Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/27/21 Ashraf Nubani on Why Sirhan Sirhan, the Man Convicted for Killing Robert Kennedy, Ought to Be Released

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Scott interviews attorney and writer Ashraf Nubani about his recent piece making a case for releasing Robert Kennedy’s convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan. Nubani explains that Sirhan meets all the stated requirements of the parole board and that the pressure to keep him in prison is mainly political.  Note: This interview was recorded hours before the news broke that the California Parole Board recommended Sirhan’s release. Governor Newsom’s office will now review the case and can still block parole.  Discussed on the show: “It’s time for Sirhan Sirhan to go free” (The Electronic Intifada) “Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of Robert F. Kennedy assassination, seeks parole with no opposition from prosecutors” (Washington Post) Ashraf W. Nubani is an attorney and a Palestinian American and Muslim community leader in the Washington, DC, metro area. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things comes The Roses starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Samburg, Kate McKinnon, and Alison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. Get tickets now. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism.

And I've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2000. Almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at Scott Horton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, introducing Ashraf Nubani, a lawyer in Washington, and a writer at Electronic Intifada. And here's an interesting one. it's time for Sir Han Sir Han to go free

Welcome to the show How are you doing? Good, I'm doing well, thanks Scott. Good to have you back on the show here. Really interesting piece on the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, June 5th, 1968,

and he just won the California primary for the Democratic nomination to run for president and had just given a speech there at the Ambassador Hotel and turned around and went through the kitchen area there and was shot to death and then a punk rock band was named after him and his older brother who had been shot a few years before.

But then, so this guy went to prison and to this day he says he doesn't remember any of it. He doesn't dispute his guilt, but he just says, like, geez, I guess if you guys say so, because he doesn't know that he did it. Is that correct? Well, basically, yes, he has admitted, from the beginning, from the trial phase onward, he's accepted responsibility. But he's also consistently said that he doesn't remember the actual murder itself, pulling out his gun or shooting anyone, much less Robert Kennedy. And that's been his position for decades.

now so i'm a bit of a kook mostly a former one but anyway i've read about this story for a very long time and i've read a lot of conspiracy theory stuff about it the lady in the polka dot dress um and i've read a lot of debunkings of that such as these holes in the wall were already there and they weren't gunshot holes you know they were already from other things that had gone on in that pantry right and who knows so what do you think about all that? Well, so the way I became interested in this story particularly is it never sat well with me that the murderer of RFK was a Palestinian. And so I'm writing a book on Islam in America. And one of the things I was looking into is to compare the penal systems and murder specifically in the death penalty and the role of the family, the victim's family in each

case. And in Islam, while there is the death penalty, if the family forgives, then the person is not put to death. And not only is he not put to death, because in Islamic jurisprudence, there's other forms of punishment. Some of them people consider arcane or archaic. Prison is not the only punishment. So a person doesn't necessarily spend the rest of their lives in prison. And so I was looking into that forgiveness. And then I came across Sir Han's case, across the fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., RFK's son, had visited him in prison in December of 2017. And he came out saying, you know, I don't believe that he was the killer of my father. And he made amends with him. he's been in support of a reinvestigation and so have other of his children, but there's a

split amongst the family. So this is what made me interested in the case. And so I read both sides, both the conspiracy theories, you know, from the very legitimate to the way out, legitimate meaning that possible scenarios based on the evidence that was still available. And those who, like Dan Moldeia and others, who say that he acted alone and there was no conspiracy. What is clear, and I wrote this in the article, is that, you know, being a Palestinian, I know that he wouldn't get a fair trial from the get-go in the sense that there would be bias. And that's why I said that the investigation of the LAPD was more of omission than commission. In other words, you know, they had a gunman.

they had a gun. Why would they want to even look further? And it became convenient that he's Palestinian and that he said that this is this is in response to Kennedy's support for Israel. And that became the story and all of the work that was done on the case, you know, was geared towards just one gunman. And also the defense, the same thing. They were looking, We need to save your life, Sirhan, plead guilty. We're not going to contest any of these things. And looking back at the case, any attorney would say that this was mishandled, they should have questioned the evidence more thoroughly.

