Alex Christoforou
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
RT CrossTalk host Peter Lavelle and The Duran’s Alex Christoforou take a quick look at Saudi Arabia’s possible admission to killing journalist Jamal Khashoggi…accidentally, while they were torturing the man inside the consulate in Istanbul.
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Via Zerohedge…
Even before the publication of last night’s Saudi trial balloon hinting that the kingdom would soon acknowledge that the extrajudicial killing of Jamal Khashoggi – the insider-turned dissident journalist who walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week and never walked back out – was the result of a “botched” kidnapping attempt carried out by “rogue killers” (despite reports that the US intelligence community knew that Khashoggi was being “targeted”), two realities had become increasingly clear. One: That the Saudis would avoid responsibility for the killing by pinning it on some unfortunate underling, and two: that there would be few, if any, lasting diplomatic repercussions.
And as more media organizations confirmed reports about Saudi’s plans to spin Khashoggi’s murder as a botched interrogation (we can only imagine what was said in that room to justify the use of such extreme violence), CNN calculated the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Saudi King Salman in Riyadh for approximately 15 minutes early Tuesday, following his 12-hour-plus flight to the kingdom.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s meeting with King Salman of Saudi Arabia lasted no more than 15 minutes, CNN estimates based on the time the top US diplomat’s motorcade arrived at the royal court and departed.
The motorcade arrived at the royal court at 11:42 a.m. (4:42 a.m. ET) and left 26 minutes later. There is a fair distance to walk from where the motorcade dropped Pompeo off to where he met the king.
While Trump said on Monday that Pompeo would travel to Turkey “if necessary”, the Saudi’s decision to “come clean” about Khashoggi’s death pretty much rendered Pompeo’s fact-finding mission unnecessary.More important are developments in Turkey, where the joint Saudi-Turkish “investigation” is turning its attention toward the home of the Saudi consul, where a black diplomatic van that departed the Saudi consulate just under two hours after Khashoggi entered was captured on camera disappearing into a garage. Some speculate that this is where the killers finished disposing of Khashoggi’s body. This comes after a “nine-hour” search of the Saudi consulate building that, according to leaks published in Al-Jazeera, turned up “evidence of tampering” by the Saudis. On Tuesday, Turkey’s foreign minister clarified that Saudi had yet to admit its role in Khashoggi’s disappearance and probable death.
Turkish investigators will carry out a search of the Saudi Consul General’s residence on Tuesday as the probe into the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi continues, according to a Turkish diplomatic source.
CCTV footage released to the media from the day the Washington Post writer vanished show movement of vehicles from the consulate building to the Consul General’s residence nearby.
As speculation mounts that the incident could unseat the increasingly authoritarian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (who has already marginalized or incapacitated nearly every threat to his rule), it’s looking more likely that neither the US nor the rest of the Western world will do much to punish the world’s most important oil exporter, which can “weaponize” the oil market seemingly on a whim.
Any punishment for this flagrant violation of human rights will need to come, therefore, from the private sector, which, according to Bloomberg, could sabotage MbS’s grand Vision 2030 plan, which aims to remake the Saudi economy via a flood of foreign direct investment:
The economic strategy of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, is to make investment the main engine of economic growth instead of government spending, but the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi could frustrate these ambitions. Foreign direct investment, a key part of the plan to reinvent Saudi Arabia’s economy, declined sharply in 2017 and is unlikely to return to previous levels, leaving the government’s target for 2020 beyond reach, according to analysis by Bloomberg Economics. Increased policy uncertainty and, after the Khashoggi incident, the risk of reputational damage to foreign companies working in Saudi Arabia won’t help.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
Here is an interesting look at how American companies are heavily involved in arming Saudi Arabia:
https://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2017/11/saudi-arabias-military-capabilities.html
The United States has heavily impacted the military balance that currently exists in the MIddle East.
The last sentence at the link says it all: “Not much chance that the US MIC will allow Trump to put SA in the doghouse.”
Today Trump basically says the Saudis are blameless. So much for Trump about to “bring the hammer down” on the Saudis. The new explanation is that some Saudi intelligence people “went too far” to curry favor with the Crown Prince MbS, and that he is blameless. The US appears prepared to accept that explanation – and thus save the $100 billion in arms sales that Trump has – TWICE – said he won’t risk over this journalist. For all we know, the Turks killed the guy in an attempt to curry favor for the US in an extortion attempt against… Read more »
So we can’t trust the US, Saudi Arabia or Turkey to tell the truth over this “incident”, but what government can we trust? I’ve reached the point where I find I cannot trust any of them, particularly when there are hundreds of billions of dollars in arms sales and oil supplies at risk.
Saudi Arabia officially stated that Khashoggi left the embassy.
Now the Saudis admitted that they are liars.
Liars cannot be believed, unless the believers of the liars want to lose all their carefully cultivated masks of credibility.
True that he left the Embassy , but in a body bag.
How do they explain Khashoggi’s fiancee waiting for him outside the embassy and somehow missing him when he came out? How do they explain that he asked his fiancee to raise the alarm if he failed to emerge from the embassy? And last but not least, where is he now?
Yes, the Saudis are liars, but what do you call those who are willing to accept the lies because Khashoggi is less important than oil and the weapons worth multiple billions sold to Saudi Arabia by countries such as the US, Canada, UK, France and Israel? Complicit liars?
As long as the ludicrous accusations against Iran and Russia are all true, without even blinking an eye…Pathetic that.
It’s not about oil, it’s about the petrodollar agreement convluded between R. Nixon and King Faisal in 1973 and the blind belief that the Saudis can prop up the dollar just by charging USD for their oil and parking their reserves in Treasuries– in eschange for the US military risking your son’s life to promote Wahhabism. Note that all US-waged wars since the 70s were against countries that did not enforce Shariah law. Even Kosovo was about carving out a Muslim state from a Christian country. After the war, the Israelis rushed in and donated millions on new Wahhabist mosques… Read more »
Perverted Saudis being sneakily abetted by their fellow pro-terrorist global-traitor Zio-liar Yank-w@nker war criminals – as hypocritically expected. Bunch of sly sicko propagandist sadists.
It is still uncertain what the Turks will do about this. Erdogan has said the Kahsoggi was a friend. This is not unlikely, since Kashoggi’s granddad was Turkish and Kashoggi may have spoken Turkish.