Mohammed bin salman

I suit up most days (thank you, casual Fridays) and with the stress of New York’s walking speeds and tremendous cleanliness of its streets, the closet life of suits falls somewhere between the lifespan of a monarch butterfly and a succulent fathered by a man in his twenties, another way of saying: cherish life.So, we will call it a Tuesday of last week. I found myself either a) running from hired guns of a Memphis law firm after I had uncovered their Cayman Islands-based money laundering scheme or b) catching my pocket on the armrest of a conference room chair, when I split my dress pants down the leg.

It fell under the radar when it was announced, but a new project with some major names from the political right have come together to fight fraud and corruption in the Middle East at a pivotal time for US relations in the tumultuous region. Launched last month at the National Press Club in Washington, the Global Justice Foundation includes former Clinton-era independent counsel Kenneth Starr and Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who has been outspoken in calling out corruption in the Deep State’s war against President Donald Trump. The first case the group has highlighted is Tameer Holding, which they claim is among the largest-ever cases of real estate fraud in the Middle East.

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.

Political correctness is the yoga of the modern Western mind. The salutations and poses of rationalised irrationality are nowhere aped more sedulously than in the American university. At the same time, the infinite cupidity of the American university, its appetite for money from parents, corporations and even foreign powers, brings the soft conscience into contact with hard cash from the kind of regimes for whom ‘political correctness’ retains its original sense, which is repeating the regime’s propaganda so you don’t get shot or sent for re-education in the local equivalent of a liberal arts facility.

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.

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.