SearchRecent comments
Democracy LinksMember's Off-site Blogs |
why khashoggi was murdered by a little psychopathic prince...
machinations
The Khashoggi affair is one of the many examples of Western hypocritical positions on international ethics. This article has been re-written (interpreted with added information) by Jules Letambour to better express in English and hopefully the full intent of the original writer, Tierry Meyssan, who writes mostly in French — and is more erudite than we are, thus bypasses some facts we should know but don't... The Arabia of the Saoud family For seventy years, we in the West have been ignoring the fact that Saudi Arabia is not a State like any others. Saudi Arabia is the private property of the King, and all the people that live there are no more than serfs (slaves and workers with benefits). That is why it is described as the residence of its owners, the Saoud family, in other words, "Saudi" Arabia.In the 18th century, a tribe of Bedouins, the Saouds, allied themselves with a Wahhabite sect and rebelled against the Ottoman Empire (ruled from Constantinople — the Turks). The Saouds and their allies managed to create a short-lived kingdom in Hejaz, the region of the Arabian peninsula which includes the holy cities of Islam, Medina and Mecca. They were quickly put down by the Ottomans. At the beginning of the 19th century, a survivor of the Saoud tribe started a new rebellion. However, his family members began fighting amongst themselves and they lost again to the Ottoman empire. At the beginning of the 20th century, the British allied with the Saoud family in order to overthrow the Ottoman Empire and to exploit the hydrocarbons (oil) in the Arabian peninsula. With the help of Lawrence of Arabia, they founded the present kingdom, the tribe’s third. The Foreign Office’s divisive concept was that the Saouds and their (uneasy) allies, the Wahhabites, would be hated by their serfs and incapable of maintaining proper relations with their neighbours. Because of the differential of the military equipment — the sabre of the Saouds versus the modern guns of the British — the Saoud family would "never be able to turn on their new Western masters". However, by the end of the Second World War, the United States seized the opportunity presented by a weakened British forces, to take over ruling over the Saouds. President Franklin Roosevelt concluded the Quincy Pact with the founder of kingdom. This pact might be considered "urban legend" as it is not written in any form — but it is shared by many people, despite being unverified, based mostly on the succession of historical facts. It provides an explanation of contemporary events in the Middle East — the "Quincy Pact" is named after the US warship where President Franklin Roosevelt met with Saudi Arabia's King Abdul Aziz al-Saud on 14 February 1945 after the Yalta Conference. According to this secret unverified pact, the United States pledged to protect the Saoud family in exchange for their hydrocarbons. Apart from that, the Saoud family would not oppose the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. This agreement was "renewed" by President George W. Bush. The meeting between George W Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah on 25 April 2005 in Crawford, Texas, is likely to be behind the revitalisation of this unverified "verbal" agreement. The joint statement began by revisiting the meeting on the Quincy 60 years earlier: "In six hours, the predecessor of President Bush and the father of the Crown Prince had established a strong personal link which set the tone for decades of strong relations between the two nations." This was probably at the origin of the idea for a "secret" contract had been put in place 60 years before. The Quincy Pact between the USA and the Saoud family is still "unverified", but it would sum up the decades of Arab-Saudi relations that are much more complex than they appear from the outside. While it may set out the foundation of relations with the US with the Arabian peninsula, it omits the context of February 1945, with the end of the war in Europe, the continuation of the war in the Pacific and the Anglo-American squabbling — all at a time when the Cold War was not yet an issue. The Americans were empire-building worldwide (see: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33845). The psychology of US "victory" was complexed by the fact WW2 had been won due to the help of the Russians. Such "verbal" pacts between nations are not new. For example the pact made between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev in regard to the USA letting the former Soviet Union countries alone, was only a "gentlemen's agreement". The USA of course has hypocritically flaunted this agreement since under fake pretexts. The founder of Wahhabism, Mohammed ben Abdelwahhab, considered that all those who did not join his sect should be exterminated. Many historians have pointed out the similarity of the Wahhabite way of life and that of some Orthodox Jewish sects, as well as the resemblances between the thinking of the Wahhabite theologians and that of some Puritan Christian pastors. However, in order to maintain their influence over the Middle East, the British decided to fight against "Arab nationalism". People and groups associated with Arab nationalism include(d) King Faisal I of Iraq, the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab Nationalist Movement, the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the President of Somalia Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party which was to power in Iraq for some years under Saddam Hussein — and is still the ruling party in Syria — and its founder Michel Aflaq. He was a Syrian philosopher, sociologist and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement. Aflaq is considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist "socialist" philosophy. