Friday 30 August 2013

Sirhan Sirhan - Was he Brainwashed?

Robert Kennedy was assassinated on tv in 1968 by gunman Sirhan Sirhan, whom was very quickly apprehended.  He was sentenced to life imprisonment.  What is strange about this case is that Sirhan has always maintained that he cannot remember anything about the assassination.  Conspiracy theorists believe Sirhan had been brainwashed into carrying out the murder, probably by the CIA.  This premise had been used as the plot to the 1962 film "The Manchurian Candidate" starring Frank Sinatra.  Many experts believe that hypnosis cannot be used to programme somebody to carry out a murder.

    In 2011, Sirhan was denied parole because he refuses to admit his guilt and address his actions.  Sirhan maintained he has no recollection of anything that happened.  His parole has been refused more than a dozen times because of this.  Was it possible to programme a person to murder?  Mentalist Derren Brown decided to try.  Over a three month period, he had a man he had hypnotised, carry out various actions when a certain trigger was shown to him.  The proposed victim was actor, writer & broadcaster Stephen Fry, who went along with the plan.  At a theatre, Stephen Fry was giving a talk to a capacity audience, where only a select few were in on the act.  Security people, firearms experts(the shooter had marksman lessons) and on a given point - the trigger was polka dots - he stood up and shot Fry three times.  The audience were shell shocked, not knowing what to do, then Derren Brown walked on stage which immediately relaxed the audience as they then realised some experiment had gone off.

   Derren told Fry it was ok to get up.  He did make it look realistic!  The shooter had absolutely no recollection of standing up and shooting Fry.  After a test run, he was given a polygraph which he passed with flying colours.  The experiment proved it could be done but it did take Brown three months to get him to the stage that he thought he could do it.  This gives credence to the claim that Sirhan may have been brainwashed.

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