New Reports By Expert Research Group Document Conspiracies To Slay JFK, RFK

Two major new research reports assemble evidence that challenges longstanding official accounts endorsed by major news organizations that President John F. Kennedy (JFK) and his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), were fatally shot in separate assassinations by lone gunmen, acting alone.

The separate reports announced late this month show that JFK’s 1963 death in Dallas and RFK’s 1968 death in Los Angeles were each the product of conspiracies to thwart the democratic process of elections and accountability via the criminal justice system and have resulted in long-time cover ups that continue to thwart justice and other aspects of civic life.

The reports were prepared by the non-partisan Truth & Reconciliation Committee (T&R), which was founded in January 2020. The reports are available in full on the committee’s website:

• JFK: The Real Story
• RFK: The Real Story

Also, the Justice Integrity Project, whose editor was a founding board member of the T&R Committee, will excerpt the reports, beginning with today’s column focusing on JFK: The Real Story.

The brothers at right are John at left, Robert Kennedy, center, and their younger brother, Ted Kennedy, right.

Excerpted at the bottom of this column is a news release on the RFK report that is planned for distribution on Nov. 29.

The reports each carry relevance to developments expected in the next few weeks even beyond the intense civic interest that has generated large numbers of book, films and conferences since the deaths.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, shown at left greeting President Biden in September, and the state’s full parole board must decide soon whether or not to affirm a recommendation in August by state parole board panel that RFK’s accused assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan, deserves release under the state’s generally applicable policies for prisoners. Sirhan has been jailed since RFK’s shooting at the Ambassador Hotel shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968 following California's presidential primary the previous day.

Separately, Biden has announced that his administration will disclose by Dec. 15 an unspecified number of the estimated 16,000 classified records pertaining to the JFK assassination that have been withheld from the public for supposed national security reasons despite the mandate that they be released under the congressional mandate of 1992 JFK Records Collection Act that President George H.W. Bush signed into law in late 1992 under intense public pressure.

The new report assembles considerable evidence that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a “patsy,” as he claimed to be before Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald on live national television at the Dallas police headquarters two days after JFK’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

Who Did What? Why?

As visitors to this site know, our project has for years published separate, updated “Readers Guides” to the JFK and RFK assassinations that compile extensive lists of the major books, films, archives and research conference focused on each death, with inclusion of materials favorable to conventional and official accounts, as well as alternative analysis.

By contrast, these two new reports by the T&R Committee pull the evidence together from disparate, credible sources in order to make coherent narratives of how and why JFK and RFK were killed. In doing so, the reports shred the official accounts in their descriptions of Oswald and Sirhan as Kennedy-hating sole gunmen.

In the case of Lee Oswald, considerable evidence exists that the former Marine (shown at left) was working in covert fashion with U.S. military and intelligence personnel before the assassination, and could not have fired all of the shots recorded during the six relevant seconds shown on businessman Abraham Zapruder’s film. Oswald may not have fired any shots at all, according to the report,

Regarding Sirhan, the evidence shows that RFK was killed from the rear whereas Sirhan was in front of the senator at all times, according to witnesses. Furthermore, Sirhan – who admittedly fired some shots towards the senator – was using a gun with a capacity of just eight bullets.

Evidence exists that 12 to 14 bullets were fired at the death scene in the hotel’s pantry as RFK was exiting a speaking stage after just winning California’s 1968 Democratic presidential primary.

RFK is shown immediately at center below addressing a crowd in the hotel's ballroom with a victory speech before he departed the room from the rear via a crowded kitchen pantry.

Sirhan’s guilt or innocence regarding firing the fatal shot at RFK is not directly relevant to his current parole proceeding. Sirhan’s defense counsel at his 1969 murder trial never argued for innocence on the basis of ballistics or other evidence. The parole board has never permitted introduction of such evidence in Sirhan’s parole hearings that began when he first became eligible for parole in the early 1980s.

But public perception is always a factor when elected officials must make decisions. And in the case of Sirhan, reader comments to relevant news articles this fall show overwhelming opposition to his release, regardless of the law. Many readers base their view on their belief that Sirhan killed RFK, with many insisting that they saw him do it -- when, in fact, no video of the shooting has ever been known to exist and all video and still photos were taken after shooting stopped when Sirhan, right, was being restrained by RFK's aides.

This editor has served as a consulting attorney for the defense in recent years, working other attorneys. Most notable have been Dr. William F. Pepper of New York, who assumed the main role of defense attorney in 2007, and Angela Berry of California, a specialist in that state’s parole procedures and lead defense counsel for that aspect of the defense.

