admitted he did what he did to help pay off a tax debt. He also made a similar confession in public. When Mike Wallace asked him on 60 Minutes (7/13/73) why he had to trash Bobby Kennedy, Mailer replied “I needed money very badly.” ...

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry218745

viewtopic.php?p=459270#p459270

Who knows what Stephen King's excuse was?

ABC Newsman, William Weisel

PostPosted: Sun May 06, 2012 3:31 pm
by MinM

Vancouver Sun: Nina (Roman) Rhodes-Hughes

PostPosted: Sun May 06, 2012 3:43 pm
by MinM
Image
Nina (Roman) Rhodes-Hughes joins John Pilger, Philip van Praag, Robert Joling, Thomas Noguchi, Paul Schrade, Jamie Scott Enyart, Sandy Serrano, Philip Melanson, Ted Charach, Donald Schulman et al., in confirming that there were multiple shooters...

B.C.-based actress Nina Rhodes-Hughes speaks of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination (with video)
Image
Pictured is a newspaper featuring a photo of Nina Rhodes-Hughes (left) with Rafer Johnson (centre) and actress Shirley MacLaine at the Democratic national convention in Chicago in 1968. Rhodes-Hughes was standing nearby when US Senator Robert. F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968. Rhodes-Hughes claims more than one gunman was responsible for the killing, although only one man, Sirhan Sirhan, was ever charged and given a life sentence, which he is still serving today.

By Denise Ryan, Vancouver Sun May 5, 2012

Her sobs were heavy, layered, alarming.

She sat on the sofa, her pale, cream dress crumpled like wet Kleenex. Her face was streaked with tears and dirty black mascara, hair dishevelled, stockings violently torn.

By her side, her husband was crying, too. In the early hours of the morning they were huddled around the television, waiting for news. Would he live?

She’d left the Ambassador Hotel just hours ago, amid the cacophony of sounds, the screaming and chaos. More than a dozen shots had been fired. Two came from in front of her, in front and to the left of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, where she saw a dark-skinned man with curly hair; the rest of the shots popped like firecrackers all around them.

“They shot Bobby Kennedy,” she said over and over.

“They shot Bobby Kennedy.”

A second gunman?

William Francis Pepper, a famed New York-based human rights lawyer, is brusque on the phone. To the point.

“I knew about her,” he says of Nina Rhodes-Hughes, whose eyewitness account had long been overlooked. The woman in the pale, cream dress who had been walking just a few feet behind Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel when he was attacked.

She knew how many shots had been fired. She was there.

“I couldn’t find her,” says Pepper.

Until now.

The lawyer says the testimony of Rhodes-Hughes, a B.C.-based actress who has, until recently, lived in virtual anonymity on Bowen Island, may be pivotal in winning a new trial for his client, Sirhan Sirhan, Kennedy’s convicted assassin.

On Feb. 22, 2012, Pepper filed a petition for a new trial on behalf of Sirhan in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Pepper is arguing there was a second gunman, that fraudulent evidence was presented at trial, and that key witness reports, like that of Rhodes-Hughes, had been altered or ignored.

Pepper’s court filing also is built on analysis of an enhanced audio recording of the assassination, made by Montreal Gazette reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski, that surfaced in 2007.

Pruszynski had his tape recorder running throughout the assassination, but didn’t realize it until many years later. The enhanced recording, according to forensic acoustic expert Philip Van Praag, identifies 12 to 13 distinct shots being fired.

“Sirhan’s gun only held eight bullets,” says Pepper. “The tape was one of the reasons I got involved.”

If a new trial is granted, Pepper expects to call Rhodes-Hughes to the stand.

Hope and despair

How Rhodes-Hughes came to be just a few feet from the senator on the night he won the 1968 California Democratic primary, and face to face with his confessed killer, is also the story of one of the 20th century’s most shocking junctures of hope and despair.

Rhodes-Hughes was a young mother of two children in 1967. Married to a Hollywood television producer, she had a regular role on the daytime soap, Morningstar.

Petite, with sea-green eyes and jet black hair, she was a beauty with a life that seemed brushed by stardust, but underneath the glitter the pretty actress was politically minded.

Rhodes-Hughes was born in Brooklyn, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Europe, whose history was a constellation of terror: murders, pogroms and brutal discrimination had driven her mother’s family out of Russia.

The stories she grew up with, she says, gave her a steely sense of moral duty and keen idealism. It was this sense of duty and this determination to make the world a better place that drew her directly into the path of another idealist, Robert F. Kennedy.

“He walked into the room and everything stopped,” says Rhodes-Hughes, remembering the day she met the charismatic young senator.

She was sitting in hair and makeup at the NBC studios in Burbank. Kennedy had been brought in to be prepped for Meet the Press, filmed in the same studio. Rhodes-Hughes decided to tell him how much she admired his strength, his work on poverty. She walked right up to him.

“I said if ever you decide to run for president, I will work for you. I promise you.”

He laughed it off, and assured her he had no such plans. They chatted about politics and world affairs.

“He said, well, what do you do?”

She told him she was an actress, and he asked how often she appeared.

“I said every day.”

Kennedy was humble

He asked how many pages a day, and when she replied 30 pages, he was amazed.

“You memorize 30 pages a day?”

“I do,” she said.

“I could never do that,” he said, “But my brother Jack, he could memorize just looking at something very quickly. I never had that ability, and I admired that in him and I admire that in you.”

He was humble, says Rhodes-Hughes, but incredibly compelling: “He had a magnetism, and a charm that was absolutely indescribable.”

Like so many others, she admired Kennedy’s commitment to education, to housing and social justice, and that he wanted the Americans out of Vietnam.

“I became convinced that this was the man who could save our country.”

When Kennedy announced he would run for president, Rhodes-Hughes went down to the local campaign headquarters to volunteer.

She became a fundraiser. She knew entertainers and celebrities — Nancy Sinatra was a close friend — and quickly pulled together an event at a local disco, The Factory. “We called it a ‘happening’ back then,” she says.

The event was a huge success, and Kennedy sent her a personal telegram, thanking her.

She produced other fundraisers: a wine and cheese for Ethel Kennedy, a train ride called the Kennedy Cannonball that ran from L.A. to Bakersfield. Her son, Ross, worked alongside her. Momentum gathered and Kennedy’s prospects looked as bright as the California sunshine.

