http://www.wa****ngtondecoded.com/site/
By Mel Ayton
It has often been said that lurid theories about the Lincoln and
JFK assassinations have thrived because neither John Wilkes Booth nor
Lee Harvey Oswald received their day in court. The concept of due
process is so embedded in the American psyche, in other words, that
its denial inexorably gives rise to conspiratorial explanations.
The aftermath of Robert F. Kennedy=92s June 1968 assassination,
however, challenges this somewhat comforting observation.
In this instance, the assassin was literally caught red-handed=97
tackled by Kennedy=92s bodyguards moments after the shots were fired, a .
22 caliber revolver still in hand. When the trial of Sirhan Bishara
Sirhan, a 24-year-old native of Palestine, opened seven months later,
his defense counsel explained, =93There will be no denial of the fact
that our client . . . fired the shot that killed Senator Kennedy.=94[1]
Instead, Sirhan=92s lawyers mounted a defense of not guilty because of
=93diminished capacity,=94 the only way to spare their client from what
seemed to be his likely fate, the gas chamber at San Quentin.
Sirhan=92s counsel had no other choice because the presiding judge,
Herbert Van Walker, exercising his discretion, had summarily rejected
a plea bargain that would have exchanged life imprisonment for a
guilty plea. =93We don=92t want another Dallas,=94 Walker re****tedly
observed, repeating the mantra uttered moments after Sirhan=92s
apprehension.[2] Walker believed, presumably, that prosecuting Sirhan
to the full extent of the law would avert the uncertainty that was
already rampant with respect to the first Kennedy assassination. The
Sirhan case was being tried at virtually the same time the awful
miscarriage of justice in New Orleans=97the circus-like persecution of
Clay Shaw by district attorney Jim Garrison=97was coming to a head. And
that debacle was the direct outgrowth of the doubt and disbelief which
existed because of Jack Ruby=92s vigilantism, and the denial of due
process for Oswald.
Sirhan Sirhan had his day in court, indeed, several months.
Because of the extraordinary security precautions employed, Sirhan=92s
prosecution was judged the most expensive US trial ever held, costing
the county of Los Angeles $900,000 ($5.3 million in 2007 dollars).[3]
And despite the best efforts of his lawyers, Sirhan received the
ultimate sanction. The only factor which saved him from being executed
decades ago was that three years after the penalty was handed down in
May 1969, the state Supreme Court declared California=92s death penalty
unconstitutional. Sirhan=92s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment,
and Corcoran State Prison near Fresno, an infamous maximum-security
facility, is where he remains to this day=97along with other notorious
inmates such as Charles Manson.
Judge Walker was not a na=EFve man, but even a cynic might have been
hard pressed in 1969 to foresee how conspiracy theorists would succeed
in twisting the facts in a ceaseless effort to raise doubts about what
amounted to an open and shut case. Today it comes as little surprise,
given the absence of any editorial vetting on the internet, to find
many websites and blogs saturated with bogus revelations and mindless
repetition of supposed =93facts=94 that were, in actuality, refuted or
rationally explained years ago.[4] The tide of nonsense is
sufficiently high that on occasion, and as if by osmosis, palpable
falsehoods are accepted and propagated by even the most venerable news
organizations, as will be seen below.
There were, to be sure, apparent anomalies in the evidence,
including problems with the ballistic and forensic evidence. In
addition, some eyewitness statements, if taken completely at face
value, at least raised the possibility that Sirhan had not acted alone
in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. But such incongruities are
entirely normal in most murder investigations, which are far from
being as neat and tidy as an episode of CSI. It is particularly true
of major investigations, where the possibility of human error is
compounded because of the vast amounts of paperwork and physical
evidence that must be processed. Then, too, police forces 40 years ago
were simply not as careful about securing a murder scene as they are
trained to be now.
What is immediately apparent when the historiographies of the JFK
and RFK assassinations are placed side by side is their similarity,
independent from the reality that Sirhan confessed, was tried, and
convicted. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the
assassination mimicry serving as inspiration for Sirhan=92s crime in the
first place has extended to the post-assassination arc of the RFK
case. Though not in the same order, many of the same tactics used to
put the official story of the JFK assassination in disrepute by 1968
have been employed in the RFK case=97sometimes by the very same people.
Pur****ted Involvement of the CIA
It took four years before allegations of CIA involvement in the
JFK assassination achieved critical mass in the public mind, courtesy
of Jim Garrison. In the RFK case, the allegation was leveled far more
quickly, owing to the noxious political atmosphere generated by
Garrison and comrades such as Mark Lane in the late 1960s.