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Battle for One Destiny (1958) and The Struggle Against Distorting the Movement of Arab Revolution (1975).Born into a middle-class family in Damascus, Syria, Aflaq studied at the Sorbonne, where he met his future political companion Salah al-Din al-Bitar. Aflaq returned to Syria in 1932, and began his political career in communist politics. Thus the Pan-Arabism is a "greater" concept, in as much as it calls for supranational communalism among the Arab states. The British thus supported the Muslim Brotherhood (a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt by Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928) and the Nashqbandis (major Sunni spiritual order of Sufism) against this "Arab Nationalism". This British's (probably with US influence) support was an extension of the "war" against communism/socialism, by using the Islamic religious beliefs as a "weapon".That is why in 1962, the British asked the Saouds to create the Muslim World League. It is based in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to propagate Islamic religious teachings against the socialist ideals of the Arab Nationalism. The MWL (an NGO) was funded by the Saudi government from its inception in 1962. Because of the Saudi funding, the League is widely regarded as promoting Wahhabism. In 1969, it became what we now call the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. In time, Wahhabism admitted Sunni Islam in full, which, until then, it had always somehow resented it. The Wahhabites thus presented themselves as the protectors of Sunnism, but continued to oppose all other forms of Islam. Eager to avoid the fratricides which had marked the history of his family in the 19th century, Ibn Saoud instituted a system of succession between brothers. The founder of the kingdom had 32 wives who gave him 53 sons and 36 daughters. The oldest of the surviving heirs, King Salman, is now 82. In order to save the kingdom, the Family Council decided in 2015 to put an end to this adelphic rule and designate the children of Prince Nayef and the new King Salman as future heirs to the throne. A few years ago, Mohammed Ben Salman (MBS) ousted Nayef’s son and became the only Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. The tenets of the Saoud family Having evolved abruptly from the use of camels to that of the private jet, the Saoud family of the 21st century still cultivates archaic ways of the desert. For example, the Saoud family hates "history". It has destroyed any ruins of historical archeological value in Saudi Arabia. This mentality of destruction of history was also applied by the jihadists in Iraq and Syria, such as the destruction of the house of Mahomet by the Saouds, that of the Sumerian administrative tablets by Daesh and the destruction of Palmyra in Syria. This "hatred of history" was probably "subconsciously" at the core of the destruction of the Twin Towers, 9/11. The Taliban in Afghanistan has also used this "hatred" of history and destroyed the biggest buddhas statues in the world. Just as the Western powers used the Saouds to force the Ottomans (Turks) to retreat — an event which no-one contests today — they also used the jihadists (terrorists including Daesh), financed by the Saouds and supervised by the Wahhabites, to destroy Iraq and Syria. This has been conveniently forgotten by our "selective record" of history, but at the beginning of the aggression against Syria, when the Western Press was inventing the "Arab Spring", Saudi Arabia only demanded for the departure of President Bachar el-Assad. Riyadh accepted that Syria kept its counsellors, its government, its army and its secret services, with which it had no quarrel at all. It only wanted Assad’s head because he is not a Sunni. The West obliged to help the Saoud family. The Russians saw the con-trick. The Western disinformation disservices, from the BBC to the Murdoch outlets have piled shit on Assad, including "gassing beautiful babies", but the Western powers have been a bit more cautious on the military front. The Russians won't be taken for fools and have the capability to down half the Western forces overnight. The bloodshed would not be value for money. When Prince Mohamed Ben (Bin) Salman (MBS) became the youngest Minister of Defence in the world, he wanted to exploit the oil fields of the "Empty Quarter", a desertic zone which straddles Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Faced with Yemen’s refusal, MBS launched a war to "cover himself in glory", like his grand-father. In reality, no-one has ever been able to successfully occupy Yemen, no more than Afghanistan. But this is history. The Crown Prince so far has displayed his ruthless power by depriving seven million people of food — also helped by hypocritical Washington to get rid of the "Arab nationalists", namely the Houthis in Yemen. Although, all the members of the UN Security Council expressed concerns about the humanitarian crisis, none of them dared say anything against the vicious Prince MBS. Advising his father, King Salman, MBS proposed to eliminate the head of the Saudi Arabia's main opposition, Cheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr. Cheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr was a peace-lover, but from the Wahhabite point of view, he was an infidel, a Chiite. He was decapitated without causing any uproar in the West. Then MBS ordered the destruction of Moussawara and Chouweikat in the Qatif region. All Chiite populations! Here too, the West hypocritically "failed to see" these