“It was fabulous,” she says. “Because of all that, I was invited to come to the Ambassador Hotel the night of June 4, 1968 and to meet him again. I was thrilled. We were really moving toward getting this done, getting everything I was dreaming about, that someday we would have a government that wasn’t corrupt, that had great principles, that worked for the downtrodden, that we would be a diverse country with no bigotry. That was my hope.”

Rhodes-Hughes, now 78, points to the creamy, pale beige carpet in her condo, “That was the colour of my dress.”

Her voice is clear and sure as she describes that night at the Ambassador hotel, as if it were all happening again:

The night had been euphoric, filled with laughter and joyous celebration. Balloons bobbed through the air and people were chanting: RFK! RFK!

Kennedy was onstage, his back to her. To her right was the Pierre Salinger press room, where Kennedy was slated to go after his speech. To her left, through a kitchen pantry, was another press room called the Colonial room.

Went the wrong way

Rhodes-Hughes was waiting — she had been asked to “get” Kennedy and direct him to the Salinger press room as he came offstage.

But the entourage swept him the other direction, through the kitchen toward the Colonial room. She waved and called out: “No, no, that’s the wrong way, he’s supposed to come over here.”

She ran after them as he was moved offstage, down a ramp toward the kitchen. She could see the back of the senator’s head, surrounded by his entourage, and ran down the ramp toward him.

“He turns to his left a little bit and starts to greet some of the kitchen staff,” she says.

“Suddenly, he turns to his right and went straight ahead towards the Colonial, the other press room ... then, as I’m looking at him, I heard ‘pop, pop.’ ”

For a split second, she thought they were flashbulbs. Then, to her left, ahead of the senator, she saw him, Sirhan Sirhan, standing on top of a steel kitchen table.

“He was higher, he was standing up on a steam table, not floor level.”

Kennedy didn’t have a lot of security that night, but Rafer Johnson, a decathlete, and football player Rosey Grier were there to escort him. They reacted instantaneously.

“I see Rafer Johnson and Rosey Grier running toward Sirhan Sirhan to tackle him.”

Rhodes-Hughes was six to seven feet behind the senator, to his left. She saw Sirhan twist and crouch as Johnson and Grier lunged to tackle and subdue him.

Only two shots had been fired. As they brought him down, more rang out to her right, close behind senator Kennedy.

“The shots are pop, pop, pop, pop, pop ....” Rapid gunfire, 12, maybe 13 in all. “People are falling, people are sliding down the wall, people are ducking and I’m screaming. Then I look down and I see the senator has fallen. He’s lying on the floor. He has been shot.”

She remembers screaming, “Oh my God, no, oh my God, no.” Then she collapsed and fainted.

When she came to, her dress was soaking wet, her shoe and belt were missing, her stockings were torn from being trampled on in the melee.

Before her, a life was flooding away.

Senator Kennedy lay on the floor, blood spilling out around his head. His wife, Ethel, knelt beside him.

In all, six people had been shot, one fatally.

Kennedy would be pronounced dead in hospital later that day.

According to autopsy reports, Kennedy died from a gunshot wound in the back of his head, behind his right ear, shot at close range — close enough to leave powder burns on strands of his hair.

Sirhan — Rhodes-Hughes is sure — had been positioned in front of him.

Rhythm of gunfire

“It was very, very hard to see. When you experience something like that, it’s emblazoned in your mind. The emotional memory, the whole thing is just so strong that there is no way you could ever forget one detail,” she says.

Kennedy was facing Sirhan. His head was not turned.

She will never forget the rhythm of the gunfire. The first two shots, she says, came from the direction of the dusky-skinned man with the curly hair that stood on top of the steam table. Then some more shots, from her right-hand side. No law enforcement official spoke to her that night at the hotel; the FBI didn’t interview Rhodes-Hughes until about a month had passed.

Her son, Ross Rhodes, remembers the night of the shooting clearly; how his parents’ sobs woke him, how he pushed off his blankets and stumbled through the bathroom that connected his bedroom to the room with the TV.

He was 13 years old and had never seen his mother cry.

He also remembers when the FBI showed up weeks later.

“I remember very clearly two men in suits coming to the door,” says Rhodes, now an artist and gallery owner in Palm Springs.

“I was told to go to my room. I didn’t. I hid in the kitchen and listened to the interview.”

Her story was never told

It bothers him that people are asking why his mother is coming forward now to tell her story of hearing over a dozen shots coming from two distinctly different directions when Kennedy was shot.

“She has always maintained this testimony from day one,” he says.

“I told them everything,” says Nina Rhodes-Hughes.

“I told them if you need me to testify I would be most happy to testify because I really would like to see whoever the other person was, I would like the other person to be found because it was more than just Sirhan Sirhan.”

She insists she recounted the number of shots to the FBI agents. She was asked to describe Sirhan, whom she had seen clearly. Then she was asked if she had been wearing a polka-dot dress.

“They were looking for the girl in the polka-dot dress.”

That girl had apparently been seen with Sirhan earlier in the evening and in the kitchen; another witness had said a girl in a polka-dot dress had fled the hotel crying out “We shot him, we shot him!”

“I said no, my dress was a champagne colour with a high neck and a little belt. That’s what I was wearing. I was not the lady in the polka-dot dress.”

The agents took notes, but didn’t record anything. When they left, they forgot their attache case. Rhodes-Hughes and her son stared at it, circled around it. She called a neighbour in a panic, to come and sit with her until they returned for it, and be a witness that they had not touched the attache case with the Kennedy file inside.

“By this time, I’m scared. I’m nervous. I was not going to do anything that wasn’t right.”

Eventually the agents returned to retrieve the case. Rhodes-Hughes was never called to testify, and she never knew what those FBI agents wrote in the transcription of their interview. Had she opened the attache case that day, she would have seen: the report stated she had heard eight shots, the exact number of bullets that Sirhan’s gun held, and that she saw bright red flashes emanating from the gun. None of that, she says, is true.

Dropped out of politics

Rhodes-Hughes was a delegate at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, but after that she dropped out of politics. She had been forever changed by the assassination, as had the political landscape. She had a third child and turned her attention to other fundraising ventures, to her acting career and even opened a fitness studio with Richard Simmons. In 1983, she came as a tourist to Vancouver, fell in love with the city and eventually moved here. That night at the Ambassador Hotel wasn’t something she often talked about. But in the early ’90s, a Dartmouth professor, Phil Melanson, contacted her with a stunning revelation. He had obtained the FBI reports from the assassination, including her statement through an FOI request. She agreed to look it over.

