MEDIA REVIEW
November 24, 2002
New Trial for Sirhan?
According to GoOFF.com, the lawyer of Robert Kennedy's convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan petitioned the California Supreme Court for a new trial for his client.According to the report, "Lawrence Teeter, a respected Civil Rights lawyer, has spent eight years gathering evidence which he described last week, “virtually proves that powerful branches of the U.S. government were behind the murder”.
Teeter alleges that Sirhan was a subject of the CIA's MK ULTRA program in which the agency experimented with people to see if they could use hypnosis and drugs to create a programmed assassin. Sirhan suffered a head injury in 1966 when he was a jockey.
Teeter said the head injury may have made Sirhan "one of the most deeply hypnotizable people in the world. It will be part of our case at a new trial that the CIA discovered this when Sirhan was in hospital. We will show that from that point on, he went into the CIA assassination program. Part of that program was to ensure that Sirhan would have no recall of how he had been programmed and by whom.”
Teeter said Sirhan claims to have no memory of the incident at all. In support of Teeter's theory, Dr Herbert Spiegal, a New York psychiatrist, expert on hypnosis and teacher at Columbia University submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court, in which he says, “Sirhan, being an outstanding hypnotic subject, was probably programmed through hypnosis to shoot Senator Kennedy and to experience a genuine amnesia of the shooting”.
As to a motive, Teeter says, "There were good reasons for them to have wanted Robert Kennedy eliminated. He wanted to end the Vietnam War. He wanted to get to the bottom of his brother’s assassination. He wanted to break the power of the Teamsters Union. He wanted to end the wild adventurism of the CIA.”