MBS’s rampaging anger will not silence questions about Jamal Khashoggi

Inside his royal palace in Riyadh, Mohammed bin Salman is said to have alternated between dark brooding and rampaging anger in the days after the death of Jamal Khashoggi, as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, or MBS, as he is widely known, looked for someone to blame for what Turkish officials have said was the journalist’s grisly murder.

One possible scapegoat, according to several sources, may be Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the deputy chief of Saudi intelligence. Assiri “has made numerous approaches to MBS on taking actions against Khashoggi and others,” said one source who is familiar with Western intelligence reports.

The U.S. government learned last month that Assiri was planning to create a “tiger team” to conduct covert special operations, I’m told, though officials didn’t know the targets. U.S. intelligence also learned, but only after Khashoggi’s disappearance after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, that the crown prince had told his subordinates this summer that he wanted Khashoggi and other Saudi dissidents brought home.

The swirling reports and recriminations surfaced as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the kingdom on Tuesday and urged King Salman and his son to conduct a “transparent” investigation of the disappearance of Khashoggi, a Post contributing columnist. But such efforts to seek a tidy solution will face rising skepticism in Congress, epitomized by the blast on Tuesday from Sen.?Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) that “he [MBS] had this guy murdered.”

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, urged MBS last weekend to organize an investigation that could identify the culprit responsible for Khashoggi’s death, two sources told me. The next day, after speaking with the Saudi king, the president said he thought “rogue killers” within Saudi Arabia’s government may have been responsible, seemingly telegraphing a fall-guy strategy.

The emerging Saudi narrative appears to be that the palace authorized Khashoggi’s arrest and interrogation but not his murder. This version has some obvious holes: If the goal was “rendition” back to Saudi Arabia (as it is politely termed), then why interrogate him in Istanbul? And why did a forensics expert allegedly join the 15-man Saudi team photographed arriving at Istanbul airport? Finally, will such a Saudi account hold up under intense scrutiny by Congress, the media and, perhaps, U.S. courts?

The Khashoggi case isn’t the first time the palace allegedly attempted to kidnap a critic. After one prominent Saudi criticized aspects of the crown prince’s plan to privatize Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, in a meeting abroad with potential foreign investors, a Saudi plane arrived along with an official who allegedly tried to arrest the man as a terrorist. He escaped and is now living outside the kingdom. But the message was clear: Challenging MBS was risky.

The darkening mood inside MBS’s palace in recent months shows a crown prince facing economic pressure and tightening his circle of advisers.
MBS’s key counselor is said to have been Saud al-Qahtani, the crown prince’s media adviser but also increasingly his consigliere in the kingdom’s battles with foreign adversaries such as Qatar and Iran as well as domestic critics. Like his boss, Qahtani is considered young and headstrong.

Qahtani organized interviews with MBS for visiting foreign journalists. But sources say he was quietly assuming a larger role overseeing strategy in social media, which the Saudis (like the Russians) view as a domain of war. Qahtani’s headquarters was a special “Center for Studies and Media Affairs,” operating inside the royal court without supervision from other ministries. It became, in part, a domestic snooping operation, sources say.

Qahtani is a demon in Saudi Twitter debates, with 1.3 million followers and barbed messages to dissenters. He has created a hashtag with the Arabic term for “Black List,” and he urges Saudis to report enemies of the kingdom. His opponents in Qatar refer to Qahtani’s followers (perhaps including automated bots) as an “Army of Flies.” U.S.?officials believe that, in addition to seeking dominance in social media, Qahtani and other advisers have helped MBS use the latest and most?aggressive hacking techniques against adversaries.

MBS’s tight inner circle has helped him push modernization efforts, such as reducing the power of the religious police, allowing women to drive and opening movie theaters and other public entertainment. But his team of palace advisers has often amplified, rather than challenged, the crown prince’s worst impulses.

This breakdown was evident immediately after Khashoggi’s disappearance, when official Saudi statements were all happy talk. Behind the scenes, says one knowledgeable source, “MBS went into a funk for several days after learning of Khashoggi’s death before re-emerging on a rampage of anger around what happened and trying to figure out a response.”

