Sirhan's Upcoming Parole Hearing

[James DiEugenio]

Sirhan had a personality change after his fall at the racetrack.

The treating doctor at the hospital thought he had taken care of his injuries by cleaning his eyes and giving him a few stitches around his right eye.

Sirhan actually disappeared after his stay in the hospital for a period of about two weeks.

But further, Sirhan visited a doctor 13 more times over the next year and 3 months.

These visitations went on until the end of 1967.

His friend from the track, Walter Rathke, noted the difference when he visited him at his home in 1967. Rathke told the LAPD that at that time Sirhan seemed to be a different person. "He did not laugh anymore and was not his jovial self." (Pease,  p. 436-37)

Edited June 9 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

21 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Michael Wayne resembled Sirhan.

And he was asking for the location of RFK throughout that night.

Sirhan's brother fired the shots? What is the source for this?  Neither Adel, Munir or Sharif were there that night.

As per a precedent, in her book Lisa describes the case of Luis Angel Castillo (pp. 428-33)

In John Marks' book, he describes how a hypnotist could, through skilled application, walk a chosen patsy through a series of events, "such as a visit to a store, a conversation with a mailman, picking a fight at a political rally, to lay in a history that could make him look guilty after the fact. "

Quoting directly now from Marks: "The subject would remember everything that happened to him but be amnesiac only for the fact that the hypnotist ordered him to do these things...The purpose of this exercise is to leave a circumstantial trail that will make the authorities think the patsy committed a particular crime." (Marks, p. 204). 

And just remember, Marks is one of the more conservative authors on the subject of hypnotic suggestion.

 

Jim,

     People who remain skeptical about the evidence of Sirhan's hypnotic conditioning, and the nature of post-hypnotic compulsions and amnesia, should study Chapter Nine of Lisa Pease's book, A Lie Too Big to Fail, on Mind Games.

     Pease did an excellent job of describing the hypnosis phenomenology in plain English.

     She also described the RFKA forensic and ballistic evidence in detail.

     I'm not convinced that some of her critics on this forum have even read, or understood, her book.

[James DiEugenio]

Another example furnished by Lisa.  She wrote about this in Salon.

Derren Brown is a famous stage hypnotist in the UK.  He took a highly susceptible subject, and over a two month period trained him in an assassination plot. But did not tell him who the victim was.  There was a two part trigger mechanism that would recall the post hypnotic suggestion: a girl in a polka dot dress and a ringing cell phone.

 

 

[Johnny Cairns]

58 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Another example furnished by Lisa.  She wrote about this in Salon.

Derren Brown is a famous stage hypnotist in the UK.  He took a highly susceptible subject, and over a two month period trained him in an assassination plot. But did not tell him who the victim was.  There was a two part trigger mechanism that would recall the post hypnotic suggestion: a girl in a polka dot dress and a ringing cell phone.

 

 

Derren Brown is incredible and so is this experiment. Eerie that a girl in a polka dot dress was used, the pattern must be significant? 

[James DiEugenio]

I think Brown did that specifically to show that the concept behind the Manchurian Candidate idea is more than a theory.

The same thing was done on the Discovery Channel by hypnotist Tom Silver.

After he did this, he said the following: "I believe hypnosis does have the potential to control someone's mind and actions...That's something that a lot of hypnotherapists don't want to talk about--its something they're scared of"

Bryan had a good reason to be afraid of admitting it.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

7 hours ago, Stu Wexler said:

Ben. I think you did a nice summary. And I have long been on the side of C2. My guess (look who bought/gave Sirhan the gun) is that he was protecting family. But I would absolutely say-- tell us what you *really* know and we will commute.

SW-

Thanks for your collegial comments.  

 

[W. Niederhut]

8 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

SW-

Thanks for your collegial comments.  

 

Translation:   "Thanks, Stu, for agreeing with my inaccurate views about Sirhan's dissociative disorder and his hypnotic, "Manchurian" programming."

Read Chapter Nine of A Lie Too Big to Fail, Ben.

Did you ever buy the book?

[Benjamin Cole]

I still wonder...so where are the verifiable cases of  Manchurian assassins? 

There are many governments in the world with adequate resources to maintain spooky intel services. Maybe dozens. 

Knowledge is almost impossible to keep under wraps--if a method for actually creating Manchurian assassins was available...where are the assassins? 

