An Oliver Stone moment.

Last night I'm watching a program on the Discovery Channel called "Conspiracy Files." I've seen other episodes of this program and it treats neither the fringe-Art-Bell-types nor the the-government-wouldn't-do-such-a-thing-types as above question. Neither side is presented as gospel.

This episode dealt with CIA mind-control programs, built around a skeleton of whether or not Sirhan Sirhan had been brainwashed and reprogrammed to kill RFK.

It looked at some of the proven CIA attempts at mind-control in the past, also. One of which was giving LSD to people without their knowledge or consent. There have been at least three such projects: Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, and Project MKULTRA (or MK-ULTRA.) At least one case led to the death (either by suicide or by being thrown out a window) of an unwitting CIA agent who apparently thought he was having a nervous breakdown.

That's all well and good, but sometimes more interesting things can be found in the background of what they're showing you onscreen. In the last ten minutes of the show, maybe even the last five, several documents concerning the government's coverup of the matter are shown briefly onscreen. Some are splayed across a surface, where you can see part of the pages beneath the top one.

On one of these "underneath" pages, I caught two names: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

I, of course, was eager to get online this morning and do a little research. An old Buzzflash entry has lots of good info on the matter.

As juicy as the Cheney-and-Rummy-covering-up-a-CIA-assassination angle is, I find myself more interested in how involved they were (are?) in the actual mind-control projects themselves, and there seems to be precious little information on that out there.

The show's verdict on Sirhan Sirhan? From what I could gather, their position is "Probably not, but maybe." They didn't seem particularly interested in finding out WHEN Sirhan underwent the supposed reprogramming, though. They spent a lot of time on exploring what they seem to think was the phrase that triggered him to act -- "Lots of cream; lots of sugar." My suggestion would be to one day slip the phrase casually, almost unnoticably, into a conversation and see what happens.

The episode airs again June 3rd and June 22nd.

Update: Sent a link to this post to the guys at The Smoking Gun. Received the following email from Bill Bastone there:

thanks for the link, we'll give it a read.

regards,

bill bastone
editor
tsg