“I was flabbergasted. Devastated ... I never said I saw red flashes. I never said eight shots.”

FBI fabrications

There were numerous other fabrications attributed to her in the FBI report.

“I was in shock,” she says.

Rhodes-Hughes gave Melanson the story as she remembered it, which he included in a book about the assassination, Shadowplay. Rhodes-Hughes never read the book, and heard nothing more from the professor. Nor did she seek to bring the story to public attention.

“As soon as you say ‘conspiracy’ it sounds like you’re a nut, that all of your intelligence is gone and you’re some kind of thrill-seeking crazy person who wants some notoriety,” she says.

Again, the story slipped below the surface of her life. She had no idea lawyer William Pepper — who is not afraid to use the word conspiracy, and who believes Sirhan was hypno-programmed, possibly by the woman in the polka-dot dress — wanted to find her. Or that a tape recording corroborating her version of the number of gunshots had surfaced.

She may never have come forward, but for a call a few weeks ago from CNN reporter Brad Johnson. Now, in spite of the notoriety, she believes it is her duty to Kennedy, and to history, to tell — and ask — what really happened that night. Until the call came, even her closest friends in her small Bowen Island community had no idea that she had been witness to Kennedy’s assassination, close enough, almost, to reach out and touch him as he fell.

dryan@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/based+ ... story.html

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry251515

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Tue Jun 23, 2015 8:11 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen
After searching for a Bobby Kennedy thread to place this, I thought this would be the best place. Someone on Facebook just alerted me to this article. It's four years old, but I'm a huge fan of Lisa Pease. She wrote one of the best articles I've ever read about how corrupt the media has always been for the entirety of American history titled The Media and the Assassination (I can't find an online link; I read it in The Assassinations, a collection of Probe Magazine essays).

Monday, Nov 21, 2011 01:20 AM PST
The other Kennedy conspiracy
The assassination of Robert Kennedy never received the scrutiny it deserves
Lisa Pease

Image
Robert Kennedy after winning the California primary in June 1968, shortly before his assassination.

Each November, the media recalls the assassination of President Kennedy and its attendant controversies. Rarely, however, is a second Kennedy anniversary acknowledged. On Nov. 20, 2011, Robert Kennedy — JFK’s brother and devoted political partner — would have turned 86 years old had he not also been assassinated. Although the mainstream media has been all but silent on this case, the facts scream out for a deeper investigation.

The story of Robert Kennedy’s assassination seems deceptively simple. After winning the California Democratic presidential primary on June 4, 1968, Sen. Robert Kennedy traversed a pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. A young Palestinian Christian named Sirhan Sirhan pulled a gun and fired. Kennedy died roughly 25 hours later. Five others were wounded. Sirhan was tried and convicted. End of story, right?

Not so fast. A crime is like a jigsaw puzzle. You can’t solve the puzzle by forcing a piece where it doesn’t belong. The theory that Sirhan killed Kennedy is an ill-fitting piece not supported by the physical evidence. Here are some facts that are not in dispute.

Fact: The medical evidence showed that Kennedy was shot four times from behind from a distance of 1 to 6 inches. The fatal shot entered Kennedy from 1 inch behind Kennedy’s right ear.

Fact: All witnesses placed Sirhan in front of Kennedy. Not one witness put Sirhan’s gun muzzle closer than a foot to Kennedy, and most witnesses placed the muzzle about 3 feet away.

Based on these two facts alone, Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi wrote in his memoir, “Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.”

Fact: Seven bullets were recovered from six pantry victims. Another bullet was lost in the ceiling space. Sirhan’s gun could only hold eight bullets. But an FBI agent photographed four additional “bullet holes” in the pantry. This so worried Los Angeles County officials that, nine years later, they asked the FBI essentially for a retraction, noting that if those were, in fact, “bullet holes,” as the bureau unequivocally stated, “We should certainly find out who else was firing.”

In recent years, an audiotape recorded by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a Polish reporter covering the 1968 presidential campaign for Canadian newspapers, resurfaced that supported the FBI’s finding. Sound engineer Philip Van Praag used sophisticated equipment to analyze the tape and found at least 12 shot sounds on the tape. He also found that two pairs of shots came too close together to have been fired from a single gun.

The evidence clearly points to at least two shooters that night in the Ambassador pantry. In addition to the physical evidence, multiple witnesses spotted other men with drawn guns in the pantry.

Fact: Richard Lubic, a televison producer, was standing behind Kennedy during the shooting. Lubic saw an arm to his right with a gun but could not see who was holding the gun. After Kennedy fell, Lubic knelt to help Kennedy and saw a security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, with his gun drawn and pointing toward the floor. The Los Angeles Police Department later put enormous pressure on Lubic to change his story. Lubic was visited at home by LAPD investigators, who told him, “Don’t bring this up, don’t be talking about this.”

Fact: Donald Schulman, a young runner for a local TV station, claimed he saw security guard Cesar fire his gun. Schulman also told the LAPD he saw three guns in the pantry. (Some authors have mistakenly suggested Schulman wasn’t in the pantry, but LAPD records confirm that he was.)

Fact: Sandy Serrano, a Kennedy campaign volunteer, told NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur on live TV about seeing a young woman in a polka dot dress and a male companion who had passed her on a fire escape. The woman in the polka dot dress said, “We shot him, we shot him!” Serrano asked whom they shot. The woman said, “Senator Kennedy,” and ran off. A witness in the pantry, Vincent DiPierro, told the LAPD about a woman in a white dress with dark polka dots who seemed to be “holding” Sirhan just before the shooting.

Fact: The police were so interested in this “girl in the polka dot dress” that they issued an APB for her and specifically asked nearly all the witnesses interviewed whether they had seen anyone fitting her description. But when the story started to gain traction in the press, the LAPD declared that a blond girl on crutches in a bright green dress with yellow lemons dotting it was “the girl in the polka dot dress” and closed the book on this subject.

A new novel called “The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress” conjures an imaginary history for this illusory character. It’s a shame the novelist didn’t review the actual record, as the LAPD files suggest an even more provocative back story, which has not yet appeared in print, but will, when I finish the nonfiction book I’m writing about this case.

If one accepts the existing evidence, at least two people were firing bullets. And if two people were shooting, not only was there a conspiracy, it was such a sophisticated one that it has eluded prosecution for over 40 years.

The piece that has never fit has been Sirhan himself. Why did he never identify his co-conspirators? In addition, Sirhan has always claimed he had no memory of this crime. He had no idea why he shot Kennedy, nor did he remember writing in a notebook, over and over, “RFK must die.”