Even as a special unit of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
detectives were investigating Sirhan=92s every movement and association
prior to June 5, some of the conspiracists who had attached themselves
to Garrison=92s probe were contacting the LAPD to re****t a =93CIA
conspiracy=94 in the senator=92s assassination. These freelance
researchers, or =93Dealey Plaza irregulars=94 as they were dubbed, claimed
that RFK was killed because the CIA feared he would launch an
investigation into =93[agency] involvement in his brother=92s death=94 if
elected president in 1968.[5] Garrison himself was
uncharacteristically silent on the subject, perhaps because he had
accused the former attorney general, prior to June 1968, of
obstructing the DA=92s probe into the JFK assassination. The truth,
Garrison alleged, threatened to =93interfere with [RFK=92s] political
career.=94[6] In fact, within the DA=92s bizarre world, according to Tom
Bethell, who worked on the investigation, Robert Kennedy was
considered a suspect in the JFK case until his own death.[7]
The theme of CIA involvement in the RFK case waned in subsequent
decades, but was resuscitated with the success of Oliver Stone=92s 1992
film, JFK. The most persistent purveyor of this meme was Lawrence
Teeter, a criminal defense attorney who took up Sirhan=92s case in 1994
and immediately began petitioning state and federal courts for a new
trial. Taking a leaf from two earlier, conspiratorially-minded books
about the case, Teeter never denied that Sirhan fired a handgun
shortly after midnight, but claimed the assassin was a victim of
hypnotic programming, =E0 la Richard Condon=92s 1959 book, The Manchurian
Candidate (later a film by John Frankenheimer).[8] In Sirhan=92s case,
however, he was not a tool of a foreign power and Stalinist mother,
Teeter contended, but was controlled by the CIA, the =93military-
industrial complex,=94 or both.[9]
As inexorably happens, the latest incarnation of this fantasy is
even more Baroque and involved than its precursors. That did not,
however, prevent it from being propagated by the BBC.
On 6 November 2006, =93Newsnight,=94 the BBC=92s flag****p news
program,
broadcast a 12-minute segment about a forthcoming =93documentary=94 on the
assassination, written by Shane O=92Sullivan, an Irish screenwriter.
Though not previously known for his investigative prowess or non-
fiction writing, O=92Sullivan claimed to have uncovered new video and
photographic evidence that proved =93three senior CIA operatives were
behind the [RFK] killing.=94 In the BBC segment, and a companion article
published in The Guardian on the same day, O=92Sullivan even named
names: David Sanchez Morales, Gordon Campbell, and George Joannides,
all three of whom were involved in anti-Castro activities out of the
CIA=92s station in Miami in the early =9260s.[10]
There was only one problem (well, actually there was more than
one, but one will suffice) with O=92Sullivan=92s allegation. These CIA
officers he claimed were the real sponsors of the assassination were
not at the Ambassador Hotel on the night in question.[11]
Primarily because my own book on the RFK assassination, The
Forgotten Terrorist, was coming out in a matter of months, I
immediately undertook to investigate O=92Sullivan claims. Through Don
Bohning, the former Latin America editor for The Miami Herald (and
author of The Castro Obsession), whose contacts in this subject are
unrivaled, former colleagues who knew David Morales and/or Gordon
Campbell very well were promptly located.[12] All three positively and
without hesitation stated that the dubious witnesses O=92Sullivan had
relied upon=97Wayne Smith, Bradley Ayers, and David Rabern=97were wrong in
their identifications of Morales and Campbell.[13]
Simultaneously, two other journalists, David Talbot and Jefferson
Morley, began investigating O=92Sullivan=92s story, because they, too,
were working on projects with equity in the allegation. Talbot was
putting the fini****ng touches on Brothers, his biography of Robert
Kennedy post-1963. Talbot was going to argue that JFK had been killed
as a result of a conspiracy involving CIA operatives, and he obviously
needed to understand if a similar =93plot=94 extended to RFK. Morley had a
keen interest because he had single-handedly transformed George
Joannides from an all-but-forgotten officer into the crucial link that
would supposedly unravel the CIA=92s alleged cover-up of its
embarrassing involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the JFK
assassination. If Joannides had been at the Ambassador Hotel, Morley
also needed to know it immediately.
Despite their predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories
when it came to one or both Kennedy assassinations, not even Talbot
and Morley could countenance O=92Sullivan=92s flimsy proof.[14] After six
weeks of crisscrossing the country, their investigation not only
confirmed the mistaken identifications of Morales and Campbell, but
took the debunking of O=92Sullivan=92s allegation two steps further. In an
essay posted in the spring of 2007, they proved that Campbell could
not possibly have been in Los Angeles in 1968 because he had died in
September 1962. In addition, utilizing Morley=92s familiarity with
Joannides, Talbot and Morley quoted five close friends/relatives who
said the man who =93looked Greek=94 to Shane O=92Sullivan was definitely
not=
Joannides.[15]
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