Story by Shawn Hubler — March 2, 2023

SACRAMENTO — A California panel on Wednesday denied parole for Sirhan B. Sirhan, the man convicted in the 1968 assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in its first review of the case since Gov. Gavin Newsom decided last year that Mr. Sirhan, 78, should not be released.

Sirhan Sirhan at a parole hearing in San Diego in 2021.© California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, via Associated Press

The parole board’s latest decision, which followed a hearing via videoconference from the state prison in San Diego, where Mr. Sirhan has been held, was the second time in three years that Mr. Sirhan’s release had been considered. He has spent more than a half-century behind bars for shooting Mr. Kennedy, then a candidate for president, inside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at the end of a campaign appearance in 1968. At the time, Mr. Sirhan was 24.

His lawyers have argued that he is not a danger to the public and should be released. In 2021, a panel of the parole board agreed. But after an extraordinary chain of events, the governor overruled the panel last year, charging that Mr. Sirhan had not yet been rehabilitated.

On Wednesday, after Mr. Sirhan’s 17th parole hearing, the new recommendation was made by a commissioner and a deputy commissioner who were not part of the review panel in 2021. Governor Newsom had no comment.

The assassination of Mr. Kennedy stunned the nation, occurring as Americans were grappling with deep generational and cultural divisions, the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights. Mr. Kennedy — the brother of a beloved president who, only a few years before, had also been assassinated — had just won the Democratic presidential primary election in California.

Mr. Sirhan, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian who had emigrated to the United States from Jordan, shot Mr. Kennedy as he walked through the hotel’s pantry. He confessed almost immediately. Initially, he was convicted of first-degree murder and assault with intent to murder and was sentenced to death, but that sentence was later commuted to life with the possibility of parole.

In a television interview from prison in 1989, Mr. Sirhan said that he had killed Mr. Kennedy because he felt betrayed by the senator’s proposal during the campaign to send military planes to support Israel. Later, however, he said he did not remember the shooting.

By 2021, California law required the parole board, when making a determination on releasing an inmate, to consider the inmate’s advanced age and his relative youth at the time a crime was committed. After 15 prior denials, a panel of commissioners granted him parole that year.

They noted then that Mr. Sirhan had improved himself by taking classes in prison. Two of Mr. Kennedy’s sons had also urged leniency.

But most of the family was adamant that Mr. Sirhan remain behind bars and pleaded with Mr. Newsom to exercise his power under California law to reject the panel’s recommendation. In January 2022, after more than four months of review, the Democratic governor — who has long spoken of Mr. Kennedy as a role model — granted that plea.

“After decades in prison, he has failed to address the deficiencies that led him to assassinate Senator Kennedy,” the governor wrote last year. “Mr. Sirhan lacks the insight that would prevent him from making the same types of dangerous decisions he made in the past.”

Mr. Sirhan’s lawyer, Angela Berry, has since asked a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to reverse Mr. Newsom’s 2022 parole denial. With that petition pending, she said on Wednesday that she believed the panel’s latest decision had been influenced by the governor’s rejection last year.

“I don’t know how you come to an opposite conclusion,” Ms. Berry said, noting that since 2021, Mr. Sirhan had undergone even more counseling and had added to his long record of good behavior.

“He’ll be 79 this month,” she said. “He’s trying to do the right thing. He wants to help his younger brother, who is almost blind. They want to live together for their remaining years.”

But she said that the Kennedy family and its lawyers had argued strenuously at Wednesday’s hearing that Mr. Sirhan still posed a risk to society and that the panel had “a different dynamic.”

“With the governor’s power to reverse the board,” she said, “I think it makes it difficult for any politically sensitive person to be released.”

Read More at THE NEW YORK TIMES

By Jonathan Allen and Brendan O’Brien

FILE PHOTO: Attallah Shabazz (R) and Malaak Shabazz, two of the six daughters of the late Malcolm X sit togethe..© Thomson Reuters

(Reuters) – A daughter of Malcolm X, the civil rights activist assassinated 58 years ago to the day on Tuesday, has filed notices that she intends to sue the FBI, the CIA, New York City police and others for his death.