cities being destroyed by tanks and the many people being killed. Barely a peep in the western press. Since he has virtually no opposition, MBS pushed his father to break up with Qatar in June 2017. Qatar had started to try and make peace with Iran (Shiites) — a country which is diplomatically and religiously against Saudi Arabia — by being a religious socialist country. The West hates socialism beyond belief and supports "the destruction of Iran". MBS called for all the Arab states to follow his lead and managed to force the Emirate of Qatar to back off — temporarily. When MBS went to the White House, President Trump gave him some leeway. He would let the Yemenites be bombed and starved to death on the condition that Riyadh stop supporting the jihadists in Syria and Iraq — (and possibly those roaming the world as terrorists). That’s when President Trump’s son-in-law advisor, Jared Kushner, had the bright idea of recuperating some of the Saudi oil money to replenish the US economy. The immense fortune of the Saoud family is nothing more than the money that the Western powers, in particular the United States, had been paying for extracting their hydrocarbons. It is not the fruit of their work, but only a royalty on their property. The young Prince MBS therefore organised the Palace coup of November 2017. 1,300 members of the royal family were placed under house arrest, including the bastard son of the Fadh clan, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. Some of them were hung by their feet and tortured. All of them were obliged to "offer" the Crown Prince half of their fortune. So "MBS", in his own name, raked in at least 800 billion in dollars and actions. The fortune of the Saouds, which until then had been shared between them all, was now concentrated in the hands of a man who was not the King, and therefore was not representative of the state. All that needed to be done was to twist the Prince’s arm in order to grab the loot. Here comes Jared Kushner to "make a deal with MBS" and get some of the cash to flow back to the USA by secret means. MBS also threatened Kuwait with the same destiny as that of Yemen if it refused to offer him its frontier oil reserves. Remember Saddam Hussein, 1990? How time flies... Operation Khashoggi Jamal Khashoggi was the grandson of the personal doctor of King Abdul Aziz. He was nephew of the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who equipped the Saudi Air Force, and then, on behalf of the Pentagon, supplied Chiite Iran against Sunni Iraq. His aunt Samira Khashoggi is the mother of arms dealer Dodi Al-Fayed — eliminated with his companion, British Princess Lady Diana, possibly with some help from MI6*. Jamal Khashoggi — a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood — had been associated with the Palace coup that old Prince al-Waleed was preparing against MBS. Mercenaries cut off his fingers and dismembered him before presenting his head to MBS, their master. The operation was carefully recorded by the Turkish and US secret services. In Washington, the US Press and parliamentarians demanded that President Trump raise sanctions against Riyadh. One of MBS’s advisors, Turki Al-Dakhil, replied that if the US were to sanction the kingdom, Saudi Arabia would be ready to destabilise the world order. In the tradition of the desert Bedouins, all insults must be avenged whatever the cost. According to Al-Dakhil, the kingdom was preparing some thirty measures, the most significant being to : Reduce the production of oil to 7.5 million barrels per day, provoking a raise in prices of about 200 dollars per barrel. The kingdom would demand to be paid in other currencies than the dollar, which would bring about the end of US hegemony ; Move away from Washington and move closer to Teheran ; Buy arms from Russia and China. The kingdom would offer Russia a military base in Tabuk, in the North-East of the country, in other words, close to Syria, Israël, Lebanon and Iraq ; Immediately begin supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.(Note from Jules: The Russians should refuse to deal with MBS, or they should entrap him, because like all psychopaths, MBS HAS NO ALLEGIANCES BUT TO HIMSELF AND WILL DO THE DIRTY ON ANY ONE...) Aware of the damage that this wild cannon could cause, the White House sounded the attack. Remembering a little late their uplifting speech about "Human Rights", the Western powers declared en chœur that they would no longer stand for this medieval tyrant [8]. One by one, all of their economic leaders obeyed the instructions from Washington and cancelled their participation in the Riyadh Forum. In order to calm their anger, and remembering that Khashoggi was a "US resident", President Trump and his advisor, Kushner, mentioned the confiscation of MBS properties for the benefit of the United States. In Tel-Aviv, panic reigned. MBS was Benjamin Netanyahu’s best partner [9], and had asked him to create a joint staff in Somali-land in order to crush the Yemenites. MBS also made a secret visit to Israël at the end of 2017. The US ex-ambassador in Tel-Aviv, Daniel B. Shapiro, warned his Israëli coreligionists that with an ally like that, Netanyahu is putting the country in danger [10]. The "Quincy Pact", as ficticious or secret as it is, only protects the King, not the pretenders to his throne. Translation Pete Kimberley Adapted and editorialised by Jules Letambour*. Addendum by Gus. When the Saudi King dies, which could sooner due to an "unfortunate event" (assassination comes to mind or induced terminal diseases are not out of the question), young MBS will have carte blanche to do as he pleases, unless the West eliminates him before, by bringing him to justice NOW. He has to go. He is making Hitler look good.