Could Sirhan have been hypnotized? I know how crazy this sounds to people who haven’t studied the history of mind control. It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fiction. (On the other hand, where do you think Hollywood gets those stories? William Bryan, a renowned hypnotist who consulted on the making of the film “The Manchurian Candidate,” called a radio show shortly after Kennedy was shot to suggest Sirhan had been hypnotically programmed.)

Several witnesses, including some of the Los Angeles police officers who interacted with Sirhan immediately after the shooting, commented on Sirhan’s preternatural calmness before, during and after the shooting. LAPD officer Randolph Adair said in later years, “The guy was real confused. It was like it didn’t exactly hit him what he had done. He had a black, glassed-over look on his face — like he wasn’t in complete control of his mind at the time.”

Both Sirhan’s defense team and the prosecution tried and failed to get Sirhan to recall shooting Kennedy under hypnosis. Both, however, presumed his guilt and tried to get him to “admit” it while in a trance, which Sirhan never did.

Sirhan’s current attorney, William Pepper, recently had an expert hypnotize Sirhan in an open-ended fashion, during which Sirhan finally recalled that the touch of a girl in the pantry sent Sirhan into a mode where he thought he was firing at a target on a range. Could the girl in a polka dot dress DiPierro saw “holding” Sirhan moments before the shooting began have triggered his act?

On Channel 4 in the U.K. last month, hypnotist Derren Brown tested this scenario on his TV show “The Experiments.” He took a highly hypnotizable subject and, over a two-month period, trained him to shoot and “kill” a celebrity. The subject, however, did not know this was the experiment’s goal. Brown gave his subject a two-part trigger that would send him into a hypnotic state: a polka dot pattern and a unique cellphone ring tone. When he saw this pattern and heard the tone, the young man was taught to touch his head to focus his concentration, and then fire a gun at a target on a range. But his final test occurred not at a range, but at a taping of British entertainer Stephen Fry’s show. As the subject watched the show from a back row, a hidden camera showed a girl in a polka dot dress enter and sit in front of the subject. The cellphone rang. The girl turned to the subject and whispered, “The target is Stephen Fry.” The subject hesitated a moment, then touched his forehead, opened the case, pulled out a gun loaded with blanks, stood, and fired. Stephen Fry, who was wired with squibs (the exploding fake blood packets used in movies to simulate gunshots), fell down “dead.” The hypnotized man showed no reaction at the time. When shown a video of his act later, the subject seemed genuinely surprised at what he had done.

If Sirhan was hypnotized, is there any chance he could be “innocent” of the crime, as his current lawyers are pleading? While I’m not aware of any American precedent to such a claim, there was a similar case in Denmark in the 1950s. Palle Hadrup, who had committed a murder, was charged only with temporary insanity because the jury believed he had killed under the hypnotic influence of another man, a hardened criminal who directed Hadrup to commit crimes.

Robert Kennedy had many enemies, but which of them were capable of such a sophisticated plot? Could the mob have hypnotized Sirhan? Could Aristotle Onassis have suppressed the FBI’s evidence of conspiracy? Could Jimmy Hoffa have made sure that no troubling facts about the case were ever presented to a jury? Who had that kind of power?

The CIA had strong relationships with the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, and L.A. county officials. The CIA had enormous influence over the media, including national coverage of both Kennedy assassinations, as Carl Bernstein’s explosive October 1977 expose in Rolling Stone magazine later demonstrated. Even powerful FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover had never been able to rein in the CIA. If anyone had the power to pull this off and completely cover their tracks, it would be a small handful of people from the covert side of the agency.

Perhaps most significantly, the CIA was, by 1968, extremely experienced in various mind-control scenarios that involved drugs, hypnosis and a combination of the two. One of the CIA’s initial forays into this area came through a project code-named ARTICHOKE. One ARTICHOKE document presents the question: “Can an individual … be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?” This program later evolved into the MKULTRA program, an umbrella designation for hundreds of experiments that involved drugs, hypnosis and biological and chemical warfare.

But why would the CIA want to kill Robert Kennedy? Weren’t they in bed together on the Castro assassination plots when RFK was serving as his brother’s gung-ho attorney general? That’s a widely believed myth. The 1967 CIA Inspector General report on the anti-Castro plots explicitly asks, “Can CIA state or imply that it was merely an instrument of policy?” and answers, “Not in this case,” explaining that while RFK was informed of plots against Castro from the past, he was not informed of the plots that were continuing.

During his brother’s administration, Robert was a constant thorn in the CIA’s side. After the agency’s disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961, President Kennedy asked his brother to closely monitor the CIA, which infuriated the operatives who had for years prided themselves on their independence from authority. After RFK was elected to the Senate from New York in 1964 and became a growing critic of the war in Vietnam and the Johnson administration, the CIA began to keep a close watch on him.

Fact: The CIA was so concerned about Robert Kennedy in the last year of his life that it put spying on him on a par with spying on the Soviet Union, according to a report in the Washington Post after it obtained this data.

Perhaps the CIA was also anxious about RFK because, as David Talbot (the founder and current CEO of Salon) recounted in his 2007 book, “Brothers,” Robert Kennedy harbored suspicions about the CIA’s possible complicity in his brother’s death. One of Robert’s first calls after JFK’s assassination was to the CIA to ask if the agency had killed his brother. If members of the CIA were involved in the death of JFK, could they afford to let Robert ascend to an office where he’d have the power but to do something about that?

I’m well aware that extraordinary claims deserve extraordinary evidence. I have much more to support what I’ve said here, which I am laying out in book form. I hope only to have cracked your mind open, because Occam’s Razor fails us when the simplest explanation is the carefully planned cover story.

Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney John Howard once said of Sirhan, “If he isn’t guilty, it’s the sweetest frame in the world.” I think Howard got that right. He isn’t. And it is.

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Tue Jun 23, 2015 9:18 pm
by 82_28
RE Hypnotism I do not recommend it, but I will say it is powerful. My anecdote has nothing to do with this thread. But unless you have a "spirit" or deep-seated will that wishes to fight back against it you could totally be told to do anything or shall we say be mind controlled. I didn't feel "right" for a week until it wore off. But hypnotism works and I will never ever do it again.

As always, crew. Thanks for the links that I had missed.

