Jamal khashoggi

To the extent Joe Biden had anything to say about Saudi Arabia during the 2020 presidential campaign, it largely centered on shaming the oil-rich monarchy into changing its ways. Coming off the 2018 state-sponsored murder of Washington Post columnist and former royal court insider Jamal Khashoggi in a Turkish consulate, Biden aired numerous complaints about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. He pledged to make the kingdom a pariah state during a Democratic presidential debate, accused the Saudi air force of killing children in Yemen — it wasn’t as much an accusation as a fact — and committed himself to reassessing US arms sales to Riyadh. The Saudis didn’t like what they saw during the Biden administration’s opening months.

When news broke that President Biden was planning a trip to Saudi Arabia to visit the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MbS), members of his party were horrified. Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was especially disturbed and recommended the White House cancel it outright. "I wouldn't go. I wouldn't shake his hand,” Schiff told CBS on June 5. "This is someone who butchered an American resident, cut him up into pieces in the most terrible and pre-meditated way.” That resident was Jamal Khashoggi, a former Saudi royal family insider who used his perch as a columnist at the Washington Post to raise awareness about the crown prince’s ruthless ways.

An executive in charge of a security company based in Arkansas has given the New York Times a document confirming that they trained four members of Saudi Arabia’s so-called Tiger Squad, responsible for murdering the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. As has now been established by several different investigations, Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, injected with a drug — perhaps morphine — and suffocated with a plastic bag, his body then cut into pieces, apparently on the Saudi deputy consul’s desk. This latest information raises the question of what the US might have known about the Tiger Squad and its operations. Could the US intelligence agencies have warned Khashoggi not to go to Istanbul?

A few weeks ago, the Saudi human rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul was summoned to the offices of the General Directorate of Investigation at the Interior Ministry in Riyadh. Ostensibly, the Saudi secret police — the Mabahith — simply wanted to tell her that her appeal against her conviction for ‘treason and terrorism’ had been turned down. But her brother, Walid told me it was really a warning: Keep quiet, we’re watching you; the Americans may have got you out of prison; we can send you back whenever we want. She has been out of prison since February, serving the rest of her sentence on probation. Though aged 31, her long black hair is now streaked with gray, the outward sign perhaps of what her family say was an attempt to ‘break’ her in prison.

Donald Trump has many faults. So does John Bolton. But their unwillingness to listen to a recording of Jamal Khashoggi being butchered is not wrong. In fact, it’s cheeringly sane. For starters, Bolton and Trump don’t speak Arabic, so there is no point. As Tom Rogan notes, they have the CIA to analyze such things. Why are reporters and endless Twitterers so eager to know whether Trump and Bolton are listening to the snuff tape? Trump and Bolton, they say, are ducking responsibility. America’s government doesn’t want to be accountable for its policy of standing by the Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, who is believed to have ordered the killing. But there is something perverted about this strong wish for leaders to listen to a murder.

You have probably never heard of journalist Turki bin Abdul Aziz Al Jaser. He was beaten to death last month by the Saudi regime in one of the kingdom’s notorious torture chambers. He had been ‘forcibly disappeared’ by the security forces in March, after a spy at Twitter’s headquarters in Dubai reportedly connected him to an account highlighting the regime’s human-rights abuses. Contrast the scant American media interest in that outrage with the ongoing frenzy surrounding the slaughter of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Istanbul.

Nine days after Jamal Khashoggi was butchered like an animal in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-strong hit team almost certainly sent on their mission by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, The Spectator published a cover story by me on his murder and the political intrigue that I believed lay behind it. The essay was reprinted here, the UK magazine’s USA website, under the headline ‘What the Media Aren't Telling You About Jamal Khashoggi’. It was contemptuously dismissed by American policy wonks. And in an especially scurrilous hit piece by Khashoggi’s former colleagues at the Washington Post, I was indirectly accused of dredging up Khashoggi’s Islamist past to ‘smear’ him. What had I done to earn such wrath?

There’s a joke, not terribly politically correct, about a very rich man called Costas who complains he has employed thousands of people, built hospitals and schools, but is still not respected. ‘Do they call me Costas the provider of opportunity? Do they call me Costas the healer? Do they call me Costas the educator? No.’ Then he adds a sad addendum. ‘But you make love to just one goat…’ Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, must understand how Costas felt. Until the start of this month he was lionised throughout the West for his efforts to modernise his kingdom in order to attract the multi-trillion dollar foreign investment it needs to prevent it from going bankrupt.

If ever a history of botched cover-ups that made things even worse for the criminal conspirators is written, the official explanation from Riyadh of why Jamal Khashoggi died in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul – it was an argument that turned into a brawl – will rank right up there with Watergate and the Dreyfus affair. The most obvious problem for the Saudis is that Turkey – Saudi Arabia’s rival for regional hegemony – has video and audio of what actually took place. And they insist that Khashoggi was slaughtered like an animal on the Saudi consul’s desk just minutes after entering the building.

The Washington Post is upset. That’s understandable: one of its contributors seems to have been tortured and killed. Many of the senior staff were close to Jamal Khashoggi, and are perhaps grieving. But the trouble with journalists being upset is that they tend to turn themselves or their grief into the story. This exacerbates an already massive problem in Washington, where journalism is elevated into such a high civic duty it becomes almost religion. Well-known journalists here start to behave like bishops, incanting the accepted pieties and occasionally acting like a mafia to ensure nobody hurts the free speech church by speaking freely. That’s exactly what is happening with the Khashoggi story.

The media frenzy over Jamal Khashoggi shows no sign of abating. Reporters can’t get enough of the gory details and the international intrigue. But they seem to have forgotten the need to report basic facts, question their single-sourced material, and ask difficult questions of those who know far more than they let on. Instead, they just trot out the same biased narratives, devised to lay blame at President Trump’s feet, presumably in order to use this episode as a wedge issue in the upcoming midterm elections. This trend was on vivid display on MSNBC on Wednesday. The channel missed crucial opportunities to set the record straight when they hosted Khashoggi’s Washington Post colleague, David Ignatius, on Morning Joe, and then again with former Obama-era CIA director John Brennan.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives in Saudi Arabia today, dispatched at short notice by President Donald Trump. His mission near-impossible? To help orchestrate a believable cover-up for the kingdom's brutal murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago of Muslim Brotherhood activist, and one-time Saudi intelligence officer, Jamal Khashoggi. CNN says the Saudi regime may finally be ready to admit that Khashoggi was murdered, but will portray it as an accident during an attempted abduction gone wrong. The blame will be placed on (in Trump’s words) ‘rogue elements’ in the Saudi security apparatus, who improbably undertook the task without the consent or knowledge of the Saudi leadership.