|
User login |
MSB has to go...
The little price has killed more people than many other despots. He is a psychopath driven by his contempt and use of the hypocritical West. He has to be taken to the international court for war crimes.
laughable?... dangerous!!!!
The Laughably Incompetent Mohammed bin Salman
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is having its worst month since after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the world learned that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. The state-sanctioned murder of Saudi dissident journalist and Washington Postcolumnist Jamal Khashoggi by a team of 15 Saudi men close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has become an international murder mystery with new twists every day.
Inside the kingdom, however, the 33-year-old crown prince is all smiles, going about his business in a vain attempt to reassure his subjects that the country is under good management. On Monday, MbS met with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and released a photo showing the two men sitting side by side like long lost friends. The next day, Saudi Arabia’s de facto monarch inaugurated Riyadh’s second “Davos in the Desert” investor conference, entering the ballroom to a standing ovation. “More people, more money,” the prince proudly declared to reporters covering the event, as tens of billions of dollars in deals were signed.
Outside the kingdom’s walls, the situation was far less rosy. Since Khashoggi’s killing, MbS has tried to craft a narrative to Riyadh’s potential investors of business as usual. And yet, for all the millions of dollars the Saudis pay to K Street lobbying shops, it turns out that Saudi Arabia is quite horrible at PR. The brutal killing of a journalist and permanent U.S. resident has not only exposed the kingdom’s sinister dark side, but accelerated a discussion among senior princes and Riyadh’s Western partners about MbS’s competence as a leader. Even President Donald Trump, who just days ago defended the crown prince (“He’s seen as a person who can keep things under check…he truly loves his country”) is now suggesting that higher-ups may very well have been involved in Khashoggi’s death.
It appears as if the days of the patriarchal king presiding over a consultative system of senior royals is gone for good, replaced with an absolute dictatorship headed by a brash, inexperienced hothead. If the man running the country was making wise decisions, the extreme silencing of dissent and the mass detention of ministers, princes, and wealthy businessmen in the Riyadh Ritz Carlton hotel wouldn’t be particularly concerning. But MbS is not a man of caution and prudence like the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz. If anything, bin Salman is on the other end of the spectrum, a leader prone to anger who wants nothing but yes men around him.
Read more:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-laughably-incompete...
Read from top
secret revision of the rule of succession...
The 2018 session of the Future Investment Initiative opened on 23 October 2018 in Riyadh. This conference was inaugurated in 2017 and the intention was that it become an annual event. However, the feet of most speakers and foreign sponsors turned blue with hypothermia following Jamal Khashoggi’s death.
The Future Investment Initiative was being marketed the “Davos of the Desert”. During the 2017 Session, the Crown Prince Mohamed Ben Salmane (now commonly referred to as “MBS”) presented Project Neom: the establishment of a tax haven in the Red Sea for the world’s elite. He also announced his future plans to abandon Wahhabism [1].
During the year that has just flown past, Project Neom was entrusted to Klaus Kleinfeld, a director of the Bilderberg Group. It had been extended to the Western Bank of the Red Sea with Egypt’s help. Israel had to ensure its security.
There was no public manifestation that Wahhabism had been abandoned. Strict interpretation of the Koran as usual, the only slight relaxation being that women now have the right to drive cars, a right contingent on them being accompanied by their legal guardian.
The withdrawal of the key sponsors and orators from the conference seems to confirm that Western Powers plan to marginalize the Crown Prince Mohamed Ben Salman, who is the son of today’s Saudi King, King Salman.