It has been 60 years since the JFKA and RFK1. That is 60 years to improve and refine hypnosis techniques and drugs. Again, we see nothing.  

Has anyone, in a peer-reviewed journal, ever laid out replicable procedures and drugs for creating a Manchurian assassin?

If not an assassin, a method for ensuring a person would become an automaton well after the hypnosis sessions are complete? 

Yes, we have seen cases of hypnosis "working" in the immediate sense, under controlled conditions with willing subjects. 

That may roughly been the case of Sirhan, though that is hardly proven. The polka-dot dress girl may have had a role. 

Sirhan still needs to reveal who were his co-conspirators in the RFK1A. 

And Sirhan may have willingly put himself into a fugue of sorts to steel up for the RFK1A, along with the four drinks. Sirhan had apparently been experimenting with self-hypnosis. 

The whole case needs to be re-investigated, although like the JFKA...the intel-state stalled long enough that truth is dying along with witnesses. 

 

 

Edited June 10 by Benjamin Cole

[Nick Bartetzko]

4 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

I still wonder...so where are the verifiable cases of  Manchurian assassins? 

There are many governments in the world with adequate resources to maintain spooky intel services. Maybe dozens. 

Knowledge is almost impossible to keep under wraps--if a method for actually creating Manchurian assassins was available...where are the assassins? 

It has been 60 years since the JFKA and RFK1. That is 60 years to improve and refine hypnosis techniques and drugs. Again, we see nothing.  

Has anyone, in a peer-reviewed journal, ever laid out replicable procedures and drugs for creating a Manchurian assassin?

If not an assassin, a method for ensuring a person would become an automaton well after the hypnosis sessions are complete? 

Yes, we have seen cases of hypnosis "working" in the immediate sense, under controlled conditions with willing subjects. 

That may roughly been the case of Sirhan, though that is hardly proven. The polka-dot dress girl may have had a role. 

Sirhan still needs to reveal who were his co-conspirators in the RFK1A. 

And Sirhan may have willingly put himself into a fugue of sorts to steel up for the RFK1A, along with the four drinks. Sirhan had apparently been experimenting with self-hypnosis. 

The whole case needs to be re-investigated, although like the JFKA...the intel-state stalled long enough that truth is dying along with witnesses. 

 

 

I am curious what you would require as verifiable proof. In a way, that's a bit like asking for the original Z film to prove that what we have now has been tampered with. No more re-investigations either. Enough with the likes of the Clark Panel and HSCA. The fix will always be in by the powers that be who pick the experts who will see things your way. Those experts will always be available for hire.

I was in the insurance field for years and high powered attorneys and insurance companies often kept shopping for experts until they found ones whose conclusions they liked. The polka dot girl knew Kennedy had been shot and announced it to Sandy Serrano. Speaking of Serrano, I'm amazed those audio tapes weren't destroyed. 

[James DiEugenio]

Nice one Nick.

We just saw two examples above and I mentioned the Castillo case in Lisa's book.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Nick Bartetzko said:

I am curious what you would require as verifiable proof. In a way, that's a bit like asking for the original Z film to prove that what we have now has been tampered with. No more re-investigations either. Enough with the likes of the Clark Panel and HSCA. The fix will always be in by the powers that be who pick the experts who will see things your way. Those experts will always be available for hire.

I was in the insurance field for years and high powered attorneys and insurance companies often kept shopping for experts until they found ones whose conclusions they liked. The polka dot girl knew Kennedy had been shot and announced it to Sandy Serrano. Speaking of Serrano, I'm amazed those audio tapes weren't destroyed. 

NB-

In medical science, usually the standard is replicable experiments and trials. 

Does a drug work? Phase 1, 2 and 3 trials. 

My reservation is that the purported use of Manchurian assassins seems entirely absent in recent decades. I have done Google searching, and the topic is rather thin.

No nation appears to have claimed another nation deployed a hypnotized assassin against them, or even just a spy or saboteur. 

In the case of Sirhan, there is the situation of him having four drinks on the night of RFK1A, and apparently Sirhan also a fan of "self hypnosis." The polka-dot dress girl  appears to have been a companion of some sort, perhaps to egg him on, after Sirhan went into some sort of fugue, or possibly to trigger a previous hypnotic suggestion.

It is possible Sirhan was responsible for putting himself into a state/fugue, or possibly, with very current hands on coaching (the polka-dot dress girl) a hypnotic suggestion might work. All very iffy. 