Ilyasah Shabazz accused various federal and New York government agencies of fraudulently concealing evidence that they “conspired to and executed their plan to assassinate Malcolm X.”

“For years, our family has fought for the truth to come to light concerning his murder,” Shabazz said at a news conference at the site of her father’s assassination, now a memorial to Malcolm X.

The New York Police Department said it would not comment on pending litigation. The FBI and the CIA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Malcolm X rose to prominence as the national spokesman of the Nation of Islam, an African-American Muslim group that espoused Black separatism.

He spent over a decade with the group before becoming disillusioned, publicly breaking with it in 1964 and moderating some of his earlier views on racial separation, angering some Nation of Islam members and drawing death threats.

He was 39 years old when three men with guns shot him onstage as prepared to speak at New York’s Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965. Shabazz, who was then 2 years old, was present with her mother and sisters. Soon after, some associates of Malcolm X said they believed various government agencies were aware of the assassination plan and allowed to it happen.

Talmadge Hayer, then a member of the Nation of Islam, confessed in court to being one of the assassins.

In 2021, a New York state judge threw out the convictions of two other men who wrongly spent decades in prison for the murder of Malcolm X, saying there had been a miscarriage of justice. Hayer had long said the two men were innocent and that his accomplices were other Nation of Islam members.

The two men were exonerated at the request of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which said an investigation had found that prosecutors and law enforcement agencies withheld evidence that, had it been turned over, would likely have led to the pair’s acquittal.

In Shabazz’s notices of claims, which New York law requires be served on certain government agencies before a lawsuit can be filed, Shabazz said she seeks $100 million in damages.

The notices were served with the agencies she intends to sue on Tuesday based on new information that only recently came to light, according to Ben Crump, her attorney, who said he intended to take depositions of government officials.

“It’s not just about the trigger men, it’s about those who conspired with the trigger men to do this dastardly deed,” Crump said at the news conference.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Courtesy of JFK Lancer and The Mary Ferrell Foundation

George Michael Evica

Autumn Too Long: A Remembrance

by Charles Robert Drago

Objectivity, I am pleased to admit, is simply unimaginable when I contemplate the life and legacy of George Michael Evica.

At his insistence, George Michael became my indispensable friend, mentor, spiritual guide, and, all too soon, my spirit guide.  From the day we met in the ’90s at the First Research Conference of “The Third Decade”, beloved Professor Jerry Rose’s JFK assassination scholarly journal published at the State University of New York, Fredonia, he and his beautiful, brilliant wife Alycia welcomed me into the heart of their family.  I returned the favor.  For the rest of their earthly lives, we were inseparable.  And so we remain today.

I cannot begin to thank my friend and colleague Alan Dale for editing and bringing to electronic print this far from complete yet marvelously representative collection of George Michael’s research papers.  Allow me to quote briefly from them here.

George Michael is (I write and speak of him in the present tense; he is with us not just in spirit, but as spirit) a polymath of the highest order.  Among his areas of expertise which he shared in the classroom as well as on the printed paged are Myth and Ritual in Literature, Genre Studies in Literature, Literary Criticism, Consciousness Development and the Symbolic Process, Linguistics, Film Studies, Creative Writing, Investigative Reporting, and Investigative History. He also pursued Advanced Studies in Linguistics and Anthropology at Columbia University (1957-1960) and Advanced Studies in Myth and Literature at Hartford Seminary Foundation (1971-73).  All of these disciplines inform his JFK-related endeavors, in the aggregate a furious storm of influences unmatched before or since.

It is all but forgotten that George Michael organized and hosted the first national conference on the JFK Assassination in October, 1975, at the University of Hartford.  Jim Garrison participated and made certain to celebrate him for his incomparable work.

