STORIES
Another one bites the dust!
“Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in 1968”
In June 1968, the Democratic primaries were in full swing, and things were looking good for Senator Robert Francis Kennedy (42). He had announced his candidacy for the Presidential nomination in March, thus angering his main Democratic rival Eugene McCarthy and panicking the incumbent President Lyndon B Johnson, who announced his withdrawal from the 1968 election shortly before the assassination of black rights activist Martin Luther King in Memphis , Tennessee on 4 April. Johnson's worst nightmare was to be running for re-election against another Kennedy. He had served as Vice President under JFK from 1961 to 1963 and had come to despise the entire Kennedy clan and the east coast Ivy League entourage that enveloped them.
To a large section of the American electorate, Bobby Kennedy was the natural successor to his elder brother John (Jack), who had been assassinated under highly suspicious circumstances at Dallas , Texas in 1963. ‘RFK', a senator representing New York , was a handsome and charismatic politician in the typical Kennedy mould who had championed civil rights and the suppression of organised crime during his term as Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964.
Many people perceived that there was certain symmetry, an innate fairness in the idea that he should be allowed to carry on where the martyred Jack Kennedy had left off. Bobby's man political stance in the spring run-up to the November election was as a strong advocate against the conflict in Vietnam , where thousands of conscripted young Americans (and Vietnamese) were dying in an Asian civil war in which the USA was aiding the pro-American government based in Saigon .
In spite of his younger brother Teddy's objections, Bobby was determined to run for the Presidency and end the war in Vietnam . His brushed aside his family's concerns for his own safety. “Kennedy men are not born to make safe decisions,” he argued, echoing sentiments that had been drilled into the rich and powerful Irish-Catholic family by Joe Kennedy senior (1889-1969), whose ultimate ambition had been to gain (or buy) the American Presidency for at least one of his four sons.
For this latest Kennedy campaign, things were looking good. Bobby had consolidated his lead over McCarthy by winning primaries in South Dakota and California . This brought his total delegate votes to 198 and his victory at the final Democratic Presidential Election in Chicago in August seemed to be a certainty.
On the morning of 4 June 1968, Bobby washed and dressed in his plush suite at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles . He had spent a restless night but showed no signs of fatigue as he made speeches throughout the day and addressed an audience of enthusiastic campaign volunteers shortly after midnight. “On to Chicago !” he shouted to his supporters as he marched through the hotel corridors trailed by campaign staff, advisers and a handful of security guards.
Running a few minutes late, Kennedy decided to take a shortcut to the waiting press conference room. It was 12.15am. The route took him through the hotel kitchens. Kennedy pushed through a set of swing doors and entered a narrow pantry corridor teeming with over seventy people, most of them ardent admirers anxious to get a glimpse of their hero. No one paid any attention to a slight, dark-haired young man leaning against an ice-making machine.
Kennedy was accompanied by his wife Ethel, who was pregnant with their eleventh (!) child as he paused to shake hands with an admirer. Then just what Ted Kennedy feared so much suddenly happened. The man by the ice-making machine stepped forward, shouted “Kennedy, you son of a bitch!”, pointed an eight-shot .22 calibre Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver at Bobby and commenced firing at him. Later identified as a 24-year-old Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan, the man was swiftly tackled and wrestled to the ground by hotel worker Karl Uecker, speech writer George Plimton, 1960 Olympic Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson and the muscular pro football player Rosey Grier.
It was later determined that Kennedy had been shot twice in the body and once in the head. A fourth shot grazed his jacket. As he lay on the floor bleeding, he asked if anyone else had been hurt. Five other people were wounded in that fusillade of shots: William Weisel of ABC News, Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers Union, party activist Elizabeth Evans, 19-year-old radio reporter Ira Goldstein and a 17-year-old party volunteer Irwin Stroll.