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Wed Jun 24, 2015 12:11 am
by Joao
stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jun 23, 2015 4:11 pm wrote:I'm a huge fan of Lisa Pease. She wrote one of the best articles I've ever read about how corrupt the media has always been for the entirety of American history titled The Media and the Assassination (I can't find an online link; I read it in The Assassinations, a collection of Probe Magazine essays).

Most of that essay is available online between G**gle Books and this page.

I've combined the two sources and posted them here. Several pages remain unavailable, unfortunately. Missing sections are indicated in the body of the document.

Good, lucid piece. It may not have much new general info, however, for those who already accept that all media exists to serve an agenda. A quick taste:

Lisa Pease wrote:One of the first questions people raise when confronted with evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is this: if any of the evidence for conspiracy is valid, why haven’t the major media organizations told us? Wouldn’t breaking the story about a conspiracy be a career-maker for an investigative reporter?

On the surface of it, the question appears to be legitimate. We assume that the purpose of the news media is to give us facts about newsworthy events to help us interpret life in our time. But is that a legitimate assumption?

Thomas Jefferson used to hold the opinion that the purpose of the media was to tell us the truth. His opinion changed radically once he knew more about the events being (mis)represented. Jefferson realized the importance of the press and the threat a less-than-honest press presents to a nation. In 1787, Jefferson said, “the basis of our government is the opinion of the people,” and given a choice between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without government,” he would choose the latter. In 1799, having learned a bit more, he wrote, “Our citizens may be deceived for a while and have been deceived; but as long as the press can be protected, we may trust to them for light.” But by 1807, the veil of idealism had completely fallen from Jefferson’s eyes:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior ... but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors…

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some way such as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first, Truths; second, Probabilities; third, Possibilities; fourth, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

One might be tempted to dismiss Jefferson’s comments as overly cynical and not applicable to our time. But our situation is very similar.

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Wed Jun 24, 2015 8:08 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen
Joao » Tue Jun 23, 2015 11:11 pm wrote:
stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jun 23, 2015 4:11 pm wrote:I'm a huge fan of Lisa Pease. She wrote one of the best articles I've ever read about how corrupt the media has always been for the entirety of American history titled The Media and the Assassination (I can't find an online link; I read it in The Assassinations, a collection of Probe Magazine essays).

Most of that essay is available online between G**gle Books and this page.

I've combined the two sources and posted them here. Several pages remain unavailable, unfortunately. Missing sections are indicated in the body of the document.

Good, lucid piece. It may not have much new general info, however, for those who already accept that all media exists to serve an agenda. A quick taste:

Lisa Pease wrote:One of the first questions people raise when confronted with evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is this: if any of the evidence for conspiracy is valid, why haven’t the major media organizations told us? Wouldn’t breaking the story about a conspiracy be a career-maker for an investigative reporter?

On the surface of it, the question appears to be legitimate. We assume that the purpose of the news media is to give us facts about newsworthy events to help us interpret life in our time. But is that a legitimate assumption?

Thomas Jefferson used to hold the opinion that the purpose of the media was to tell us the truth. His opinion changed radically once he knew more about the events being (mis)represented. Jefferson realized the importance of the press and the threat a less-than-honest press presents to a nation. In 1787, Jefferson said, “the basis of our government is the opinion of the people,” and given a choice between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without government,” he would choose the latter. In 1799, having learned a bit more, he wrote, “Our citizens may be deceived for a while and have been deceived; but as long as the press can be protected, we may trust to them for light.” But by 1807, the veil of idealism had completely fallen from Jefferson’s eyes:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior ... but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors…

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some way such as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first, Truths; second, Probabilities; third, Possibilities; fourth, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

One might be tempted to dismiss Jefferson’s comments as overly cynical and not applicable to our time. But our situation is very similar.


Thanks for that contribution Joao, that combo post gets most of it. Let me attempt to fill in the cracks from my copy of The Assassinations.

After the sentence, "the media would have been hard‐pressed to retract all its earlier stories and defend a new position."

There are those that argue further though, saying, no secret stays secret forever. To that point, we would do well to remember we have never learned the identity of "Deep Throat," the famous informer who gave Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein guidance as they uncovered the Watergate story. Still others will point to Woodward and Bernstein as examples of reporters who were brave and did stand up to tell the truth. But those who have done extensive research on the Watergate episode will tell you that Woodward and Bernstein may well have served as pawns to others who wanted to portray the events in a particular light.5

But that's not the end of why we can't trust the press, especially in the case of the Kennedy assassination. There is a much more insidious reason. The CIA has enormous control over the press, and this little known fact has only briefly and sporadically been reported on in the mainstream media outlets. The CIA's relationship with the press bears examination, as it was used directly and provably in this case to shape reporting on the issues surrounding the Kennedy assassination.

Controlling the Media


Then proceeds, "Everything is quiet."

I'll try to fill in more omissions tomorrow when I have time.

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Wed Jun 24, 2015 10:44 pm
by Joao

Teeter Pepper & Pease

PostPosted: Wed Jun 24, 2015 11:07 pm
by MinM
seemslikeadream wrote:Larry Teeter talks about the CIA and RFK

Teeter to Pepper to Pease. This case has so many angles...

During the only real investigation and trial in the RFK case Scott Enyart's legal team was able to share some research with Larry Teeter in his defense of Sirhan. Of course Teeter died before he could do anything with that information. Another angle to that Scott Enyart case was that Court TV was all set to report on and broadcast that case when a little thing called the OJ Simpson Trial came along and changed everything.

Pepper & Pease .. so Bill Pepper picked up the ball from Teeter and Lisa Pease is still working on her RFK book which she briefly touches on in this interview from last week ..

Show #736
Original airdate: June 18, 2015
Guests: Lisa Pease
Topics: RFK and Hammarskjold Assassinations


Play Lisa Pease (1:39:38) Real Media or MP3 download

Dag Hammarskjold, United Nations Secretary-General 1953-1961
The mineral rich Katanga province of the Congo
Patrice Lumumba was assassinated just before JFK was inaugurated
Hammarskjold stood up for Lumumba's leadership
Hammarskjold died in a plane crash/murder
Assassin Roland "Bud" Culligan claimed he shot the plane down
Who Killed Hammarskjld?: (Williams 2011)
50 years later, we still can't get the truth about so many cases
BOR, discussing things that really matter
We're subtly propagandized all the time
Bob Kennedy was the last powerful liberal candidate of his time
LBJ's recognized Vietnam was a war he couldn't win
Mr. President what is 'it' that we can do that will win the war?
Bobby had not authorized plots against Castro
All countries are at risk of their own secret service
CIA saw Bobby as their biggest threat
CIA can survive if it can control the media
The system prevents conspiracy from surfacing
Lisa believes Sirhan was completely innocent, hypnotized
People can be mind controlled, Hypnotism (Estabrooks 1957)
The Bjorn Nielsen / Palle Hardrup case in Denmark
Lisa thinks that Sirhan was only firing blanks ...