And all of these things have responses. For example, the bullet holes, or holes were seen. Whether they were bullet holes or not, well, we don't know now because the evidence was destroyed while the case was still an appeal. So again, there's so many issues that were raised, and I wanted to get beyond that, and the gist of the article was, look, it should be re-investigated, to be fair. The Kennedys want that many people would like to see that happen, but if that doesn't happen, what do you do with the person who's been in jail for 53 years? It's a political assassination, yes, but things have changed. A lot of the people that are involved are no longer around.

older Americans are less forgiving, especially those who, people who loved Robert F. Kennedy and what he represented and the hope that he represented during those tumultuous times in the 60s, whereas younger people would look at it and they would want to look at the circumstances and have other considerations. So we get to the point where he's coming up for his 16th parole hearing today. So in California, times. it started at 8 o'clock or thereabouts and may take a few hours. Yeah, or several hours. And we'll see the results of this 16th attempt by Sir Han and his attorneys to seek release.

So another point, and it's in the article, but people should know that he was initially sentenced to death, but because of change of the law in California in 1972, and then it was abolished in 1976. He was resentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. And that's why he's been eligible for parole since the 80s, and it's been denied every time. Right. And now, but so according to the Washington Post, the prosecutor agrees with you now. Well, the prosecutor, so Gaskin is the newly elected prosecutor. He's been there for over a year. I don't know how long, But there's a push to also get him out like Newsom, or recall. He's a progressive prosecutor, and his position is it wasn't initially on Sir Han's case alone.

His position was that our prosecutors are not going to attend these parole hearings because historically they viewed it as being biased against the inmate because they would always come in and say, we represent the victims and this person should stay incarcerated and not be released. So he said, we're going to leave that to the parole board to decide we don't need to be there. And when the story broke from the Washington Post and what I wrote in others, it got closer to the time, they started asking him. And he said, look, we're taking that, I mean, we're taking the position that we're not going to be there. And for some, they look at it as a green light for the parole board to release him if they so choose, which in essence, it can be viewed that way, obviously, if the price. prosecutor's office had gone there and argued against it, then we would know that that's their position. But they chose to stay silent on it. And I think that that gives him the only, that gives him a much better chance than he's ever had. But I'm not hopeful. I'm very pessimistic that the board

would allow him to be released because, again, it's a political assassination and it's still a very sensitive topic for America. I really believe that we need to look at it in a fresh manner and take everything into consideration before a decision is made of whether he should be released. But according to California law, he should be released. There's no doubt that he should be released. And that's for different reasons. One is they look at, for example, violence and all of his tests that he's taken in prison regarding his mental capacity and proclivity to violence or whether he would be a danger, he's always tested at the lowest possible range, because there's no one that can have a zero risk to violence, no matter who they are. And so he wouldn't,

you know, he wouldn't present a risk. Also, he would be sent to Jordan. He was a, he's a, he's a Palestinian who was at the time in the 50s granted in the early 50, or no, yeah, in the early 50s, 52 was granted Jordanian citizenship. So he was a permanent resident at the time in 1968, and because of this felony, he wouldn't be able to stay in the United States. He would be deported. So he wouldn't present a risk, certainly to Americans, but again, he wouldn't present a risk to anyone. And he's been there for 50, over 53 years now. He's had a, uh, a, uh, a good, an excellent prison record, meaning there, you know, there hasn't been trouble in prison. He follows the rules and so forth.

And he's taken responsibility, but what complicates everything is that he doesn't remember the actual shooting. And so the board, in doing research for the story, I saw some of the board's reasoning. And they just, you know, they laid this big thing on him. And it is, it's huge. but they said, you killed Kennedy, you don't understand what this means. The way that politicians now deal with crowds has changed because of this. The whole nation was traumatized, and you're not taking, you can't, you know, you're not taking responsibility for that.

Well, how can he? I mean, almost no human being under such circumstances can, you know, take on that type of, you know, I mean, guilt and trauma. And so it makes it difficult. But if it was another person, you know, person, then certainly he would have been released a long, long time ago. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess they let Hinkley out. He's playing guitar on YouTube. I saw any of that.