Pepper, below, a former community activist in New York who became friendly with RFK in supporting his 1964 Senate campaign in New York, became convinced that Sirhan was innocent of killing the senator. As part of this process, Pepper arranged for Dr. Daniel Brown, M.D., a top professor at Harvard Medical School specializing in training medical personnel in hypnosis, to spend more than 150 hours with Sirhan to evaluate and report on his mental state.

The current parole proceeding has so far been decided on the basis of evidence of Sirhan's good conduct in prison, his youth at the time of the offense, his current age, 77, and most importantly an absence of evidence that he would be a threat to the California community if he is released. Sirhan’s brother, Munir Sirhan, has volunteered to house him in the family’s longtime home in Pasadena. As another option, the government of Jordan has offered to accept Sirhan Sirhan if he is deported. Reared in a Christian family, the two Sirhan brothers came to the United States at an early age from Palestine with their now-deceased parents.

Ira Arlook, a Washington, DC-based specialist in public relations, has volunteered pro bono to assist in distributing the two new reports, including via a major press release scheduled for Monday, Nov. 29 regarding the RFK report, headlined, “Sirhan Innocent New Report Confirms; Second Gunman Identified.”

The release states further:

• Multiple witnesses confirmed hearing at least 12 shots but their statements were ignored by police. The police also ignored three eyewitnesses who stated they saw a security guard, who was standing right behind Kennedy, pull his gun and one saw him fire it.

• The guard's gun was never checked by the police or FBI and subsequent revelations show him lying about owning a gun that matched Sirhan’s .22 caliber pistol at the time of the murder.

The Truth & Reconciliation Committee (TRC) that created the reports is named for a similarly named group in South Africa that sought decades ago to establish facts regarding racial abuses under that nation’s apartheid regime but without using the information for new prosecutions.

The committee (www.americantruthnow.org) was formed in 2019 by members of the Kennedy and King families, Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, David Crosby, Reverend James Lawson Jr., Oliver Stone, Adam Walinsky, James Galbraith, David Talbot, and other public figures.

The TRC is dedicated to helping America confront the truth of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy, all of which changed the course of American and world history and adversely affect us to this day. The subsequent cover-ups and failures to disclose critical case files have added to the public’s distrust of both the government and the media, a situation that has helped create the dysfunction in our current political environment.

Written by respected journalists and researchers, the reports rely on documented evidence to refute the official government story of these assassinations. As with other Truth and Reconciliation movements, our goal is not to punish the perpetrators but to set the historical record straight and thereby help bring about a new era of understanding for current and future generations.

The U.S.-based committee’s founding signers include two of RFK’s children, former RFK speechwriter Adam Walinksy and RFK friend and associate, Schrade, shown at right in a photo by Interesting Stuff Entertainment.

At the time of the shooting, Schrade was a United Auto Workers executive who was shot in the head by Sirhan in the hotel pantry in 1969. Schrade for more than 50 years has sought a new investigation on the grounds that he does not believe Sirhan shot RFK. Other signatories include more than 60 other well-respected public figures versed in law, medicine and other civic affairs.

Those available through the committee for media interviews about the case include Schrade, plus:

• Denise Bohdan, an attorney and consultant to Sirhan’s legal team in the parole hearings. Her father, Fernando Faura, was a newspaper journalist who reported on the shooting and who informed the Los Angeles Police Department at the time about a likely accomplice, whom police ignored. In 2016, Faura  published The Polka Dot File on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing, a book about the extensive evidence that he uncovered just after the shooting that was ignored.

• Dan Storper, Co-Chair of the Truth & Reconciliation Committee- and a prominent New Orleans-based business executive and author of a forthcoming book about the 1960s.

What Can You Do?

Those creating these materials encourage you to contact your Senators, members of Congress, and President Biden to demand the release of all documents and testimony from the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy.

Please visit the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s website (www.americantruthnow.org) and sign our petition to reopen these cases and create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The Justice Integrity Project’s coverage of these cases and their continuing impact on American democracy will resume with excepts from the committee’s reports, beginning with those from the TRC report on JFK’s death.

Contact the author This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Related Resources

Change.org. Petition Seeking Sirhan's Parole.

The Truth & Reconciliation Committee (TRC). The RFK primer is presented by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee whose founding signers include members of the Kennedy and King families, RFK associates Paul Schrade and Adam Walinsky, forensics expert Dr. Cyril Wecht, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, civil rights leader Reverend James Lawson, Jr., activist actors and directors, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, Alec Baldwin, Oliver Stone and many others. (www.americantruthnow.org).

