The Turkish account of the murder of Khashoggi given by President Erdogan is true, in every detail. Audio and video evidence exists and has been widely shared with world intelligence agencies, including the US, UK, Russia and Germany, and others which have a relationship with Turkey or are seen as influential. That is why, despite their desperate desire to do so, no Western country has been able to maintain support for Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. I have not seen the video from inside the consulate, but have been shown stills which may be from a video. The most important thing to say is that they are not from a fixed position camera and appear at first sight consistent with the idea they are taken by a device brought in by the victim. I was only shown them briefly. I have not heard the audio recording.
There are many things to learn from the gruesome murder other than the justified outrage at the event itself. It opens a window on the truly horrible world of the extremely powerful and wealthy.
The first thing to say is that the current Saudi explanation, that this was an intended interrogation and abduction gone wrong, though untrue, does have one thing going for it. It is their regular practice. The Saudis have for years been abducting dissidents abroad and returning them to the Kingdom to be secretly killed. The BBC World Service often contains little pockets of decent journalism not reflected in its main news outlets, and here from August 2017 is a little noticed piece on the abduction and “disappearance” of three other senior Saudis between 2015-17. Interestingly, while the piece was updated this month, it was not to include the obvious link to the Khashoggi case.
The key point is that European authorities turned a completely blind eye to the abductions in that BBC report, even when performed on European soil and involving physical force. The Saudi regime was really doing very little different in the Khashoggi case. In fact, inside Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi was a less senior and important figure than those other three abducted then killed, about whom nobody kicked up any fuss, even though the truth was readily available. Mohammed Bin Salman appears to have made two important miscalculations: he misread Erdogan and he underestimated the difference which Khashoggi’s position as a Washington Post journalist made to political pressure on Western governments.
Khashoggi should not himself be whitewashed. He had a long term professional association with the Saudi security services which put him on the side of prolific torturers and killers for decades. That does not in any sense justify his killing. But it is right to be deeply sceptical of the democratic credentials of Saudis who were in with the regime and have become vocal for freedom and democracy only after being marginalised by Mohammed Bin Salman’s ruthless consolidation of power (which built on a pre-existing trend).
The same scepticism is true many times over when related to CIA Director Gina Haspel, who personally supervised torture in the CIA torture and extraordinary rendition programme. Haspel was sent urgently to Ankara by Donald Trump to attempt to deflect Erdogan from any direct accusation of Mohammed Bin Salman in his speech yesterday. MBS’ embrace of de facto alliance with Israel, in pursuit of his fanatic hatred of Shia Muslims, is the cornerstone of Trump’s Middle East policy.
Haspel’s brief was very simple. She took with her intercept intelligence that purportedly shows massive senior level corruption in the Istanbul Kanal project, and suggested that Erdogan may not find it a good idea if intelligence agencies started to make public all the information they hold.
Whether Erdogan held back in his speech yesterday as a result of Haspel’s intervention I do not know. Erdogan may be keeping cards up his sleeve for his own purpose, particularly relating to intercepts of phone and Skype calls from the killers direct to MBS’ office. I have an account of Haspel’s brief from a reliable source, but have not been updated on who she then met, or what the Turks said to her. It does seem very probable, from Trump’s shift in position this morning to indicate MBS may be involved, that Haspel was convinced the Turks have further strong evidence and may well use it.
Meantime, the British government maintains throughout that, whatever else happens, British factories will continue to supply bombs to Saudi Arabia to massacre children on school buses and untold numbers of other civilians. Many Tory politicians remain personally in Saudi pockets, with former Defence Minister Michael Fallon revealed today as being amongst them.
It is of course extraordinary that Saudi war crimes in Yemen, its military suppression of democracy in Bahrain, its frequent executions of dissidents, human rights defenders, and Shia religious figures, even its arrests of feminists, have had little impact in the West. But the horrible murder of Khashoggi has caught the public imagination and forced western politicians to at least pretend to want to do something about the Saudis whose wealth they crave. I expect any sanctions will be smoke and mirrors.