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2015.html

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:12 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen
Hey Joao, here's more from Lisa Pease' The Media and the Assassination:

There is a section after "by inflaming public opinion with propaganda and yellow journalism" but before "For a short time in the early part of the twentieth century" where on your link it says [Approx. 1 page not available]. According to my copy in The Assassinations, there is nothing omitted.

But after, "“Propaganda must be coordinated with information and espionage services which can supply material to the propagandists and report progress of propaganda work.” and before […] media absent from his piece", there is quite a bit missing. Here's what I've got:

Lasswell, Lippman, and others presaged what William "Wild Bill" Donovan would eventuall recommend to President Franklin Roosevelt as World War II unfolded.

In 1940, Roosevelt sent Donovan to Europe to scope out what was happening in Germany and elsewhere. When Donovan returned, he recommended the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, predecessor to today's Central Intelligence Agency. In his "Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information," (dated June 10, 1941) Donovan outlined to Roosevelt that, in addition to setting up a formal intelligence service to gather and process information regarding the Nazis in Germany, "there is another element in modern warfare" that the Germans were mastering that posed a far more insidious, serious threat, "and that is the psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defenses of a nation."9 Donovan urged the President to create and fund an organization to actively engage in propaganda and other actions that could be used to demoralize the enemy. To Donovan, propaganda was just one item in the psychological warfare toolbox, which to him consisted of anything, physical or intellectual, that could be used to break the will of the enemy. As the OSS War Report states, "On the one hand, [Donovan] saw it as conditioning the minds of the people as a whole; on the other, he conceived of it as a strategic weapon for the exploitation of particular objectives, whether political or military."10 Some activities were downright sinister. The definition of psychological warfare included "propaganda, sabotage, guerilla activities, bribery, blackmail, assassination..."11 Note that a great majority of Donovan's assets were journalists. While Americans don't typically associate journalists with assassinations, we should understand why journalists in foreign countries are often assumed to be spies, and are sometimes abducted and even killed, thanks to this precedent set during World War II.

During WWII, the OSS had several separate offices responsible for various activities relating to propaganda, covert action and psychological warfare. When WWII came to a close, several of those groups were combined into the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), an innocuous-sounding organization set up under the auspices of the State Department and led by Frank Wisner that sought to continue the covert action that Donovan had envisioned as necessary to successful psychological warfare operations. Under Wisner, the OPC became the fastest growing unit within the nascent CIA, rising in personnel from 302 in 1949 to 2,812 in 1952, along with 3,142 overseas contract personnel. In the same period, the budget rose from $4.7 million to $82 million.12

From his seat at the head of OPC, Wisner kept the highly secret and valuable "Propaganda Assets Inventory," more commonly known as "Wisner's Wurlitzer." The inventory represented a network of more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals - opinion makers that could be called upon at any time to play the tune of Wisner's making.13 The network included journalists, columnists, book publishers, editors, entire organizations such as Radio Free Europe, and stringers across multiple news organizations. When the OPC was combined with the Office of Special Operations (OSO) to form what we now call the CIA, the media assets came with it.

Tom Braden became an early head of propaganda operations when the CIA was formed. Braden, who once wrote an article title "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'" (and years later, recommended the abolishment of the CIA14), also headed up QKOPERA, the code name for the Congress of Cultural Freedom.15 This body was set up to combat Communist efforts to paint America as culturally bereft. The Congress sponsored artists, writers, poets, musicians and other cultural figures, some with their consent, and some without. The CIA did not limit itself to propagandizing about news items. The CIA sponsored Olympic athletes, scientists, and anyone who could be used to promote the notion of the superiority of American culture. The psychological warfare campaign was an all-out assault on people's ability to think and feel freely not just in Communist countries, but all over the globe.

Highly regarded journalists were especially valuable to Wisner and the CIA's efforts because they had the luxury of being able to write material that top policy makers would actually read. As former CIA officer Miles Copeland noted, "the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, Congressmen and even the Director of the CIA himself will read, believe and be impressed by a report from Cy Sulzberger, Arnaud de Borchgrave, or Stewart Alsop when they don't even bother to read a CIA report on the same subject."16 And although the CIA did not have the legal authority to propagandize Americans, that didn't stop them from trying to fan winds abroad that would blow back across to America. The New York Times reported that the CIA had a formal operation known as KMFORGET in which stories planted by the agency in one country would be clipped and mailed to media in other countries, and "such efforts enhanced the likelihood that the stories would be seen by an American correspondent and transmitted home."17 CIA operative Darrell Garwood shared the information that the CIA was very concerned about domestic perceptions of the Agency, despite the prohibition from it acting against U.S. citizens: "In order to achieve its self-perceived objectives, the CIA believed it was not enough to be immune from congressional or judicial control. The agency felt it was also imperative that anti-CIA sentiment and leftist leanings in general had to be defused and combated on every front. To this end, the CIA infiltrated the groves of academia, the missionary corps, the editorial boards of influential journal and book publishers, and any other quarters where public attitudes could be effectively influenced."18 In the '70s, the CIA was exposed as having illegally spied on Americans and having infiltrated many anti-war organizations. The CIA specifically targeted Ramparts, one of the few large circulation magazines to talk openly about the holes in the official story regarding the Kennedy assassination.