Right. No, I did. I did. I saw that, the shooter of Reagan. So, yeah, there's, it's really, it's, you know, these cases are, again, they're a reflection of the issues that we have to deal with in, in society. And Paul Schrad, and Paul Schrad was one of the victims. He's now 96 years old. He attended Sir Han's previous hearing in 2016, and that was the first time. And he actually, you know, he said, he apologized to Sir Han and said, I should have been here earlier for you. He just, he's just asking, you know, he doesn't say that there's necessarily any other, I mean, a conspiracy theory, but I do believe that there was a second gunman based on what he remembers. and he's just asking that there be a reinvestigation.

And I think that there have been attempts by the prosecutor's office over the years to, I mean, they've let out information 20 years after the incident in 1988, I believe, there was a... Has he ever said that anyone put him up to it, or that he had a friend there with him or anything like that? So he remembered, no, he went at the, he remembers going there alone. he does remember being with a lady at the time. And, you know, he was 24 years old, and he said that he had taken alcohol, and he was looking for coffee, and all of a sudden he became agitated. And, you know, as if there was some cue.

He doesn't, yeah, he doesn't remember the important parts. And that's why people like Dan Moldeus say that, you know, he conveniently doesn't remember what would. make him guilty, what would go to motive, and therefore it's obvious. But he, in an interview with, I forget his name, in the UK, famous journalist, he just passed away probably just a few years ago. But he did a big interview at the time with Sir Han. This was probably in the 90s or late 80s or early 90s. And he said that, you know, I would never be in a conspiracy with anyone else. That's like an insult. You know, what I did, I did, you know, my anger towards Kennedy was

because of his support, you know, for Israel. And you just, you have to understand what it means for us Palestinians. So he gave, you know, a motive as to that, but he said that he didn't act with anyone at all. There are some people who believe that he was hypnotized and that was even some of the court papers that were submitted, but the judge rejected that they brought in a psychologist from Harvard, a hypnotist who put him under hypnosis, and he was convinced that he was highly suggestive to hypnosis, and that this was a theory.

Now, other people in their books, when you look at all of the work that has been done on the case, and some people, obviously for money, most people did it for money, even the attorneys wrote books, is that he worked at a at a horse track and there were connections to the mob at that horse track and, you know, because of the issues between the mob and the Kennedys, even with President Kennedy,

that there could have been some connection there and that he was, you know, somehow a fall guy. And that may very well be possible, but, you know, it's going to be difficult after all these years to attain that. I do believe that his release is probably the best thing for everyone in the sense that, obviously there are people who want him dead. The moment that Sir Han is dead, especially in prison, he was stabbed in prison a couple of years ago.

If he dies, that's it. There's no reinvestigation. There's nothing. It's over. And it'll always be that Sirhan was the murderer. If he stays and lives another, you know, he's 77, relatively good health, if he lives another 10, 15 years, there will be growing calls for an investigation, and that could open up another Pandora's box.

I think the best thing is to have him go to Jordan, live out his quiet life, you know, meet his maker. He's a Christian Palestinian, by the way, and one of the parole board members in one of the parole hearings had asked him, you know, about his Christian faith. He wanted to know, are you a Christian? As if that made some difference, it certainly didn't, you know, cause the board to release him, but he is a believing Christian. And so are the Kennedys. And I think, you know, many of them believe in forgiving him. They just don't want to, the parts of the family or, I mean, not parts, but other members of the family just don't want to reopen the case.

But I do believe that another way of closing this chapter is if he's released, we've shown mercy and it could be, you know, close a chapter in this incredibly sensitive case for America involving the Kennedys in the 60s. And it's always, you know, it's always been intriguing for people looking into into this, the material out there is just, you know, a sea of material. Yeah. Hey, y'all, check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. First of all, we've published No Quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our Institute's late and great co-founder. He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean. And No Quarter will leave his mark on you, no question. Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richmond.