Enraged Kennedy supporters nearby turned into an instant lynch mob as they fought to get at the gunman. Grier and Johnson kept them at bay. “Let's not have another Oswald!” Johnson bellowed among the confusion (a reference to the alleged assassin of JFK in 1963). Minutes later, Los Angeles police officers arrived, handcuffed Sirhan, read him his Miranda rights and bundled him away.
Robert Kennedy was rushed by ambulance to the Los Angeles Central Emergency Receiving Station where Dr Victor Boz examined him and administered cardiac massage. “I was about to put adrenalin into his heart”, said Boz, “but as we were working we found we didn't need that. At first there was no pulse, but then his pulse came back and we began to hear a heartbeat. Then he began to breathe erratically.”
A team of surgeons under Dr Henry Cuneo operated on Kennedy for three hours and forty minutes. After the surgery, a medical bulletin was posted which stated that his condition was critical and the next 36 hours would prove crucial. But despite the best efforts of the medical staff, Robert Francis Kennedy, born in Boston on 20 November 1925, died at 1.45am on the morning of 6 June 1968 still in intensive care at the Good Samaritan Hospital in LA, almost 26 hours after he had been shot. His younger brother Teddy, now suddenly the last of the golden Kennedy boys, sat mournfully by his deathbed.
Meantime Sirhan was refusing to answer questions under police interrogation. “I wish to remain incognito,” was all he said. Much later it was discovered that Sirhan had immigrated to the USA from Jordan , and was once a Kennedy admirer who became disillusioned by what he perceived to be RFK's pro-Israeli stance. He had been trailing Kennedy for days. On 18 May he had apparently written in his diary, “RFK must die...be disposed of openly...die, die, die.”
Sirhan was placed by all witnesses at between two and five feet from the Senator when he commenced firing. All witnesses agreed that the gunman was facing Kennedy when he opened fire. But the autopsy revealed that Kennedy had been shot from BEHIND. All three bullets that hit him punctured his back and his head.
In conducting the autopsy, LA coroner Dr Thomas Noguchi discovered powder burns on Kennedy's right ear and gunpowder residue in his hair. Noguchi concluded that this indicated that the fatal head wound had been fired from a distance of, at most, 1.5 inches (37mm) away from his skull. When a firearm discharges, the powder residue travels only a few inches because the material is very light. Noguchi's conclusions led to speculation that Sirhan was too far away from Kennedy and in the wrong position to have administered the fatal wound; also fired from a .22 calibre handgun, one that had apparently been fired into Kennedy's head at point-blank range behind his right ear. The conclusion is that another gunman, behind Kennedy, fired the fatal shot amid the confusion as all attention was focused on Sirhan.
Dr Noguchi himself concluded in his report, ‘Until more is precisely known, the existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus, I have never stated conclusively that Sirhan killed Senator Robert Kennedy.'
Independent testing indicates that gunpowder residue can easily travel over 15 inches (38 centimetres), but that the stripling effect observed in this case requires that the gun must have been less than 2 inches (5cm) away from Kennedy's skull.
Sirhan's .22 revolver held eight rounds in the chamber. The official conclusion is that Sirhan fired all his cartridges, even as he was being subdued, and all eight bullets were recovered. Others have suggested that there were more than eight shots fired that night.
A police officer observed a forensics team dig two bullets out of a doorframe in the pantry area, bringing to ten the total number of shots that were fired during the attack. FBI documents describe holes in the pantry doorframe as ‘bullet holes', and William Bailey, the first FBI agent at the crime scene, has stated that he saw a bullet in one such hole. In addition, most of the witnesses thought that Sirhan's gun sounded as though it was firing blanks. “It looked like a cap gun throwing off powder residue,” said Rafer Johnson.
Many claims of a second gunman point to a part-time armed security guard who escorted Senator Kennedy that night. This was a Lockheed Aerospace worker named Thane Eugene Cesar (26) who had been called to work at the Ambassador at the last minute by his employer, Ace Guard Services. According to witnesses, Cesar had been walking closest to Kennedy on the Senator's right and slightly to the rear when Sirhan began firing. Kennedy suddenly gripped Cesar's clip-on necktie with his right hand when first hit, as that tie was less than a foot away from RFK's right hand while he was lying mortally wounded on the kitchen floor.