Mohammed Bin Salman is no fool, and he realises that to punish members of his personal security detail who were just following his orders, would put him in the position of Caligula and the Praetorian Guard, and not tend to his long term safety. Possibly people will be reassigned, or there will be brief imprisonments till nobody is looking. If I were a dissident or Shia in Saudi Arabia who bore any kind of physical resemblance to any of the party of murderers, I would get out very quick.
With every sympathy for his horrible murder, Khashoggi and his history as a functionary of the brutal Saudi regime should not be whitewashed. Mohammed Bin Salman is directly responsible for his murder, and if there is finally international understanding that he is a dangerous psychopath, that is a good thing. You will forgive me for saying that I explained this back in March whilst the entire mainstream media, awash with Saudi PR cash, was praising him as a great reformer. For the Americans to deploy Gina Haspel gives us a welcome reminder that they are in absolutely no position to moralise. Whatever comes of this will not be “justice”. The truth the leads can reveal is much wider than the narrow question of the murder incident, as I hope this article sketches out. That the fallout derails to some extent the murder machine in Yemen is profoundly to be hoped.
Jees, Craig, do you know how much money these ….s have? Rhet..
Inspiration, bro and I come back for courage
CJ
So Gina can pack her wet towels away ……. MBS is Mr. Bone Saw .
“Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” springs to mind.
As always, an excellent analysis. Thank you Craig.
Thanks from me too. Very interesting read.
Haha what a bunch of liberal hypocrites,
Canada sticks to $1bn arms deal with Saudis despite Khashoggi killing
https://on.rt.com/9h4l
“Pecunia non olet”.
But keeps its own oil in the ground in favor of ME oil, thus subsidizing those Oil monarchs. Trudeau’s twisted priorities to be seen green.
it should all be kept in the ground, and from what i’ve read trudeau has been as much of a hypocrite on being “green” as he has been on everything else.
Trudeau is an empty shell. The post-Obama liberal poster boy. The Guardian has a special place in its heart for that tool. He’s a good neoliberal of course and, yes, a massive hypocrite.
Look, the US slaughters alleged terrorists and innocent bystanders on a regular basis, hundreds of them every year. It just blows ’em up, buries them or incinerates them. So is Canada supposed to terminate trade relations with the US? With Israel? With all the other countries in the world whichexercise the sovereign right to murder enemies of the state?
I suppose if we modeled ourselves on North Korea we could do it. But if you and your country are not prepared to go that far, stop blathering about Canada terminating trade relations with the murderous bastards in Riyad. As Justin Trudeau’s Dad remarked: “Better dirty hands than empty bellies.”
Is a “liberal hypocrite” different than an “illiberal hypocrite” or a “conservative hypocrite”?
The turk selling the Allah provided carpet in the Istanbul bazaar already has a bid of $5b from the Qatari Emir with no limit, mo bone saw can try wriggling out with a haspel (abughraib) pyramid celebration by remnants of Istanbuls best CIA football team but to no avail. The carpet seller will hold on to the original video too after Qatars winning bid, mbs is become a eunuch with his body parts permanently in Erdogans pocket. It means one party has to die, and Erdogan the Ottoman will come out alive in his traditional superiority over the Saud Arab, now left helpless with no latter day Queen Victoria or Lawrence of Arabia intervention. The time has come to eliminate the root cause of Islamic fundamentalism but the chabad holding the trump white house may yet prevail, Kushner is not to be underestimated, he holds the power of the false moshioch rebbe schneerson.
“British factories will continue to supply bombs to Yemen to massacre children on school buses and untold numbers of other civilians”.
Surely “supply bombs to Saudi Arabia”?
Thanks amended.
Still, Britain would certainly be glad to sell bombs to Yemen if they wanted to bomb their own people.
Of course Mohamed bin Salman is a dangerous psychopath. That precisely why he gets along so well with the leaders of the West – they understand one another.
If in the national interest, all Governments deem any action, however atrocious, justifiable by raison d’état. Thus all national leaders are either psychopaths or normal people who have learned the psychopathic code of conduct and follow it.
Caligula springs to mind or Nero, absolute power in the hands of a psychopath?