Stewart Alsop, who, along with his brother Joseph, was a CIA conduit for information on occasion, gave us a special perspective on the CIA's targeting of reporters for assets: "The key relationship of the Washington press is, of course, its relationship with the government. But the relationship of the press with the press is also important - much more important than most outsiders realize."19 Often, as a major story breaks, reporters who are removed from the events get their stories from other journalists. Naturally, the respected journalists or those with the greatest access to information are given plenty of credibility by fellow journalists. For example, press club were a focus of CIA activity. A former CIA official told how the manager of the Mexico City press club was a CIA agent who took advantage of his position to influence other journalists. "He used to work very successfully," the CIA man explained to the New York Times. "Some guys are lazy. They'd be sitting at the bar and he'd slip them thing and they'd phone it in."20

The CIA also realized the threat that honest journalists could be to covert actions. For example, during the Guatemala campaign, New York Times reporter Sydney Gruson was kept out of Guatemala. This happened when Allen Dulles complained to the Times that neither he nor his brother, John Foster Dulles, believed that Gruson was capable of reporting with "objectivity" on the upcoming revolution (which was manufactured and conducted by the CIA). Arthur Hays Sulzberger complied with the CIA's request and kept Gruson in Mexico City on the pretense that there might be some spillover action in Mexico.21

Although the OSS had made extensive ad hoc use of journalists, Wisner realized that the CIA's efforts in this area required a more formalized approach. Together with input from his friend and Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, Wisner created Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Appropriately named after a bird that can imitate the calls of other birds, MOCKINGBIRD was exposed by Deborah Davis in her book Katherine the Great, detailing the life of Katherine Graham, Phil Graham's wife and the eventual longtime owner of the Washington Post. Davis wrote:

[A]ccording to a former CIA analyst who had worked on MOCKINGBIRD, each journalist was a separate "operation," requiring a code name, a field supervisor, and a field office, at an annual cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars - there has never been an accurate accounting.22


Davis wrote that Wisner "owned" respected members of Newsweek, CBS, the New York Times and many others, according to a former CIA analyst who had worked with MOCKINGBIRD. Carl Bernstein reported similar information in his famous Rolling Stone piece from October, 1977, entitled The CIA and the Media, in which he outlined how members of all the major media in this country owed some allegiance, whether paid or as volunteers, to the CIA. According to Bernstein, some of the many who have served the CIA wittingly are William Paley, the longtime top executive of CBS; Henry Luce of the Time Inc. empire; and Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times. Also included are members of ABC, NBC, the Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the John Hay Whitney-owned New York Herald-Tribune. Bernstein noted that the most valuable relationships the CIA had were with CBS and the New York Times. The only major media absent from his piece...


This is all I'm able to do today. I'll try to do more in a few days.

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Fri Jun 26, 2015 3:18 am
by Joao
Nice work, srp. Document is updated; new URL: https://www.scribd.com/doc/269532657/The-Media-and-the-Assassination

That was a good section.

Happy to have you do the typing, but you could also try posting a scan or a nice flat high-res photo and I can see about OCRing the remaining text. Whatever works.

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Fri Jul 03, 2015 7:38 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen
Joao » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:18 am wrote:Nice work, srp. Document is updated; new URL: https://www.scribd.com/doc/269532657/The-Media-and-the-Assassination

That was a good section.

Happy to have you do the typing, but you could also try posting a scan or a nice flat high-res photo and I can see about OCRing the remaining text. Whatever works.


Thanks Joao, I've only got two more sections to go, so I'll just type it out here.

After the sentence, "How many other such directives will we never see because destruction instructions were followed?" and before "Ralph McGehee, a former CIA operative" is this section:


Who received those instructions, ultimately? While the answer to that question cannot be easily proven, as the CIA never acknowledges outright its assets and works hard to protect their anonymity, it is indeed curious how many of the anti-conspiracy crowd have significant ties to the CIA.

Consider the journalists most vocally nipping at Garrison's heels throughout his investigation: Hugh Aynesworth, James Phelan, and Edward Epstein. Would it be simply coincidence if all of them were found to have a relationship with the CIA?

Aynesworth was the same Dallas journalist already discussed who had applied to work for the CIA in October of 1963. Whether or not he was accepted is not as significant as his already expressed preference for employment. And according to Bernstein and others, many journalists were happy to serve in volunteer roles for the agency. During the Garrison investigation, Aynesworth was informing to both the FBI and the White House on Garrison's actions. This hardly gives him credibility as an impartial journalistic observer, and calls into question the motive for his near rabid attacks in Newsweek on the man.

James Phelan, the second journalist in this anti-Garrison triumvirate, was also informing to the FBI on Garrison's activities. Phelan's activities also went beyond journalism. He tried to bribe a key Garrison witness to get him to change his story. Even more importantly, Phelan was a good friend of Robert Maheu, the man given the job of formulating CIA plans to assassinate Castro. Garrison was pointing the finger at the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans whom he believed worked in concert to assassinate President Kennedy. It's hard to imagine Phelan would let his friend be implicated. It's easier to imagine that Maheu was close to Phelan because he trusted him to keep his and the CIA's secrets.

Edward Epstein, the third anti-Garrison triumvirate member, wrote an article which quickly grew into the book Counterplot. The book mocked Garrison's case against Clay Shaw. But was Epstein an impartial observer? In another surviving message from CIA headquarters to its operatives, Epstein's pre-Counterplot article was recommended as source material for the anti-Garrison campaign. In later days, Epstein confessed openly to his close working relationship with the CIA, although he claimed that relationship began with his work on his next book, Legend, in which Epstein tried to suggest that the assassination was really the result of a Soviet conspiracy.

One has to ask, is it just a coincidence that each of these journalists has provable ties to the CIA? Or worse, is it simply the case that so many journalists are affiliated with the CIA that it would have been hard not to find such an association? Although the first suggestion is chilling, the latter possibility is even more disturbing!

Epstein was a contributor to Readers Digest, another organization with a proven relationship to the CIA.36 When Epstein interviewed the famous Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, the CIA provided Readers Digest with Donald Jameson as a consultant - the same man who had said of Priscilla Johnson McMillan that she could be persuaded to write whatever the CIA wanted her to. One of Jameson's roles was to bring Soviet defectors to selected journalists. This was one of the ways in which the CIA planted stories in magazines and books. (The CIA had already published The Penskovkiy Papers, a supposed diary of a defector which was later proven to be a work of CIA fiction.) When Epstein wanted to verify Nosenko's veracity, he called James Angleton, the then-ousted longtime head of the CIA's counterintelligence unit. Epstein had already encountered Angleton's close associate Ray Rocca during his research for his first book, Inquest, a lukewarm account of how the Warren Commission had made mistakes in reaching its conclusion.

Epstein is of special interest because he was an active and early member of the JFK assassination research community. Was he there out of genuine interest, or might he have been a plant, reporting back on what was discovered and injecting his own (or others) opinions into the research community? Members of the research community have expressed vehement opinions on both sides (some saying he was clearly a plant, others suggesting he was blackmailed into "changing his story" to support the agency. The latter case is harder to believe as his writing shows a clear and apparently sincere appreciation for the Agency.)