When interviewed by LAPD homicide detectives soon after the assassination, Cesar admitted on tape that he had pulled his pistol from his holster during the shooting in the pantry but insisted that he had never fired it. Cesar also admitted that he had owned a .22 calibre revolver similar to Sirhan's, but claimed that he had sold the weapon in February 1968. This was a lie, as it was later discovered that Cesar had in fact sold the gun three months after the assassination. (The buyer of that weapon later reported it as stolen). The gun that Cesar turned over to the LAPD was not test-fired by ballistics experts because it was a .38 calibre revolver and all the slugs recovered from the crime scene were .22 calibre rounds.
Cesar was in the perfect position to have shot Kennedy from behind as the autopsy indicated, but no one saw him do so. Dan Moldea, author of ‘The Killing of Robert F Kennedy' tracked Cesar down and performed a polygraph (lie detector) test on him which Moldea said completely exonerated Cesar.
There were other unknown suspects. LAPD sergeant Paul Sharaga and a young Kennedy campaign worker named Sandy Serrano both claimed that a young Hispanic man and a blonde haired Caucasian woman wearing a polka dot dress had suddenly burst out of a rear service exit of the kitchen seconds after the shooting. “We got him!” The man shouted. “We shot Bob Kennedy!” Then they ran out of the hotel.
Sharaga immediately issued an APB (all points bulletin) on the couple, but this was within minutes cancelled without explanation by his superiors. Serrano also claimed that she had been coerced into changing her story for the official LAPD investigation that followed.
Lisa Urso (17) a San Diego high school student at the scene, claimed that she had seen two men in smart business suits shoulder holstering handguns as they swiftly departed from the kitchen against the press of people who were trying to get closer to the tragedy; a natural response known as ‘rubbernecking'.
On 20 November 2006 (the date of what would have been Robert Kennedy's 81st birthday), BBC's ‘Newsnight' programme presented research by Shane O'Sullivan alleging that several CIA case officers were present at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of 5/6 June 1968. The Central Intelligence Agency has no domestic jurisdiction, and some of the officers were based in South East Asia at the time, with no apparent reason to be in Los Angeles that night. Three of these men were former senior officers who had worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's main anti-Castro station based in Miami .
O'Sullivan showed video footage and still photographs which identified David Morales, Chief of Operations at JMWAVE; plus Gordon Campbell (Chief of Maritime Operations) and George Joannides (Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations). The latter was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the JFK assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Now he oddly appears in a photograph placing him at the Ambassador Hotel on the night that a second Kennedy was brutally slain.
Morales once reportedly told friends, “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.” It is well known that Jack and Bobby Kennedy earned the lasting hatred of many CIA operatives along with their Cuban exile helpers when they aborted the ‘Bay of Pigs' invasion of Cuba in April 1961 by refusing to send in extra air cover. Bobby was also detested by mafia dons for his relentless pursuit of organised crime bosses throughout the televised McClelland Hearings and during his stint as Attorney General.
Paul Schrade, one of the men wounded that fateful night, believes that this new evidence merits fresh investigation. He said, “It seems very strange to me that these guys would be at a Kennedy celebration. Why were they there and what were they doing there? It's our obligation as friends of Bobby Kennedy to investigate this.”
Sirhan Sirhan was tried and found guilty of the murder of Robert Kennedy and is still serving time for that crime. During the trial, an expert graphologist cited that the diary which heavily implicated Sirhan was a forgery. There were many inconsistencies in the handwriting that differed totally from Sirhan's known writing style. Sirhan claimed that he acted unconsciously, and that he has no memory of shooting Kennedy. This has led to speculation that he may have been acting under the influence of ‘hypnotic brainwashing' that many attribute to the CIA's secret MK-Ultra program. The Central Intelligence Agency unsurprisingly declined to comment on this. Sirhan was first refused parole in 1984 and has been ever since.
