A Sad Day for Justice . . .

The complete failure of the corporate press in its responsibility of educating and informing its readers was yet again demonstrated yesterday in its reporting of the denial of parole of alleged Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan. In what seems like a quite ordinary article about Sirhan Sirhan's parole denial, it's the absence of emphasis on certain points that is most revealing. First off, only casual mention was made to the death of his unnamed "longtime attorney." Well, this "longtime attorney" was Lawrence Teeter, who had been working on Sirhan's case since 1994 and whose death was hardly reported at all in the news. Yet why is this important? Perhaps because Teeter assumed a monumental job of attempting to defend a client who was "seen" by numerous people as having assassinated the odds-on favorite to become the 1968 President of the United States. Yet through unbelievable legal determination Teeter was able to reveal the stranger-than-fiction reality of the conspiracy and cover-up of this murder. The story is quite unbelievable because it involved the hypnosis of Sirhan Sirhan, which immediately will strike modern readers as complete quackery. But it is not this aspect that is most persuasive. More persuasive should be the physical evidence that was uncovered by good lawyering, namely, the fact that the gun wound to RFK established that the shot that killed RFK was fired from no more than two to three INCHES from RFK's head FROM BEHIND, yet Sirhan was two to three FEET IN FRONT of Kennedy at the time of the assassination. Similarly, Teeter exposed how compromised Sirhan's legal representation was, colluding with the prosecution, in order to absolve more responsible parties, namely the CIA from exposure. Similarly, Teeter was trying to expose how the police investigation was compromised by the use of the CIA affiliate Manny Pena who was doing double duty at the Los Angeles Police Department and appointed to oversee the investigation of the murder.

Yet perhaps the best way to convey what Lawrence Teeter was trying to accomplish is to allow this unnamed "longtime attorney" to speak for himself. Lawrence Teeter discussing the Sirhan Sirhan case. Yet the saddest part of all and only barely mentioned in the reporting of Sirhan's parole hearings is that HE IS NOW COMPLETELY UNREPRESENTED BY COUNSEL. Here you have a man who was used as a patsy for the CIA in much the same way as Lee Harvey Oswald (though to much better effect, as discussed by the groundbreaking author Joan Mellon, author of Farwell to Justice) and protagonist to one of the most infamous crimes in American history, whose innocence was so diligently fought for by this unnamed "longtime attorney," skipping his parole hearings and being completely unrepresented after the death of his lawyer who could have quite convincingly proven that his client was actually innocent. The mainstream press, however, says not a word about the physical evidence in the case, namely, the PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY that Sirhan could have been the killer, the fact that the bullets didn't match the gun that he had fired, the fact that more bullets were recovered than could have been fired from one weapon, the MASSIVE suppression of witnesses that ensued in the so-called "investigation", and the sham of legal representation that actively cooperated in the effore to ship Sirhan straight to death row. Yet the media reports the mindless blathering of the Board of Parole Hearings spokesman that Sirhan is "very hostile" and "hates Americans," in its cartoonish depiction of reality.

Yesterday was a bad day for justice.