We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine, and what social animals owe to each other. Both are instant classics. I'm proud to say that coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians. And social animals certainly ranks

with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics, and everything else. You'll absolutely love it. Then there's me. I've written two books. Fools Arrind, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul,

29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy. It's called The Great Ron Paul. You can find all of these at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. Well, look, I mean, I think it's worth bringing up, too, here. that, you know, in the context of our own time, that the minimal official story of this is that it's blowback and consequences for Kennedy's support for Israel. And I forgot the exact story now, but I believe there was a giant arm sale right around then that he had championed in the Senate that supposedly had motivated Sirhan Sirhan to do this. And it's important, right,

that yeah he's a Palestinian and an Arab but he's not a Muslim and he's certainly not a fundamentalist or a radical extremist Islamist and and so what explains it when you have terrorism by you know a Middle Easterner over this issue but they're not a Muslim you take that part out of the equation. What do you have? You have someone who has something in common with all the rest of the anti-Western terrorists, too? And that is that they're siding with the victims of our

government's policy. And, you know, I just saw a thing this morning, this is why I'm angry. I saw a thing this morning where Tulsi Gabbard says that ISIS and Al-Qaeda, she just made this up, too. Oh, Al-Qaeda's there also in Afghanistan. And the reason they did

the suicide attack that killed a dozen Marines at the airport is because we won't convert to their religion. And they can't stand it that we won't convert. She's one of the best anti-war ladies in the Democratic Party. How do you like that? Right. Yeah, no, that's been frustrating about Afghanistan. But so people should remember that ISIS wasn't around before we were there. People are just, you know, they're not thinking straight at all. And obviously the Taliban and ISIS are opposed to each other, and the Taliban want, you know, they want security in that part of Afghanistan or Afghanistan, totally. But going back to Sirhan, yes, so this blowback, you're absolutely right. And it would have been

sensitive, obviously, at the time, and certainly in the 70s, in the 80s, after, Israel occupied the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza, that, you know, any mention of that would have, it was just impossible. And that's, and I'll all allude to this in my article, that, you know, even the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has changed so much and went through so many phases that we just can't use that anymore. And, you know, California law, all law has mitigating circumstances. If you look at Sirhan's life as a refugee and as a Christian living in Palestine as a boy and what he went through and what he saw the upheaval of his homeland at the time. He was born in 1944, so he would have been, you know, he would have been four years old

in 1948, but, you know, all the upheaval afterwards, and that's why in 1952 Jordan gave citizenship to those Palestinians living in Jerusalem and the West Bank or areas of Jerusalem. And so he saw his older brother and his younger brother said that, you know, he saw people being killed. He remembers planes, you know, things like that in his childhood, which should have been taken into consideration. And the other thing is that, you know, remember, if he had, if he was like a Palestinian, you know, terrorist, the go, the LAPD at the time would have like come down very hard on him. It's interesting how this happened, Scott, is that his brother saw him on TV and said, that's my brother. They went to the local police station to say, hey, this is our brother.

So first they got kicked out of the station, and then when they realized that, you know, that this was their brother, things calmed down for the investigators. In other words, if they were just looking for, you know, if someone had assassinated someone right now, they would send out their special forces, and they would shoot up things before anything, and they would cover up what they want to cover up and do whatever they want. But actually, because this refugee family comes and says, oh, this is our brother, they treated them much better. But the point is that, yes, this blow, like, he was just treated as a Palestinian who was

who was angry at Kennedy because of his support for Israel. Later investigations showed that the plane sales action weren't at the same time as this, you know, as this occurrence, but I haven't had an ability to go further into that. But even, you know, so the 67 war was a year before, right? So, I mean, Kennedy's position on that war in its aftermath would be part of the whole scenario. Yes, he was developing. Yes. Yes, and Robert F. Kennedy had traveled to Jerusalem in the 40s, I think in 48 or 49. He had been there, and he developed, you know, an appreciation of respect for what Jews and later Israelis had done in terms of building a nation. But even at that time, everyone recognized that there was a refugee population was being created, that

Palestinians were being dispossessed from their land. But, you know, people respect power. And so he had developing views on that issue, certainly. But by 1968, and elections coming up, there was a, you know, the Zionist, what make-up, the Zionist lobby was pretty much in power. But the blowback is there, like the nuclear, you know, the nuclear power issue for making nuclear weapons that Israel took from the U.S. and all of that. I mean, those things were happening and they were being covered up at the time. So they could have said anything about Sir Han as well

at the time. Yeah. All right. Well, so I guess probably somewhere in Georgetown, and I don't mean one town north of here in central Texas. I mean the bad one outside of D.C. They're saying that, no, listen, because what'll happen is he'll go to Jordan and everybody's going to lift them up on their shoulders and call him a hero for striking down the imperialist pig dog and this kind of thing. And so we can't have that. And by the way, that will not happen. That will not happen. That will not happen. So Jordan, first of all, Jordan would try not to accept him unless the Americans gave the green light. And if they do, it would be that he would not, you know, he would be muzzle. He's there, nothing like that.