We call for major public inquests into the four major assassinations of the 1960s that together had a disastrous impact on the course of American history: the murders of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

These public tribunals, shining a light on this dark chapter of our history, will be modeled on the Truth and Reconciliation process in post-apartheid South Africa. The inquests -- which will hear testimony from living witnesses, legal experts, investigative journalists, historians and family members of the victims -- are intended to show the need for Congress or the Justice Department to reopen investigations into all four assassinations.

Operation RFK Truth. This project led by California attorney and filmmaker Denise Bohdan is to build website and social media platforms for a JusticeForRFK campaign. The goals are to a) advocate for Parole for Sirhan and b) bring awareness to the case to build public sentiment for a new investigation. Operation RFK Truth staff are working with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Bohdan's film team from CutOutEntertainment and Sirhan’s legal team for these goals.

Justice Integrity Project, Readers Guide To the RFK Assassination: Books, Videos, Archives, Edited by Andrew Kreig, first published on June 1, 2016. This guide presents key books, videos, documents, websites and other archives most relevant to 1968 Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy's murder, with the shooting shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968 and pronouncement of death on June 6.

The materials focus heavily on remaining questions about responsibility and motive for Kennedy's shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after his victory in the California Democratic primary appeared to pave the way for his presidential nomination. Shown below is his victory speech shortly before he was gunned down while leaving via a kitchen pantry to avoid crowds.

Included also in this guide compiled by our Justice Integrity Project is research that explores the assassination's current implications for the U.S. justice system and other governance.

Related News Coverage

Dec. 22

Future of Freedom Foundation, Opinion: Max Boot’s Rant Against Oliver Stone, Jacob G. Hornberger, right, Dec. 22, 2021. Max Boot, a conservative who has long favored regime-change operations on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, is going after Hollywood producer and director Oliver Stone. His beef with Stone? He’s upset because Stone has long maintained that the U.S. national-security establishment employed one of its patented regime-change operations here at home, against President John F. Kennedy.

The title of Boot’s piece, which was published in the Washington Post, is “Oliver Stone Just Can’t Stop Spreading Lies About JFK’s Assassination.” In his article, he attacks Stone not only for his 1991 movie JFK but also for Stone’s latest update to the movie, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.

Interestingly, Boot makes a reference to Stone’s accusation “that Kennedy’s autopsy reports were falsified.”

Actually, the more accurate way to put it is that the U.S. national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy. That fraud was reflected in both the autopsy photographs as well as the final autopsy report.

But like many other proponents of the official lone-nut theory of the assassination, Boot doesn’t address any of the main features of the autopsy fraud in his rant against Stone.

Let’s take two examples. (Others are detailed in my two books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.)

For 30 years, the national-security establishment had falsely claimed that there was only one brain examination in the Kennedy autopsy.

It was a lie. And when people are lying about something that important, you know that they are up to something that is rotten and no good.

In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s determined that there were two different brain examinations in the JFK autopsy, the second of which involved a brain that did not belong to Kennedy.

How did they determine this? The official photographer for the autopsy, John Stringer, was at the first brain exam. He stated that at that brain exam, the brain was “sectioned” or cut like a loaf of bread is cut. That’s standard procedure with an autopsy that involves a gunshot to the head. Stringer took photographs of the brain, which also is standard procedure.

One of the three military pathologists who conducted the autopsy, Col. Pierre Finck, stated that he attended the brain examination. But he was not at the brain exam that Stringer attended. Stringer verified that. That means that there was a second brain exam. At that second brain exam, a different photographer was present taking photographs. The brain at the second brain exam was not “sectioned.” A sectioned brain cannot be reconstituted into a non-sectioned brand. That’s how we know that the brain at the second brain exam had to be a brain of someone other than Kennedy.

It’s also worth mentioning two other things about the brain exam. First, when Stringer was asked to examine the official photographs of Kennedy’s brain, he specifically denied that those were the photographs he took. Second, the autopsy report reflects that Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams. An average brain weighs around 1350 grams. Everyone agrees that an extremely large portion of Kennedy’s brain was blown out by the shot that hit him in the head. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no possibility that Kennedy’s brain could have weighed 1500 grams after having a large portion of it blown away by the gunshot.