But can we say footage of Khashoggi being murdered in the consulate is proof in every detail of Erdogan’s account?
How does the footage definitively rule out Bin Salman’s explanation that a rogue operation within the consulate murdered Khashoggi?
It doesn’t necessarily, but there is apparantly signal intelligence of communications to Riyadh and MBS’ right hand man. And of course the digits in the bag.
Well, if it also included the phone call where Khashoggi refused the order from MbS to return to Saudi Arabia then, yeah, the “rogue explanation” is pretty much shot to pieces.
You don’t Check In With The Boss at the same time that you are Going Rogue On The Boss.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/turkey/how-the-top-mbs-aide-behind-khashoggi-s-murder-ran-the-killing-via-skype-1.6585080
“‘Bring Me the Head of the Dog’: How the Top MBS Aide Behind Khashoggi’s Murder Ran the Killing via Skype ”
“Qahtani himself once said he would never do anything without his boss’ approval.
“Do you think I make decisions without guidance? I am an employee and a faithful executor of the orders of my lord the king and my lord the faithful crown prince,” Qahtani tweeted last summer. “
Any old person is not able to order up a fifteen-man team to fly to Istanbul, only someone royal is able to do that.
again, at this point as far as I’m aware, we only have Turkey’s word to back up that narrative all 15 of these men were in a team. I remember back to the original Saudi hijacker list on 9/11 which was exposed to be in error. How many men fly from KSA to Istanbul every day? Or how might visit the consulate on a daily basis?
The 15 arrived, did they not, in a private jet from Saudia in the small hours that morning and left the same day after killing Khassoghi? The Turkish government scrambled troops (?) to the airport raid the planes before they left but the first one had already taken off and they drew a blank in the second one. But of course if K’s remains had already been buried in Turkey that is not surprising.
What is Britain or Canada or any other country going to do if someone publishes grisly footage showing the killing by blast, suffocation, and immolation of, say, a Pakistani wedding party mistaken for a terrorist camp by some US or UK “anti-terrorist” drone operative?
The fact is, all the hyperventilation about Khashoggi is rubbish. Britain, the US and Canada are all complicit in multiple atrocities on a more or less daily basis.
The Khashoggi killing is significant only (a) insofar as it can be used to mobilize dumb opinion to some political end, and (b), as Craig notes, because it ” opens a window on the truly horrible world of the extremely powerful and wealthy.”
Glaring liberal media hypocrisy and fake humanitarian concern, part 14,361
“The Guardian view on the death of a critic: Riyadh must pay a price”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/23/the-guardian-view-on-the-death-of-a-critic-riyadh-must-pay-a-price
Any Guardian outrage when their moderate heroes in the PLP abstained en masse on a HoC motion to stop giving the Saudis bombs to drop on women and children?
That would be a “no”..
“Mohammed Bin Salman is no fool”. Intelligent enough to manipulate himself to heir apparent certainty but in possession of a reverse Midas touch.
The war in Yemen was easily justified (in Saudi eyes) by the alleged involvement of Iran, but since the US confirmed renewed sanctions in August, even US intelligence estimates have reported Iran pulling in its horns.
The farcical, chest puffing exercise with Qatar has only strengthened the position of Iran and Turkey. Talk of digging a moat to turn the Qatari peninsula into an island makes the Saudi state the laughingstock of the region.
The Ritz Carlton shakedown is Saudi internal business, but did it truly strengthen the position of MbS?
Vision 2030 is again Saudi internal business, but grand central planning doesn’t have a happy history.
The cancellation of the ARAMCO flotation is a major loss of face for MbS and was reportedly the call of the old King.
The reaction in the West to the Khashoggi murder strikes me as having all the hallmarks of telling the old King that the boy just won’t do. Even the POTUS is hinting that MbS is a wrong ‘un.
If you are in alliance with KoSA having an incompetent in charge in not good news. If you are in competition with KoSA then having a loose cannon in charge is equally undesirable.
Am I right that the Barclays fraud case involving Qatar was definitively dropped a few months ago?
That be my understanding. Why launch an investigation in the first place when success is dependent on cooperation from the Qatari government? If I proposed a project like that in the private sector it would fail at the first budget pass.