would happen. And I don't think that anyone would want to do that at this point, especially in Jordan. You know, civil society has changed, and that would not happen. You know, if he went to Libya's Qaddafi's Libya at the time, yeah, but not not Jordan in 2021. Definitely not. So that definitely is misguided. Yeah. All right. Well, so, geez, I guess we should hit refresh on the news. I mean, it sounds like the hearing started an hour before we started here. So let's see if there's anything in Google News before I let you go here, bud. Prosecutors will not oppose is the latest. That's all we got.

I don't know if there's a better Twitter feed to follow. It's more up to date than that. Yeah, I think it will take, but it's on point at this time. It's very timely. Oh, I mean, do they usually wait for, while before they announced their decision? No, they will, you know, usually they announce their decision at the hearing, but the hearing itself can take a few hours.

I see. Once they hear from everyone and go over the evidence and the attorney makes the case and if there are witnesses or, or, so it could, it could take a few hours, but they will make the decision at, at the time. It is highly unlikely that they will take it under advisement, but that's possible. But then that would indicate that they're seeking political. you know political direction from someone is there like specific legal precedent for okay everybody agrees that you are partially guilty and that you've taken responsibility for that but then also

we think that maybe there's less responsibility because somebody else did it i mean as you mentioned earlier briefly this man that's now a 96 paul shraid is that it um yes he says well you're not the guy that shot me. You are not the gunman. That was somebody else, the second gunman, you know, and that was from the victim himself. So he may be right or wrong about that, but that sure not nothing. But then I wonder

how that plays into the argument that, yeah, no, I'm guilty and I accept responsibility for it and everything. Then you have other people saying that geez, he's really not responsible. I wonder if that undermines his argument, or if that's really just a separate argument

that, and specifically, I wonder whether that's, some judge has ruled about how that's to be taken into account before or anything like that, you know? Yeah, so it's, real quickly, it is, it cuts both ways, obviously. And the vicarious liability means, so if he had gone into that hotel room with the intention to kill Kennedy, but his, it's not his bullet that actually killed him, but he had the intention, well, they would say you're just as guilty as if you had done it, because, because you intended. It just happened that you didn't kill him. But, you know, he is dead by someone else's bullet. And that would have never happened had you not been in the room with the intention to kill him. Because there are so many different theories. But one is that the, what's his name, Thane, Eugene, Caesar, was an off-duty guard who was behind Kennedy, who had a gun, who slipped and fell. But he said he never discharged his gun. So, you know, whether he could have possibly, so if he did it, let's say, accidentally, then Sir Han would still be liable because he put, you know, he made that situation where Eugene fell and he discharged his gun accidentally and he killed Kennedy if that were the scenario.

And that was what Kamala Harris's office actually argued in opposition to reopening the case in back in 2000. 2012, 2013, when she was the attorney general. That was their position that, you know, he's, whatever happened, he's also just as liable. But so it cuts both ways, but it's just, it's catch 22 then. If we were to take it in that way, then yeah, he would never be out because that would always be an argument that the parole board or anyone could make is that, you know, again, you were responsible for Kennedy's killing and this is not just any person. it traumatized the nation, you're not taking responsibility until you could remember and you know, are remorseful, but how remorseful would it take for people to say, you know, he's been remorseful enough? That's why I'm saying 53 years in jail is kind of, you know, I think it's a respectable way of saying, I did my time regardless of what the intention was and regardless of what happened. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, man, I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk about this. Very interesting subject and one that I haven't paid much attention to. So, good to catch up.

Thank you. Thanks, Scott. All right, you guys. That is Ashraf W. Nubani. He is an attorney in Washington, D.C., and he writes for the electronic intifada. Electronicintifada.net. the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk ninety point seven fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scot horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org