What does Boot, right, say about the two brain exams? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

There is something else worth noting. If it hadn’t been for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, we would never have learned about this fraud. That’s because the national-security establishment would have continued lying about there being only one brain exam. It was Stone’s movie that led directly to the JFK Records Act and the ARRB whose job it was to enforce it. That’s how we learned about the fraud relating to the two brain exams.

Dec. 2

Justice Integrity Project, Expert Report Part 2: JFK's Assassination and Why It Matters, Andrew Kreig, Dec. 2, 2021. Editor's Introduction: This excerpt concludes our presentation of "JFK: The Real Story," a major new research report by the Truth & Reconciliation Committee (TRC), which was founded in 2019 to investigate the 1960s assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (JFK), his brother, New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., (MLK) and the Black civil rights leader Malcolm X.

The TRC (www.americantruthnow.org) was formed by members of the Kennedy and King families, Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, David Crosby, Reverend James Lawson Jr., Oliver Stone, Adam Walinsky, James Galbraith, David Talbot, and other public figures. It states:

The Justice Integrity Project, which has been active as a co-founding board member in supporting the committee's work, republished the first part of the report here (JFK's Assassination Part 1) to advance public understanding of evidence that has been ignored or under-reported by the mainstream media.

Today's second and final part (with photo selection and captions by our project, not the TRC) answers the key questions about the tragic event in Dallas in 1963: "Who Killed JFK? Why Does It Matter Now?"

Nov. 29

Justice Integrity Project, Expert Report: JFK's Assassination and Why It Matters (Part 1), Andrew Kreig, Nov. 29, 2021. Editor's Introduction: This is an

excerpt that begins "JFK: The Real Story," a major new research report by the Truth & Reconciliation Committee, which was founded in 2019 to investigate the 1960s assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (JFK), Black civil rights leader Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., (MLK) and the president's brother, New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Nov. 25

Justice Integrity Project, JFK Murder Documents, Deadlines, Disclosures, Disputes, Andrew Kreig, Nov. 7, 2021, updated Nov. 25. The Biden Administration’s recent delay in releasing the final trove of classified documents pertaining to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy tees up three annual research conferences this month during the anniversary of JFK’s slaying in downtown Dallas.

The conferences and postponed document releases build on millions of pages of previously declassified documents and many hundreds of books through the decades fanning widespread public doubts about official accounts. Those official accounts, most notably the 1964 Warren Commission report, assigned guilt for the president’s death solely to ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald. Flaws in the report largely ignored by government, academic and mainstream media foster lingering fears that watchdog institutions fail to probe and prevent civic tragedies and cover-ups, including in current times.

Today’s column surveys this fall’s major developments. These include the records release delay, the three conferences and Oliver Stone's sequel, JFK Revisited, to his blockbuster film JFK three decades ago. The new documentary launched in the United States on Showtime on Nov. 22, the anniversary of JFK's death.

This editor has published a book in the field this year, worked closely with leaders in records release advocacy and also spoke at two of the three November conferences.

One was organized by Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), shown via Zoom with details, on the weekend days of Nov. 20 and 21, with a free all-day session on Friday, Nov. 19 for students. The other was the JFK Assassination Conference, which was seen both via Zoom and in person at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Dallas, beginning Thursday Nov. 18.

A third conference, organized since 1996 by the JFK Lancer event and publishing company, was its "November in Dallas" annual event, this year via remote viewing from Nov. 19 through 21, with heavily discounted admission for students.

Our project always seeks to promote all three conferences with the view that there is much to discuss, with many valuable perspectives deserving an audience.

An appendix below contains more details on these events, as well as excerpts from a number of news stories and commentaries this fall regarding the records release process and its implications, plus analysis of several recent assassination witness revelations.

This column is also the 57th segment of the Justice Integrity Project's JFK Assassination Readers Guide, which lists major books, films, archives and interpretative articles, with an index and links in the appendix.

Shown also below is a report on the new issue of Garrison, a 398-page webzine published this month. This edition's focus is on original commentaries about the 1960s assassinations of John Kennedy (JFK), his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) and Malcolm X.

Readers Guide To JFK Assassination: Books, Videos, Archives, Andrew Kreig, April 3, 2016. To help researchers of President Kennedy's 1963 assassination and its current implications, the Justice Integrity Project began publishing a Reader's Guide in 2013 to coincide with the shooting's 50th anniversary.

Readers Guide To MLK Assassination: Books, Videos, Archives, Andrew Kreig, May 26, 2016. This "Readers Guide" identifies the major books, videos, documents, websites and other archives most relevant to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s murder on April 4, 1968.