We know that the Family Council restricted to Saudis, has been meeting in secret for several days now to revise once again the rule of succession to the throne.
Translation
Anoosha Boralessa
Read more:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article203622.html
Read from top. The question now is will the Wahhabis kill him?
picture improvement...
have you noticed that the early pictures of Jamal Khashoggi after his suspected death were not very complimentary?
And when the Crown Prince was more or less outed as a suspect, the pictures of Jamal Khashoggi used in the Western press "improved":
The press use pictures to suit the mood of the slanted articles...
imagine...
And that great human rights respecting liberal, Justin Trudeau, says he is unlikely to cancel Canada’s $12bn sale of armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia because it’s a “difficult contract”. Canada expelled four Russian diplomats over the Skripal case, when no one had died, but none yet over Khashoggi.
Read more:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/442280-khashoggi-russia-iraq-assange/
killing the potomac turkey...
US media break new ground for Donald Trump's assassination
One may expect American media to announce that it was Putin, who came into collusion with the Turks to kill Khashoggi to set the USA against Saudi Arabia and sow discord among US allies...
Meanwhile:
The New York Times published an article describing five scenarios for the development of relations between Trump and Putin. "It's hard not to speculate about what might happen next. To that end, we thought: Who better than some of today's most talented spy and crime novelists - Joseph Finder, Laura Lippman, Jason Matthews, Zoë Sharp and Scott Turow - to conjure possible outcomes?" the article says.
One of the scenarios say that US President Trump will be killed by a Russian secret agent with the assistance from Trump's security guard who had voted for him but then got disappointed.
The story is simple: the two drink all night, then a Russian fires his Makarov in Trump's back, but the gun misfires, and an American security guard gives his Glock to the Russian. Sounds ridiculous, but other scenarios are even more entertaining.
See more at http://www.pravdareport.com/world/americas/26-10-2018/141882-trump_assas...
one dead one for the corporate media...
"The mainstream media is actually covering the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of one of US allies who was brutally murdered by Saudi Arabia while in Turkey a few weeks ago. And the mainstream corporate media has been all over it 24/7.
"When I saw the mainstream media doing the right thing covering this murder, I was excited, I was thrilled and I was like: 'what exactly is going on here'?" Camp said.
Camp explained that he was puzzled over whether or not they were doing this because Khashoggi was a journalist. "So our pinheaded media hacks were finally able to see past their endless defense of Saudi Arabia and reveal the truth?"
But if that was the case, Camp suggested, "they would have extensively covered the intentional murder of a Palestinian journalist a few months ago in Gaza where they were wearing press across their chest and were still shot by snipers."
If US mainstream media cared about journalists, he continued, "they would have extensively covered the police shooting of reporter Erin Schrode in Standing Rock where, while on camera, she was intentionally shot with rubber bullets. Or they would have covered the arrests of journalists at the J20 protests or at Occupy Wall Street. They would be standing up for journalist Julian Assange."
"I'm not saying you can't find one mainstream story on some of those things I mentioned but none of them got a tiny fraction of the 24/7 Khashoggi treatment," Camp explained.
But why is the media doing this? Do they really have it in for Saudi Arabia and want to make them look bad?
READ MORE: Journalist hit with rubber bullet at DAPL protest (VIDEO)
"If that were the case, they would have covered any of the countless horrific acts by Saudi Arabia, a country that publicly beheads people for 'crimes' like being gay. As fairness and accuracy in reporting made clear, the mainstream media hardly mentions the Saudi perpetrated genocide in Yemen, supported by the US. They hardly talk about our massive weapons deals, which Trump was so proud of, he made his little crayon poster of it," he noted.
Read more:
https://www.rt.com/usa/442556-us-msm-khashoggi-murder/
As many as 49 journalists were killed around the world in the first six months of 2018, according to the International Press Institute (IPI)’s Death Watch.
IPI, a global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists for media freedom, has been compiling annual data on the killings of journalists since 1997, as part of its press freedom and safety of journalist programmes.
Twenty-two journalists – including 11 in Afghanistan and two in Palestine – have died in targeted killings this year, frequently in retaliation for their work on exposing corruption or the activities of crime syndicates. An additional 18 killings on IPI’s Death Watch are still under review to confirm links to journalistic activity, although circumstantial evidence in these cases points to targeted killings.
Four journalists were killed while covering conflicts or civil unrest, and another five died while on assignment. Of the 49 journalists killed, four were women.