Try to justify your existence and collect a tax payer funded salary while achieving the square root of fuck all. Shuffle paper for a few years at the SFO before hawking your CV to the City law firms.
“The reaction in the West to the Khashoggi murder strikes me as having all the hallmarks of telling the old King that the boy just won’t do”
Provided the King’s dementia does not keep him from realizing.
For future reference, the shidas touch: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Shidas%20Touch
I doubt Turkish intelligence got all their material on their own, or that they were routinely intercepting and decrypting all phone and Skype traffic to and from the consulate. Erdogan is grandstanding.
Some on the “Arab street” believe that the Saudis set all of this up, which is a possibility. “The story got out because interrogators didn’t realise Khashoggi’s wristwatch was wired” is certainly rubbish.
But probably a third party was involved. Khashoggi was probably purposefully wired for this occasion. To go in there unprotected would have been unbelievably stupid, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe that he was so stupid. If this is correct, then some party other than the Saudis had foreknowledge, albeit not necessarily of exactly what would happen.
I would go for involvement by both the Saudis and a third party.
(Regarding the wristwatch possibility, Apple’s PR department will be a player now. Brand managers have achieved an after-the-event piece of the PR action in several similarly gruesome stories, including the capture of Saddam Hussein and Illich Ramirez Sanchez.)
Apparently it was the Russians’ signals intelligence that enabled them to give Erdogan advance warning of the 2016 attempted coup.
But Apple Watch does not have the camera to take photos/videos with so where would the video stills come from?
The Saudi Embassy could have been bugged, static and mobile micro cameras are within technological reach of the better funded agencies these days.
Indeed. Turkish intelligence would need help though, especially since I doubt Saudi security are slouches.
Thanks Germann have amended post to take this into account.
It would have to be a phone camera, surely.
Skype, or some other social media app, would do the trick.
But hard to believe that the Saudis would be that lax…..
You can buy all kinds of portable transmitting video bugging devices now – pens, cuff links, spectacles all kinds of stuff. You can get it all from Amazon! I have done the same thing in situations where I feel my security is directly at threat. It was a consulate, not the Embassy. Security there is much lower. Consulates deal with visas, passports and permits. The more high level stuff is all done in the Embassy.
And did not one of the flying fifteen have a mysterious fatal traffic accident as soon as he got back to Saudi? Was he a Turkish or other agent who took the video/recording and was killed because of it or at least suspected? Was the Apple watch story an attempt to protect him?
That’s the bit I don’t understand: why would Khashoggi feel that his security was directly at threat when he had already been to that Consulate only a few days before?
Sure, he was told that his papers would take a few days, so don’t call us we’ll call you.
Sure, that’s darn annoying because it means another trip to the Consulate to pick them up.
But he had already been there and had left without a hair out of place.
So why would he fear that the second trip would turn out any different?
CCTV camera systems are the easiest things to hack. The world is full of millions that have been hijacked. The security features are simple to bypass and indeed many are used as recruits to botnet armies that are used mainly in DDOS attacks. Streaming of video from them to another server which can store the recordings is a trivial thing to achieve even for ‘Script Kiddies’ much less for an intelligence agency. Because they are embedded systems, a whole new version of the operating system and applications can even be installed remotely with new features that enable snooping undetected. Many use a thing called Multicast that allows for multiple clients to connect without degrading the processing power of the Media Server (CCTV) and remain virtually undetected. A state security service can easily intercept the stream of data further up-steam in the network and this is undetectable. It is not beyond the imagination that all Saudi Overseas Offices are monitored in Saudi Arabia, this would expose their video streams to whoever runs the network infrastructure in the host nation. Bill Binney and Duncan Campbell held a Master Class in surveillance which those who are interested my enjoy watching. https://youtu.be/5bcN7u1bbwk
It was not the Embassy which is sovereign soil, it was the consulate which is on Turkish soil.
Embassies are not sovereign soil, in normal circumstance they are respected as if they were.
sorry I should have said that.
My son has a watch that can take video pictures and record sound. He got it from Amazon.