My stupefaction and, to be blunt, outrage that, among a significant majority of serious (self-styled and otherwise) JFK assassination researchers, George Michael’s Kennedy-related literary oeuvre remains neglected, minimally understood, and in some instances unknown, cannot be overstated.  The abandonment of this accumulated institutional knowledge has resulted in inferior duplication of effort that contribute mightily to the delay and to date denial of justice for the murdered president and the countless millions who make up the collateral damage of the Dealey Plaza attack.

What then of justice? Have we any reason to expect the guilty to be punished, the disease to be eradicated? The novelist Jim Harrison:

“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth … We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle … the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not; immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt; note Jesus’ howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity.”

In “A Certain Arrogance,” George Michael’s final book length assassination study, he presents compelling arguments to support the conclusion that the conspiracy that took JFK’s life was supra-national in origin and execution.  He summarized his revelation thusly: it was facilitated, he declared, by “a treasonous cabal of hard-line American and Soviet intelligence agents whose masters were above Cold War differences.”

I closed my Introduction to “A Certain Arrogance” with the following meditation:

November is a cruel month, and one that figures all too prominently in the life and times of George Michael Evica.

It was on a brilliant, unnaturally warm November morning in 2007 that loved ones laid to rest my friend and mentor, my confidante and comrade-in-arms, my spiritual guide and now my spirit guide.

As I carried the incongruously small urn that contained his physical remains, my thoughts drifted to another November day, when George Michael and I had found ourselves in Dealey Plaza at dusk, far from the madding crowd.  Light was filtered thinly through brittle leaves and sorrow.  And I asked if he too sensed the presence of unquiet spirits.

As usual, George Michael was years ahead of me.  He said that he had experienced the same feelings on many occasions in that place.  He spoke at length, his voice subdued yet redolent with conviction, about his certainty that the fight against the forces that struck John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the same forces that today prowl the killing fields of the Middle East and Africa and Asia and the Americas, endures into the next world.

The calm of Saint John’s churchyard where he rests represents but a temporary respite.

I am drawn to the words of novelist James Lee Burke, who showed us that he understands this immutable truth when he wrote the following ruminative passage for his fictional Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux:

“Down the canyon, smoke from meat fires drifted through the cedar and mesquite trees, and if I squinted my eyes in the sun’s setting, I could almost pretend that Spanish soldiers in silver chest armor and bladed helmets or a long-dead race of hunters were encamped on those hillsides.  Or maybe even old compatriots in butternut brown wending their way in and out of history … gallant, Arthurian, their canister-ripped colors unfurled in the roiling smoke, the fatal light in their faces a reminder that the contest is never quite over, the field never quite ours.”

  *   *   *   *   *   *

The Assassination Chronicles

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Publication Spotlight: George Michael Evica’s A Certain Arrogance: The Sacrificing of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Wartime Manipulation of Religious Groups by U.S. Intelligence

Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961.

Courtesy of Susan Williams:

On 30 December 2022, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution A/77/L.31, which authorises the renewal of the UN’s ‘Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him.’ It further authorises the reappointment of the Eminent Person, Judge Mohamed Chande Othman, to lead the investigation.

The Resolution was initiated by Sweden and co-sponsored by 141 Member States (out of 193). The US and the UK did not co-sponsor the resolution.

The Resolution follows Judge Othman’s latest report (A/76/892), which is readily available on the UNA Westminster webpages on developments relating to the Hammarskjöld plane crash (along with various other significant documents and updates).

In this latest report, Judge Othman writes:

‘…I respectfully submit that the burden of proof to conduct a full review of records and archives resulting in full disclosure has not been discharged at the present time. Indeed, information received from other sources under the present mandate underscores that it is almost certain that these Member States [that is to say, the USA, the UK, and South Africa] created, held or were otherwise aware of specific and important information regarding the cause of the tragic event. That information is yet to be disclosed.’  

In case of interest, the passing of the Resolution by the GA can be watched on UNTV. It takes about three minutes from 1.04.40: https://media.un.org/en/asset/k14/k14tlsg06p

RELATED:

Do Spy Agencies Hold Answer to Dag Hammarskjold’s Death? U.N. Wants to Know

Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him