I would say the Sirhan case and the topic are somewhat sketchy. 

But let me ask you....can you find a credible story of a state or intel-state assassin acting under hypnotic suggestion in the last few decades?  

I am open minded on the topic. 

 

 

 

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

From Martin Cannon's The Controllers, based in part on the Marks files:

According to declassified documents in the Marks files, a major difficulty faced by the MKULTRA researchers concerned the "disposal problem." What to do with the victims of CIA-sponsored electroshock, hypnosis, and drug experimentation? The Company resorted to distressing, but characteristic, tactics: They disposed of their human guinea pigs by incarcerating them in insane asylums, by performing icepick lobotomies, and by ordering "executive actions."103 A more sophisticated solution had to be found. One of the goals of the CIA's mind control efforts was the erasure of memory via hypnosis (and drugs, electronics, lobotomies, etc.); not only would this hide what occurred during the experimental indoctrination/programming sessions, it would prove useful in the field. "Amnesia was a big goal," confirms Victor Marchetti, who points out its usefulness in dealing with contract agents: "After you've done it, the agent doesn't even know what he's done... you send him in, he does the job. When he comes out, you clean his head out."104 The big problem: Despite hypnotically-induced amnesia, there would be memory leaks – snippets of the repressed material would arise spontaneously, in dreams, as flashbacks, etc. A proposed solution: Give the subject a "screen memory," a false story; thus, even if he starts to recall the material, he will recall it incorrectly

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

From Martin Cannon's The Controllers, based in part on the Marks files:

According to declassified documents in the Marks files, a major difficulty faced by the MKULTRA researchers concerned the "disposal problem." What to do with the victims of CIA-sponsored electroshock, hypnosis, and drug experimentation? The Company resorted to distressing, but characteristic, tactics: They disposed of their human guinea pigs by incarcerating them in insane asylums, by performing icepick lobotomies, and by ordering "executive actions."103 A more sophisticated solution had to be found. One of the goals of the CIA's mind control efforts was the erasure of memory via hypnosis (and drugs, electronics, lobotomies, etc.); not only would this hide what occurred during the experimental indoctrination/programming sessions, it would prove useful in the field. "Amnesia was a big goal," confirms Victor Marchetti, who points out its usefulness in dealing with contract agents: "After you've done it, the agent doesn't even know what he's done... you send him in, he does the job. When he comes out, you clean his head out."104 The big problem: Despite hypnotically-induced amnesia, there would be memory leaks – snippets of the repressed material would arise spontaneously, in dreams, as flashbacks, etc. A proposed solution: Give the subject a "screen memory," a false story; thus, even if he starts to recall the material, he will recall it incorrectly

JD-

I am open-mined on this topic.

But other nations have intel-agencies also. I assume all would be interested in creating an automaton killer, or Manchurian assassin. I assume all have tried. 

We see no reporting on successful Manchurian assassins, or even spied or saboteurs, in the last 60 years. 

A silence that speaks volumes? 

A possible exception is the 9/11 attack. The hijackers acted like automatons, fanatics beyond all measure or reason.  But no one has suggested they were subject to mind control 

Interesting topic. 

 

[James DiEugenio]

How about Canada?

Ever heard of Dr Ewen Cameron?

In January of 1998 there was an acclaimed docudrama broadcast on the CBC, a four hour miniseries. It was entitled The Sleep Room.

The paper zine I used to edit Probe, did a two part article based on this by Arlene Tyner. Between this and other research she did she wrote, "Unlucky enough to be delivered into CIA/Military custody by abrasive or uncaring parents, children as young as 8 years old were subjected to trauma based mind control programming to mold them into Manchurian Candidate spies, assassins and sexual black mailers."

Here is a preview

 

[Benjamin Cole]

35 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

How about Canada?

Ever heard of Dr Ewen Cameron?

In January of 1998 there was an acclaimed docudrama broadcast on the CBC, a four hour miniseries. It was entitled The Sleep Room.

The paper zine I used to edit Probe, did a two part article based on this by Arlene Tyner. Between this and other research she did she wrote, "Unlucky enough to be delivered into CIA/Military custody by abrasive or uncaring parents, children as young as 8 years old were subjected to trauma based mind control programming to mold them into Manchurian Candidate spies, assassins and sexual black mailers."

Here is a preview

 

JD-

That CIA program sounds inhuman beyond words.

But did any documented automaton killers result?