The “rogue operation” idea was always nonsense on stilts. Walk into your embassy or even a consulate in the nearest neighboring country, on a holiday to Dieppe, for example. Take a gander at the visible surveillance electronics, security doors and airlock passageways, the armed guards with the expressionless stares.
Imagine, then, walking into a similar establishment in more risk-conscious Istanbul, fifteen abreast, past that security, setting up shop in a main conference room, and having a boisterous chat with a visiting comrade.
Your chat “goes wrong”, ends up in a choke hold and death for the comrade. Your mates break out the 6-mm mylar sheathing and wrap him up, after slicing and dicing him all over the Turkish carpets, and then squeezes the bits into the Gucci luggage and hat box conveniently brought along. You and your mates then leave through the rear, employees-only back door, with their non-dripping luggage.
NFW. This was not a rogue op. It would have been approved at the highest level, precisely because so much could go wrong, so badly, and so publicly.
‘…the horrible murder of Khashoggi has caught the public imagination..’ – not buying this.
The only reason the public are even aware of this is because for some reason the western MSM are now all singing from the same hymn sheet and the story is plastered centre stage across most of its front pages. Similarly to the Skripal narrative. The only difference is the level of response which as you indicate could be for a number of reasons. While Theresa May rightly condemned this murder no diplomats as far as i’m aware been summoned and deported.
It appears a complicated scenario because Erdogan his hardly whiter than white bearing in mind he operated in a similar vein in response to the attempted ‘coup’ in Turkey a short while back. None of these players have a clean skin so as you say can hardly be envisaged to be acting from a ‘moral’ high ground. They don’t have morals they have interests.
Whatever is happening will now doubt play out over the coming months and we may get a deeper understanding of the play here. A short while back as you say MBS seemed untouchable regarding reports in the MSM – now that appears to have changed. Only time will tell why that may be…
I was aware of it days before MSM reported on the story, merely through following an eclectic bunch on twitter. Just as I was aware of what was happening in Ukraine/Crimea weeks before any western media began reporting on it, simply by knowing some Ukrainians. But your larger point is interesting. Craig is right. Capturing our collective imagination is a mysterious process. To illustrate what I mean, for some reason it had already occurred to me to compare my initial reaction to this incident with other similar events and I’m quite certain that I was much more stirred by this than is usual. Perhaps I sensed, as soon as I read the first account, that it had the potential to create wrinkles in the MSM consensus on Saudi but I certainly didn’t consciously expect it to. Anyway, It must have been a relief to many in MSM to finally have permission to kick MBS, they are human after all.
I agree Ian .
So – ” The truth the leads can reveal is much wider than the narrow question…”
1. Why does the US complain about China’s economic rise – after several decades of US corporations securing super-profits from a labour force without comparable environmental, health, labour laws to that of the US?
2. Why is Putin portrayed as the devil incarnate?
3. Why did the US via its President seek to embrace the Saudi cover up?
Well – Mr. Murray answers the third question – but the three ( above) put together might just expand into something wider than the narrow question.
it is not accurateto say the US via its president sought to embrace the cover up. Trump is as Trump does. He was clearly worried about the impact on Saudi US trade deals (100m USD got transferred to the US from Saudia last week) but additionally some very senior Republican senators have rejected the Saudi version of events throughout.
Not only Trump is worried, the rest of the west is too. Merkel just mumbled s.th. about having to “review” selling weapons, but of course former contracts have to be met…..
The value of the U.S. dollar depends on Saudi support of the petrodollar system.
Fwiw: my sister, who is a newshound, has been following this.She says SKY news reported last night that stories were coming in that K’s head had been dug up in the consulate garden. Separately I read,again hearsay, that MBS’s sidekick was in phone communication wuth the death squad during the incident and ended up saying “Now bring me the head of the dog”.
I still do not get why they would kill him in the consulate, which would inevitably be bugged, and not just haul him off on a flight to Saudi Arabia to deal with him there. Still as the Americans say ” there’s no fixing stupid.”
I’d advise against jumping to the conclusion that stupidity is the explanation for what you haven’t got an explanation for.
