A Lie Too Big to Fail

including some obscure ones, rarely cited, and then one day I opened the wrong drawer in the library and found, to my amazement, microfilm of the LAPD's and FBI's investigation into the RFK assassination. At the time, those files had only been released four years earlier. I knew only a handful of people, at best, had looked at those files. I realized I might find things in that data that no one else had found. And I did, as you'll soon see. Similarly, many witness interviews were never transcribed. I listened to hours of audio tapes, some recorded at extremely low volumes. I also went through a number of video archives throughout the Los Angeles area and found interesting nuggets that have never been reported before, that dramatically contradict the official version of events. The official story is deceptively simple. A young Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Bashara Sirhan shot Senator Robert Kennedy in front of numerous witnesses in a narrow serving area called The Pantry at the Ambassador Hotel just after midnight on June 5th, 1968. Senator Kennedy had just won the Democratic presidential primary the night before in California and was walking through The Pantry on his way to a room where the print media reporters were waiting. He never made it that far. Five other people were wounded during the shooting. Sirhan was tried and convicted in a trial and sentenced to death. But even in the early days after the assassination, conspiracy theories were forming. Weren't there too many holes in the victims and the door frames in The Pantry to have come from a single gun? A bullet pictured in a newspaper was one bullet too many for the official scenario to work, as a housewife pointed out, to deafening media silence. Witnesses to evidence of conspiracy were told they could not speak to reporters, per a judge's order. A film about a second gun that had entered the case raised numerous questions about the validity of the authorities' conclusions about the case. A criminalist from Pasadena with a lot of credibility wrote a report demonstrating that two different guns had been fired in The Pantry, meaning Sirhan could not possibly have acted alone. Others pointed to the fact that witnesses uniformly put Sirhan in front of Kennedy, but Kennedy was shot from behind. The discrepancies in the case led to a formal reexamination of the evidence. A panel of experts examined the bullets to determine if more than one gun had been used, but the public was told of only a single key finding, that the panel found no evidence proving that a second gun had been used. They were not told other key data, such as the fact that the panel could not match any of the victim bullets to Sirhan's gun. And while the panel did discover one deliberate deception, they missed the much larger deception operation that had been pulled on them, as you will learn in this volume. It has often been said that one lie begets another. Nowhere is that more evident than in this case. Each time one lie was exposed, another lie had to be concocted to explain the previous lie away. Those who protected the lies ascended to higher positions of power. Those who challenged the official story would be shot at, sued, or marginalized as conspiracy theorists, a frame the CIA promoted to its media assets in 1967, when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating suspects in the JFK assassination case with deep connections to the CIA. It really is a crime to marginalize the few who have spent years trying to find the truth about this and other cases, who have given generously of their time and resources, who view such research not as a hobby or a gruesome pastime, but as an important part of participating in what's left of our democracy. Each person bears a responsibility to pass an accurate understanding of the past to future generations so that the country and humanity can successfully advance.