Analysis of the data collected in the first six months shows that in many cases of targeted killings of journalists, investigations are slow, and the perpetrators have not been brought to justice.
“The impunity with which journalists have been murdered and the slow pace of investigations raise the question whether the deaths of journalists are probed thoroughly and urgently as they should be to protect press freedom”, IPI Head of Advocacy Ravi R. Prasad said.
Read more:
https://ipi.media/already-more-than-four-dozen-journalists-killed-in-2018/
According to the maths, by end of October, 2018, it can be estimated that more than 80 journalists have been killed this year alone, and about 74 before Kkashoggi's murder. 1322 journalists killed between 1992 and 2018, with an increasing yearly number...
end of war?...
On 30 October 2018, General James Mattis, the Defense Secretary, spoke at the US Institute of Peace and announced that it was his intention to put an end to the war in Yemen in less than 30 days.
Washington hopes that it will be supported by Martin Griffiths (United Kingdom). He is the Special Representative for the UN, Secretary General, and former director of the European Institute of Peace. The first president of this institution was Steffan de Mistura. He then went on to become the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Syria. The European Institute for Peace is the sister organization of its US homonym. Ronald Raegan established the US Institute at the same time as NED. The thinking: the US Peace Institute would be a special purpose vehicle for the Pentagon, just as the Ned was for the Pentagon.
Last week Martin Griffiths was received in Washington. He gave a long interview on the Saudi TV Channel, Al-Arabiya (photo). It seems that his mission is to help Saudi Arabia to clamber out of the cesspool a product of its own waste, in which it was drowning in Yemen. Yemen, like Afghanistan, is a country that has always resisted invaders and which has never been able to be occupied.
The words of Jim Mattis were immediately echoed by Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State.
This war is an initiative of Mohamed Ben Salmane who is both the Saudi Crown Prince and Saudi Minister of Defense. Its aim: to enable Saudi to pull the strings of the Yemen government. Why? so Saudi Arabia can exploit the oil reserves to be found in the region between the two countries. It was undertaken with Israel’s help as Israel and Saudi share a joint general staff in Somaliland. It seemed that up until now the Prince’s initiative was integrated into the Pentagon’s general strategy which was to destroy the state structures of the enlarged Middle East (Cebrowski Doctrine).
Translation
Anoosha Boralessa
Red more:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article203716.html
Read from top and see also:
admiral arthur cebrowski's middle-east...Is it possible that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was a catalyst to force the Saudis to deal with Washington about ending the war on Yemen? We'll see...
from the highest levels of the saudi government...
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday in a Washington Post op-ed that "we know that the order to kill [Jamal] Khashoggi came from the highest levels of the Saudi government."
"I do not believe for a second that King Salman, the custodian of the holy mosques, ordered the hit on Khashoggi," the Turkish president wrote Friday in the Post, a publication to which Saudi journalist Khashoggi contributed before he was killed in early October in Istanbul.
Erdogan stressed that in light of this, there was "no reason to believe that his murder reflected Saudi Arabia's official policy," so "it would be wrong to view the Khashoggi slaying as a 'problem' between two countries."
However, he also made clear that the friendship between Saudi Arabia and Turkey "doesn't mean we will turn a blind eye to the premeditated murder that unfolded in front of our very eyes."
Erdogan slammed the Saudi investigation thus far, noting "the efforts of certain Saudi officials to cover up Khashoggi's premeditated murder rather than serve the cause of justice."
Read more:
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201811021069465181-Erdogan-Khashoggi-...
Read from top.
fallen between the cracks...
Not much has been said about the murder of Khashoggi since the swift concerned ooohaaas at the start of the affair... The only positive result of this saga has been that Germany has stopped selling weaponry to the Saudis. The French and the other European countries — and the UK soon to become adrift of this august organisation — have condemned the Germans' move. So, what do the Germans know? Who knows...
At this stage, methink that looking at the details of this case could unearth smelly muds, not unlike that of altum statum... or stato profondo... or gladio... Governments don't want nasty gas bubles coming to the surface, do they?
Read from top.
not to mention jamal khashoggi...
Iranian journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan (photo) working for The Guardian has confirmed that Jamal Khashoggi was his informant. According to him, the latter’s revelations to him constituted the motive for the assassination of the Washington Post journalist (and member of the Muslim Brotherhood), on 2 October 2018 in Istanbul.