It’s not so easy to force a person onto a plane in a foreign country.
Basically, Saudi owns the West.
Saudi is useful to the West. And in any case, the West is falling while the East is rising.
Well, if Western countries refuse to take action against the Saudis, citing the amount of Saudi investment and the potential losses if they do, that seems to me the Saudi owns the West.
People have emailed me conflicting rumours regarding the identity of the businessman that Jess Phillips didn’t name today in the Commons. I haven’t got time to look into this further or to make any phone calls, but here goes.
The man is accused of both sexual and racial abuse. Here is the Torygraph article. It names the man’s law firm as Schillings, which it notes has acted for some named footballers. Schillings specialises in super-injunctions, so it is unremarkable that they were the firm used, but it may be relevant that they are named in the article and that football is mentioned.
Philip Green (Arcadia Group) has been viciously litigious, more litigious than Richard Branson (Virgin Group). There are more buried bodies in his background than there are in Highgate cemetery. As well as being a known misogynist, he is also a known racist, and furthermore he has hired Schillings. And he has been involved in the squeaky-clean football business with Tottenham Hotspur, Everton, and other clubs that have arranged player transfers. Slave driver Mike Ashley (Sports Direct group), meanwhile, owns Newcastle United and a chunk of Rangers. As far as I know, Richard Branson hasn’t been involved much in football but was once interested in Crystal Palace.
Interestingly Philip Green lent his private jet to Esther McVey’s close friend Kate McCann and her husband Gerry McCann for them to fly to Rome after the supposed “disappearance” of their daughter from a Portuguese hotel.
Now I have to go out. The name will probably be published outside of England and Wales this afternoon if it hasn’t been already.
Isn’t the Saudi consulate and its grounds legally Saudi territory? If so, what are the implications regarding diplomatic immunity for the Turkish authorities entering those premises apparently without permission from the Saudis? The justification was that a crime was committed. Could the British use the same rationale to enter the Ecuadorian consulate to arrest Assange, who committed the offence of breaking bail? Could the west use the Skripal pretext to enter the Russian Embassy?
I understand the Saudis gave permission – which they delayed until after the cleaners, repainters etc. The distinction between an Embassy and a Consulate is also important. It appears, for example, that the Saudis may have made a mistake in using CC plated vehicles and not the more protected CD plates. Assange is in a full Embassy, where there is no argument.
I think somewhere the Turks said that the consulate is regarded as being on Turkish soil while of course an embassy is sovereign soil for the country concerned.
correction : ….eumbassy is treated as sovereign soil….
‘The distinction between an Embassy and a Consulate’
And Consulate General, who are permitted more scope for interacting with the community and prominent community members than a Consul.
“..That the fallout derails to some extent the murder machine in Yemen is profoundly to be hoped.”
Is the best possible outcome of the whole gruesome episode. The people of Yemen have suffered enough whilst the UK/US and others have continued to take their “Thirty pieces of silver” from KSA , day after bloody day.
Indeed the people of Yemen suffered enough; that why one would expect most on this site to focus on that area but no that not the case. Israel/Gaza with 1/1000 of deaths of Yemen is the permanent center of attention here.
This site mentions Yemen a lot. And of course there are links between our position on Yemen and the I/P conflict. MBS is the new golden boy because he’s chummy with the Likudniks. Meanwhile, you may have noticed that MSM “journalists” are unable to mention the word Houthi without putting Iran-backed in front of it, even though the links are vague and the country has been blockaded for years.
Mentions of Israel are rare here, because the mods will get you, if you make a mistake in your wording.
They NEVER mention the people killed by the Baathist regime in Syria because, well, that would involve some very uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Never underestimate the human capacity for self-deception.
It’s disheartening that even a guy like Craig who risked his safety and well-being to expose human rights abuses falls victim to the blogosphere’s tribal echo chamber.
The thought that maybe there are no real “good guys” in the corridors of geopolitical power is apparently so unbearable that many people (the vast majority in my experience) will deny even irrefutable evidence to keep their illusions intact.
It does seem that the Saudi and Israeli state (SIS) can operate with impunity in any country in Europe.