After the Garrison investigation ended, in 1970 a curious event transpired. John Leonard had written reviews in the New York Times of two Kennedy assassination books: Jim Garrison's first book, Heritage of Stone, and James Kirkwood's near love-letter to Clay Shaw, American Grotesque. In the review, headlined "Who Killed John F. Kennedy?" Leonard had included two paragraphs that detailed some of the remaining mysteries about the case, as well as Leonard's own expressed view that "Something stinks about this whole affair..." Within hours, however, those two paragraphs were removed from the paper, and an altered headline of "The Shaw-Garrison Affair" was substituted. Despite his best efforts, Leonard was never able to find out who had made the changes to his piece. "We've every right to be paranoid," Leonard said.37

Jump ahead to the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). While the Warren Commission failed to truly investigate the crime, the HSCA's efforts can be recognized as more diligent in many ways. But in the end, Robert Blakely and Richard Billings got the first book out on the HSCA's investigation, enabling them to put the first spin on the report, which concluded there was a probable conspiracy. And how did they spin it? By saying that the conspiracy was mob-based. Blakey became the leader of the HSCA after Dick Sprague was ousted in what appeared to the research community to be a coordinated media campaign. Sprague had threatened to subpoena CIA records and officials and conduct an honest, no-holds-barred investigation of possible Agency involvement in the case. Shortly thereafter, press reports of alleged abuses of his past position (which later proved false) worked to oust Sprague from the committee chairmanship. In the wake of his departure came Blakey, who openly expressed his trust for the CIA, saying he had worked with them for 20 years. As for Richard Billings, he was very close to the CIA and had even gone on the dangerous Bayo-Pawley CIA mission with Cuban exiles to Cuba. Coincidence, or conspiracy?

Fast forward to the 1990s. Three books by two authors friendly with U.S. intelligence purport yet again that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan all acted alone. The two authors are Gerald Posner and Dan Moldea. Posner became famous for his work on the Josef Mengele case, in which he tried to explain how the CIA never could quite catch up with this horrific perpetrator of Nazi atrocities. After that, he wrote a book on the Chinese drug trade, and thanked the various intelligence sources that provided him the access necessary to do his research. He followed that book with The Bio Assassins, a fictional novel glorifying an old-time CIA operative stuck in a newfangled bureaucratic post-Cold War Agency. His next book was Hitler's Children. How the heck does one find the children of Nazi higher-ups if not with great help from intelligence services? His first three books were published by McGraw-Hill. Hitler's Children was published by Random House, and marks his first work under the aegis of Robert Loomis, whose wife Gloria (according to Joan Mellen) was James Angleton's secretary of many years. Loomis was responsible for Jim Phelan's book in which he recounts his experiences on the Garrison case, among others. Loomis' next book with Posner was Case Closed, Posner's widely promoted but not widely respected work on the JFK case. David Wrone, a respected history professor, described Case Closed as "so theory driven, so rife with speculation, and so frequently unable to conform his text with the factual content in his sources that it stands as one of the stellar instances of irresponsible publishing on the subject."38

Posner and Loomis teamed up again in the late '90s to produce Killing the Dream, Posner's book on the Martin Luther King assassination. It comes as no surprise to find he believes James Earl Ray killed MLK and that there was no government participation in a conspiracy.

Dan Moldea wrote one of the few books on the Robert Kennedy assassination. A former professed proponent of conspiracy in that case, Moldea wrote that not only did Sirhan act alone, but that he admitted to shooting Kennedy, a statement that Sirhan, those present during this conversation, and Sirhan's lawyer vehemently deny Sirhan ever made. Moldea is close to the man most often suspected of being the real assassin in that case, Thane Eugene Cesar. Moldea is also close to Carl Shoffler, the cop who was the first on the scene to capture the Watergate 'burglars' and who, as Jim Hougan and others have shown, has ties to the intelligence community. Moldea also includes in his pantheon of heroes Walter Sheridan, who was discussed earlier in this volume. As you will see, Moldea's objectivity must, as with the others listed here, be called into question.

Are you feeling queasy yet? If the CIA is using its own media assets to cover up the truth about the Kennedy assassination, what is the secret they so desperately need to protect? Did David Ferrie know it? Did George de Mohrenschildt? Both died under mysterious circumstances directly following meetings with reporters.

David Ferrie's last (known) visitor was Washington Post national security reporter George Lardner, Jr. Lardner claimed he left David Ferrie at 4 a.m. the day Garrison had decided to call Ferrie before the Grand Jury. There is no reason to suspect Lardner had a hand in Ferrie's death, but the coroner thought the body indicated an earlier death, and claimed 4 a.m. was the "latest possible time" of his death. In a similarly bizarre circumstance, Edward Epstein was the last person to talk with Oswald associate and CIA asset George de Mohrenschildt just prior to his alleged suicide - on the very day Gaeton Fonzi of the House Select Committee on Assassinations had come to de Mohrenschildt's Florida home to speak with de Mohrenschildt. These events may truly be bizarre coincidences. But it's not impossible to believe that someone was monitoring the activities of Ferrie and de Mohrenschildt through these journalists, and if information was to come out that might be particularly sensitive, someone may have seen fit to silence the witnesses.



Finally, after "or even scrap stories" include a "...", then start a new paragraph. These three sentences are the last paragraph of the article:

Bear these relationships in mind as you read or watch the next installment relative to the Kennedy assassination. Bear in mind George Seldes' admonition to take nothing for granted. Realize that if the CIA was behind the assassination, we are not going to hear about it through the CIA-controlled media.

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Fri Jul 03, 2015 10:25 pm
by Nordic
I just want to say thanks to all involved for an awesome thread

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 10:29 pm
by Joao
stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Jul 03, 2015 3:38 pm wrote:I'll just type it out here.

Document is updated and complete: https://www.scribd.com/doc/269532657/Th ... assination

One of the first questions people raise when confronted with evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is this: if any of the evidence for conspiracy is valid, why haven’t the major media organizations told us? Wouldn’t breaking the story about a conspiracy be a career‐maker for an investigative reporter?

On the surface of it, the question appears to be legitimate. We assume that the purpose of the news media is to give us facts about newsworthy events to help us interpret life in our time. But is that a legitimate assumption?

Re: After Bobby Kennedy

PostPosted: Thu Jul 09, 2015 1:42 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen
That looks excellent! Thanks so much for that, Joao. I only hope that Lisa Pease gets around to finishing her RFK book before Sirhan dies. I don't have a whole lot of hope that justice will prevail in time for that, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.