In October 2018, Saeed Kamali Dehghan published three articles spotlighting the Saudi connections of certain media [1]. He pointed out, in particular, that London-based Iran International TV is secretly funded by Saudi Arabia to the tune of $ 250 million.
The Persian language television channel was created just before the Iranian presidential election on 19 May 2017.
Ofcom, the UK broadcasting regulatory authority, became concerned about the stances taken by Iran International TV, especially its praise of the People’s Mujahedin and the Avaz Liberation Movement: two organizations which have claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks against the Islamic Republic and which are backed by Saudi Arabia.
Saeed Kamali Dehghan stated that the channel’s disinformation campaign was conducted by Saoud al-Qahtani on behalf of Prince Mohamed bin Salman. Al-Qahtani happens to be the same person who handled the purge in late 2017 at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and the interrogation to which Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri was subjected. He was also the person fingered by Turkey as the overseer of the Khashoggi assassination. He is currently said to be under house arrest in Riyadh.
Saeed Kamali Dehghan was trained through the George Soros networks. He made a documentary in 2009 for HBO purporting to show that the young Neda Agha-Soltan had been murdered by the secret services of the Islamic Republic during the demonstrations against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For his work, he received a Peabody Award and was named journalist of the year 2010 by the Foreign Press Association in the United Kingdom (sponsored by Qatar). In reality, the young Neda was not murdered by Iranian government agents during the protests, but was killed on her way to the hospital at the hands of her attending physician/agent [2].
Saeed Kamali Dehghan later cooperated with CNN, CBC, France 24, Channel 4, and subsequently was associated with Le Monde and the Guardian.
Since Khashoggi’s assassination, Her Majesty’s secret service has been doing its utmost to discredit him [Saeed Kamali Dehghan] and the Guardian has banned him from publishing anything on the subject [3].
Read more:
https://www.voltairenet.org/article209398.html
Read from top.
we shall certainly reach you...
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been accused of sending a hit-squad to Canada in order to kill a former Saudi intelligence official.
The failed plan to kill Saad al-Jabri was soon after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, court documents filed in the US allege.
Mr Jabri, a veteran of the government of Saudi Arabia, fled into exile three years ago.
He has been under private security protection in Toronto since.
The alleged plot failed after Canadian border agents became suspicious of the hit-squad as they attempted to enter the country at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, court documents say.
Mr Jabri, 61, was for years the key go-between for Britain's MI6 and other Western spy agencies in Saudi Arabia.
What does the complaint say?The 106-page unproven complaint, which was filed in Washington DC, accuses the crown prince of attempting to murder Mr Jabri in order to silence him.
Mr Jabri says this is down to him possessing "damning information". The document says this includes alleged corruption and overseeing a team of personal mercenaries labelled the Tiger Squad.
Members of the Tiger Squad were involved in the murder of dissident journalist Khashoggi, who was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, it says.
"Few places hold more sensitive, humiliating and damning information about defendant bin Salman than the mind and memory of Dr Saad - except perhaps the recordings Dr Saad made in anticipation of his killing," the document says.
"That is why defendant bin Salman wants him dead, and why defendant bin Salman has worked to achieve that objective over the last three years."
After fleeing Saudi Arabia ahead of a purge by the all-powerful crown prince in 2017, Mr Jabri fled to Canada via Turkey.
He alleges Mohammed bin Salman made repeated efforts to return him to Saudi Arabia, even sending private messages, including one that read: "We shall certainly reach you".
Read more:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53677869
Read from top.
still smiling.....
BY SARAH LEAH WHITSON
“You’ve got to leave the country, Jamal. You’ve got to get out before they arrest you too,” I told my friend, Jamal Khashoggi, just a few months before his fateful decision to leave his homeland in 2017.
Little did we know that rather than find safety in Washington D.C., Mohamed bin Salman and his henchmen would trick him into visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where they brutally tortured and murdered him. Little did we expect that five years after his shocking murder, the Biden administration would be potentially rewarding MBS with an unprecedented security guarantee for his monarchical dictatorship.
As a human rights advocate, this was not the first time I had urged someone to flee from an Arab regime, but the others were prominent activists long in conflict with their governments. Khashoggi was a long-time government insider, acting as spokesman for the Saudi embassy in Washington D.C., where we first met, before returning to serve as a journalist and editor in the Saudi media. We remained in touch over the years, and I saw his evolution during the Arab Uprisings of 2011, when he came to the firm conclusion that only democracy and the rule of law would secure stability and peace for the Middle East.