The GRU must be envious.
I see that there is a move to ‘approve’ MEP candidates at the moment.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/24/european-parties-urged-agree-israel-boycott-bds-antisemitic-mep
It also seems there is no news on the buffer zone in Syria and the fukus thugs trapped there with their chemical wizardry (except for an unconfirmed death of brits and ‘white helmets’ involved in some explosion).
The MSM seems to have become catatonic on the region in unison.
When the narrative has disappeared up its own arse they finally stfu!
Good stuff. Saudi PR and Haspel are key points.
The murder is not the event – the press reaction against Saudi is the event.
That it took almost 3 weeks for the first WaPo front page story to lead on Yemen shows how cautious this whole thing is,
While some media reps acting as chairmen at the “Davos in the sun” conference pulled out early, most diplomats and politicos waited to see what the US would do, and followed Treasury guy Mnuchin in pulling out over 2 weeks after the murder.
Selling weapons is the main reason nothing will happen.
Israel is the 2nd. A rogue Saudi might well choose to go after Israel and destroy it before Iran does. They’d get plenty of domestic and regional support for that. But Israel’s PR punch is even greater than Saudi’s.
Mnuchin pulled out of Davos in the desert, but he went ahead with the Saudi trip. He was granted an audience with MbS his very self!
The murder of Khashoggi, hasn’t really affected more arms sales to Saudi Arabia in the long run.
Apart from Germany sticking its neck out and halting the sale of arms to SA. The rest including the UK appear to be somewhat stalling on postponing arms sales to the kingdom.
Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau doesn’t want to cancel sales, because it will incur a billion dollar penalty. Macron when asked lately on the Khashoggi affair refused to answer, Theresa May doesn’t have her troubles to seek, especially with Brexit looming and her 1922 Committee meeting approaching.
Trump talks a good game but keeps saying, that SA spends a fortune and keeps many Americans in jobs.
I get the impression the above leaders would like to see this whole ghastly affair just disappear.
There’s hilarious compendium footage of Trump stating how many American jobs depend on the Saudi arms contract from one of the late night shows (Seth Meyer I think). He starts at 450,000 and works his way up to an astronomically improbable 600,000. The man spouts verbal diarrhoea with the reliability of Old Faithful.
Can’t remember when I agreed with Craig more, and thanks for a couple of insights which have not been published. I’d be interested to know, though, whether a safe assumption might be that Erdoğan knew well in advance of the planned murder and deployed some unusually thorough surveillance accordingly? Is this perhaps a scheme hatched in Riyadh by someone affected by MBS’s crackdown, and thinking a bit of payback was indicated? Not saying that MBS didn’t organise the murder, but that someone else knew…sorry. Too much Father Brown…
Viable explosive devises found at properties owned by the Clintons and the Obamas. Of the same design as that sent to a Soros property a couple of days ago.
Meanwhile, in the background the diagnosed cases of anthrax poisoning targeted at media outlets has reached 7. The anthrax attacks appear to be fairly primitive leading to skin eruptions that can be treated with anti-bios..
If nothing else, Trump’s ramping up the histrionics will result in plenty o/t for the FBI.
@ Vivian O’Blivion October 24, 2018 at 15:23
‘Viable explosive devises found at properties owned by the Clintons and the Obamas…’
Or so the ‘Official Narrative’ would have us believe…
Considering what Erdogan and Trump have done towards journalists they have some cheek!
This is a good piece that provides a bit more information than the MSM at the current time. And thanks for the link to the beeb article about abducted princes. Chilling stuff that ought to be getting revisited in light of the present circumstances.
What does Brown Noses have to say about it? I thought Higgins was the oracle that the MSM now went to for their facts?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a U.N. resolution for regime change so we could put these ******* in the dustbin.
Not gonna happen. Saudi is easy to control because it is not a nation state. Iran is a problem because it is, albeit one with a clerical elite at the helm.
Saudi Arabia is a family business that owes its existence to the west. It has been an extremely lucrative alliance for a very long time and will be maintained, even though the wheels are beginning to fall off the bus.
Don’t you dare touch this member of the UN Human Rights Council!