The 1968 Democratic nomination eventually went to Hubert Humphrey, LBJ's vice president, amid ugly rioting at the Chicago convention. The ‘Year of Peace and Love' in 1967 seemed long forgotten as protesters were clubbed and tear-gassed in perhaps the most violent Democratic rally in history.
Robert Kennedy's body was buried close to his brother's gravesite at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and on 20 November 2006, his son Maxwell Kennedy unveiled a memorial plaque on the site of the old Ambassador Hotel exactly on the spot where his father was shot. It seems that a powerful and dangerous group of people was determined that the world would never see another Kennedy making executive decisions in the Oval Office of the White House.
IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979
Hot Air - By Philip Smucker
No politician or diplomat in Kabul , Afghan or Western, appears ready to talk to the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar or the “mad” Mullah Dadullah, who in any case are too busy fighting an insurgency and kidnapping foreigners to pay any attention.
But with Afghanistan 's Taliban movement slowly expanding its grip across the east and south of the country, the idea of making “peace” with a fundamentalist Islamic movement still closely allied with Osama bin Laden is back on the table.
Last week, to the shock and dismay of many of the country's ethnic Tajiks, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced publicly that he was in closed-door discussions with the Taliban. To whom precisely he was talking was left unmentioned.
The secrecy hasn't gone over well with Karzai's rivals. In an interview, Afghanistan 's parliamentary Speaker, a key figure in a new anti-Karzai coalition, sounded infuriated. “For us, his admission last week that he has been talking to the Taliban comes as a complete surprise,” said Younus Qanooni, kneading a set of ruby-red prayer beads in the posh salon in his home. “We were not informed about these closed-curtain talks.”
Qanooni is an intelligent, slightly built Tajik who earned his jihadist stripes as a confidant of the “Lion of Panshir”, Ahmed Shah Masoud, who was murdered by an al-Qaeda suicide cameraman two days before September 11, 2001. Since then, he has served as interior minister and education minister.
Also last week, together with several other Karzai rivals, Qanooni formed a new northern-dominated opposition group, the United National Front (UNF), whose members include former defense minister Mohammad Fahim, former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Prince Mustafa Zahir, the grandson of the deposed and ailing king Mohammad Zahir Shah. Many in this group favor eliminating the Taliban with extreme prejudice.
But the UNF has other good reasons to oppose Karzai's secret dealings with the Taliban. For one, Karzai hails from the Taliban's Pashtun homeland in the south, which makes them part of his own political base. For another, key members of the Karzai-led government are major players in a multibillion-dollar narcotics business that stands as a major hurdle to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's stabilization efforts across the south and east.
Raw drug production is often protected by Taliban forces that have kept NATO forces locked down for months. But there are nuances to the drug trade that suggest a nexus of cooperation among drug dealers, terrorists and the Karzai government. The governor of Helmand province, Asadullah Wafa, complained recently to leading counter-narcotics officials in Kabul that government “eradicators” endowed with tens of millions of US dollars' worth of US government-supplied equipment are demanding stiff bribes in exchange for not destroying poppy fields.
The situation is so fraught with peril from farmers prepared to take up arms with the Taliban to protect their bumper poppy crops that British and Canadian forces often insist to Afghan tribal elders that “we have nothing to do with the drug-eradication business”, according to a seasoned British reporter, who has spent the past several months in the south.
So just what do Karzai's negotiations with the Taliban imply as to his own motivations and the goals of the international community to stabilize the country and wipe out terrorism?
Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani author of The Taliban, told National Public Radio in the US last week that because Washington had not pushed Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf hard enough to go after Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan , the Pashtun-led extremist movement has grown immensely in recent months and, in Rashid's words, is “probably a bigger threat now than al-Qaeda” to Afghanistan .
