American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [46]
So what do we have in the case of Sirhan? A year before the government’s mind control efforts became public, a nationally-recognized expert in hypnosis, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, had this to say: “I’ve gone over the data very carefully on Sirhan and my hypothesis is that someone... programmed him to be there and fire that gun. ... I know from his lawyer that he appeared at another political rally that night in the Ambassador Hotel, for some right-wing school superintendent. Here’s what Sirhan reports: ‘I’m in this rally and I ask myself, what am I doing here? So I leave. Then I go back to my car and the next thing I know there’s a gun on the seat. And I don’t know where that gun came from. Then all of a sudden, I’m in the kitchen.’ And he has no recall of how he went from that car into the hotel kitchen. If he was drunk or under drugs, which is possible, it would not be as easily recoverable. But if he were in a trance state and programmed, it is recoverable.”23 Meaning, an expert like Spiegel could still “unlock” Sirhan’s mind today, if he were allowed into Pleasant Valley State Prison.
Sirhan showed a number of signs of being in some weird zone that night at the Ambassador. A Western Union operator had seen him standing transfixed in front of a teletype machine.24 Other witnesses observed his intense concentration in the pantry, and his almost super-human strength when being wrestled down, despite a “very tranquil” look on his face. Policeman Art Pacencia noticed that the pupils of Sirhan’s eyes were dilated, which is another indication of a hypnotic state. Just as Oswald was when questioned about the assassination of JFK, Sirhan was oddly detached during that first long night of interrogation.
It could be, of course, that Sirhan was in a state of shock after the assassination. But Dr. Bernard Diamond was hired by Sirhan’s defense team to check out his mental state, and Diamond put him under hypnosis. Sirhan turned out to be such an easy subject, “going under” so fast and so deeply, that Diamond had trouble keeping him awake. (I’ve learned that a rapid induction like this is a sure sign of someone having been hypnotized before.) Diamond could actually get Sirhan to climb the bars of his cell like a monkey, or sing a tune in Arabic. When he once asked Sirhan who killed Senator Kennedy, the response came back: “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” Yet strangely, on the opening day of the trial, Sirhan got up and started shouting how he wanted to be executed because he’d killed the senator “willfully, premeditatedly, with twenty years of malice aforethought.” Which was the real Sirhan?
On the witness stand, Dr. Diamond testified that he was surprised how easy it was to hypnotize Sirhan, but believed Sirhan had basically programmed himself through studying texts on self-hypnosis. The “automatic writing” found in Sirhan’s notebooks, he said, “is something that can be done only when one is pretty well trained.”25
Another expert called in was Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, the chief psychologist at San Quentin when Sirhan was being held there. Simson-Kallas thought Sirhan was an ideal “Manchurian Candidate”: “He was easily influenced, had no real roots, and was looking for a cause.”26 Once, Sirhan told him: “Sometimes I go in a very deep trance so I can’t even speak ... I had to be in a trance when I shot Kennedy, as I don’t remember having shot him.”27 But after Sirhan asked Simson-Kallas to hypnotize him and see what he could find out, the San Quentin warden terminated their visits. Simson-Kallas ended up quitting his job at the prison. Even Roger LaJeunesse, the FBI’s liaison to the L.A. County prosecutor, told journalist Robert Blair Kaiser: “The case is still open. I’m not rejecting the Manchurian Candidate aspect of it.” J. Edgar Hoover told the Washington Post that the interviewer