With the rise of King Salman and his son, Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), then merely the deputy crown prince, in 2015, repression in the country escalated dramatically. By 2017, they carried out mass arrests of the Kingdom’s leading reformers, religious leaders, journalists, and activists, even before the roundup and shakedown of hundreds of the country’s business and royal family leaders. After Khashoggi penned an article critiquing then-President Trump, MBS ordered him to stop writing and remain quiet.
Khashoggi faced a terrible choice: remain in the country effectively as a prisoner or flee. Initially, he refused to leave, sending me pictures of his grandchildren to explain why leaving the country would be too great a pain for him to bear. I argued and tried to persuade him: he could just take a temporary break, until things calmed down. Perhaps the King and MBS would relent in their repression, confident their rule was secure. Perhaps they would release those they had imprisoned, many of them Khashoggi's friends. But remaining in the country at that moment would be too great a danger. So Khashoggi finally relented and came to the United States, hoping that he would, indeed, one day return.
Khashoggi soon found himself with a global audience, and able to express his true voice in his writings for the Washington Post, where his columns provided the only independent Saudi counterpoint to the unfolding disasters under the country’s new rules, not just domestically but in MBS’s catastrophic war in Yemen. MBS and his cronies tried hard to persuade him to come back, promising to lavishly fund a center for him back in Riyadh. We laughed at the ham-handed pleading texts from Saud al-Qahtani, MBS’s top henchman, who would later go on to be the principal engineer of Khashoggi’s murder.
By 2018, Khashoggi knew he could never return so long as King Salman and MBS remained in power. He grieved his loss but understood that his principles required that he speak out, remarking, “I have left my home, my family, and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot.”
He told me about his plans to launch a new organization in Washington D.C., Democracy for the Arab World Now, because he understood the outsized role that the United States played in protecting and enabling the region’s dictatorships. He dreamed of a group that would challenge continued U.S. support for them. In June of 2018, he showed me his new business card as the Executive Director of DAWN. On October 2, 2018, MBS executed his plan to murder Khashoggi, hoping to silence him once and for all.
Following the global uproar over Khashoggi’s murder, the United States and Western governments around the world strongly condemned the murder, suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia and promised to hold the perpetrators accountable. Businesses ended their ties to the Kingdom, canceling contracts and returning Saudi government investments. Many believed that Khashoggi’s death would not be in vain, because at last, it would trigger a recalibration of Western protection for the violent, sociopathic Saudi leadership.
Such was the change in mood Khashoggi’s death triggered that Congress voted on three occasions to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and President Biden campaigned on a pledge to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder, to make them “pay the price, and make them the pariah that they are,” arguing that there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
Five years since Khashoggi’s murder, however, the United States and other Western governments are falling over themselves to woo Saudi Arabia and MBS. The twin sirens of Saudi’s billions in buying power — including the world’s largest arms purchases — and control over oil prices are too great to resist, and MBS has understood that the best way to bring the West to heel is to threaten closer ties to China.
In a remarkable turn of fate, the once globally reviled MBS finds himself lauded with awards in Pakistan, feted in Paris by President Macron, and invited for a state visit in London. Most dangerous of all, President Biden is now reportedly offering MBS the ultimate prize: a treaty-level security guarantee that commits American troops to protecting his dictatorship, purportedly as his reward for normalizing with Israel.
What’s so painful and disturbing about these developments isn’t just the failure of Western governments to stay true to their promises to hold MBS accountable for the murder of Khashoggi, or the murder of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, who continue to endure a Saudi blockade of their country. It’s their willingness to sell our values for short-term economic and political returns, whatever the costs to those who face increasing attacks by not just the Saudi government, but copy-cats like India.
With expanded Saudi acquisitions of Western businesses, cultural and sporting institutions, and even hundreds of former political and military officials, the message MBS is sending is that he can buy our democracies too.
Perhaps Western political leaders will come to their senses and understand the cost of acquiescing to tyrants like MBS is simply too high, not just tainting and humiliating our nations as we knowingly capitulate to a tyrant’s demands, but undermining the true our competitive edge — our freedoms and our rights. But the onus will rest, as it always must in our democracies, on the citizens of our countries to demand that we do better, for the people of the Middle East and the people of our own region.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/jamal-khashoggi/