Indeed, Western diplomats say they are increasingly concerned about the “Talibanization” of both Pakistan and Afghanistan , which they believe is assisted by senior al-Qaeda operatives based in Pakistan as well as rogue elements within Pakistan 's intelligence services.
A time bomb is ticking in South Asia as terror tactics that have proved successful in Iraq are embraced by Taliban tacticians.
With al-Qaeda still working hand-in-hand with the extremist movement, Karzai's negotiations are in a sense tantamount to “talking to the terrorists”, something US administration officials say - for US public consumption - that they categorically oppose.
In Afghanistan , however, that view is a non-starter. The history of the country is one of deal-making with the devil - often in the form of your fellow countrymen - all for the sake of survival. In other words, Afghan leaders maintain an age-old tradition - spelled pragmatism - of keeping their enemy close at hand to sustain - and sometimes enhance - their own authority. Karzai is engaged in just this.
It would not matter much if Washington actually opposed the idea of peace talks with the Taliban. In any case, the US State Department clearly does not. Western leaders, who still laud
Karzai as an anti-terror poster boy, are in fact encouraging talks with the Taliban as a first step toward their own “exit strategy” from Afghanistan .
There is great risk involved. The Taliban, as they grow stronger in the hinterlands, exert more and more influence in the streets of larger towns and cities, as well as within political circles in Kabul . And even if the Taliban chose the political route to shared power in Afghanistan , it is not at all clear that their behind-the-scenes leaders would swear off their long-standing ties to al-Qaeda and an international jihad under the sway of Washington 's arch-enemies, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden. No one has forgotten that the Taliban actually decided to continue hosting bin Laden and friends even after Washington threatened all-out war in the autumn of 2001.
Nevertheless, with little concerted military action to end al-Qaeda's machinations inside Pakistan 's North Western Frontier Province , the Karzai government may have no choice but to engage in an effort to drive a wedge between Afghanistan 's Taliban and the extremists on the other side of the Durand Line. Certainly, NATO countries do not relish the idea of being locked in a decades-long stalemate in Afghanistan , and that is one reason they are encouraging Karzai.
The idea of getting the Taliban on board the political process isn't new. For several years, Karzai's operatives have engaged in a delicate effort to lure mid-level and senior Taliban away from their one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, and bring them back into the political fold. There have been some notable successes. Former (some say “current”) Taliban leader Mullah Salam Rocketti broke ranks with fighters in the field and is now an elected member of Parliament.
The door remains open. Senior Afghan intelligence officials say they regularly offer to drop or lower charges against captured Taliban operatives in exchange for information about their senior leaders and al-Qaeda's top tier.
Despite well-documented brutalities perpetrated by the Taliban between 1996 and 2001, the international community has never paid much lip service to an international war-crimes court for Afghanistan . Warlords and the Taliban's various ministers of death don't even need an “amnesty”, since no one is lining up to prosecute them for human-rights violations.
Talks with the Taliban are not cheap, but they may be cheaper - in the long run - than other options. NATO still does not have adequate forces on the ground to control Afghanistan 's Pashtun villages, where the Taliban are making inroads through intimidation and propaganda.
Pashtuns don't want peace at any cost, but they do want it desperately. A new survey suggests that Taliban support among civilians in southern Afghanistan has shot up to nearly 27% of the population from single digits a year earlier. The Senlis Council's poll of 17,000 Afghan men in the south and east suggested that Afghans in southern Afghanistan are increasingly prepared to announce their support for the Taliban openly. A report on the poll stated that fewer and fewer Pashtuns believe that their own government or NATO has the firepower or willpower to defeat the Taliban militarily.
One of the Taliban's strongest suits, despite its well-honed brutal ways, is a reputation for anti-corruption and stern sharia (Islamic) law enforcement. Many of the Afghans are sick and tired of living in poverty and getting shot at while Kabul politicians live in glass houses and enrich themselves.
These emerging facts on the ground add up to a strengthened Taliban hand at the negotiation table. The next move is Karzai's. www.atimes.com
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