Adding to MBS’s anxiety in the weeks before Khashoggi’s disappearance was the erosion of his big plans to boost the Saudi economy. In August, the kingdom delayed indefinitely its push to privatize Saudi Aramco, which MBS had hoped would raise more than $100 billion. That same month, plans for a big investment in the automaker Tesla cratered. An investment deal with the Japanese company Softbank also hit a snag.

Surrounded by yes-men who saw suppressing dissent as part of a media war, and rattled by the reversal of his dreams for economic reform, MBS moved toward the fateful moment when Khashoggi entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. When the brave journalist opened the door, he began a catastrophic process that has now put MBS’s own future in question. Putting a lid on a murder investigation won’t be easy, even for the brashly confident crown prince.

(Source: Washington Post)

The beginning of Trump’s unravelling may be at hand

By Martin Love

You have to wonder about the Saudis who, aside from the Zionists, are considered the number one U.S. ally in the Middle East. And the latest incarnation of Saudi Arabia’s “leadership” is Muhammad bin Salman, the designated crown prince of the Kingdom, who for stupidity may know no equal at the moment.

There are many ways to assassinate anyone. Heaven knows long beleaguered Iranians know about this, who have seen a few of its nuclear energy scientists, for example, murdered in recent years, most likely by the Zionists or their paid shills. But to directly lure journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi into a Saudi consulate in Istanbul from whence he apparently never left, except perhaps literally in pieces, has to be about the dumbest move “MBS” may have ordered to date. And we know a number of Saudi henchmen were in all likelihood dispatched from Riyadh on a Gulfstream jet to do the dirty deed. Maybe the world will never know for sure what happened to Khashoggi, that he or dismembered parts of him may never turn up, but connecting the dots could hardly be much easier to reach a plausible explanation.

Khashoggi, in any event, is widely admired as an Arab journalist, and a fearless one, who was a writer committed to finding and reporting the truth, regardless of any threat to himself in doing so. But what’s most interesting now is that one might be able to conjecture the beginning of some serious changes in Western attitudes towards leading Middle East countries, namely Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Saudis have in recent years been the Mideast darlings of the Western establishment and the Trump gang. To the extent Saudi Arabia falls from favor, Iran may benefit – not that Iran literally NEEDS favor with the U.S. except to the extent that the U.S. stop meddling in Iranian affairs and trying to wreck its economy.

Trump is currently under pressure by many in the U.S. Congress to completely condemn Khashoggi’s disappearance and probable murder by MBS, and even to stop selling arms to the Saudis and to disavow support for the Saudi and U.A.E. war on Yemen.

Trump’s first reaction to the story coming out of Istanbul was to downplay Khashoggi and point to the lucrative arms sales to the Saudis. (You can’t get more venal than that, but it’s entirely within character for Trump`, who loves nothing so much as money.) And even his ignorant son, Donald Jr., who likes shooting African wildlife on “safari”, has gotten into the act. He’s been trying to say Khashoggi supported Islamic terrorism, pointing to a 1988 photo of Khashoggi holding a RPG with some al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Do you think young Donald realizes that in 1988 the U.S. was in full support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and at the time al-Qaeda was not deemed a “terrorist” group but rather a group of freedom fighters trying to liberate Afghanistan from the grip of the Soviet Union? One conservative website in the U.S. has even gone so far as to claim that Khashoggi’s defenders and supporters are being duped by Iranian “interests” looking to damage relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. This, of course, implies that damage to relations with the Saudis does benefit Iran.

In any case, as sad as Khashoggi’s disappearance and probable murder is, for he is or was a respected and brave journalist, there are other factors at work that may also mark the beginning of the unraveling of Trump’s credibility and his Presidency, as at least with the upcoming midterm elections in early November, a shift to a Democratic Party majority at least in the U.S. House of Representatives. Consider:

The forced installation of Brett Kavanaugh by the GOP and Trump onto the U.S. Supreme Court, according to many leading law experts in the U.S., has virtually destroyed what used to be the most venerable and respected court anywhere, because now it is an unreliable, partisan court.

This month the U.S. markets for both bonds and stocks came tumbling down some. Not much, but enough to scare investors who for almost a decade have seen nothing but rising stock and bond values. Trump of late has been crowing that his economic policies gave rise to the rising market values. But he got a lot of egg on his face this past week, and tried to deflect blame onto the Federal Reserve Bank for raising interest rates And before he was elected and campaigning in 2016, Trump was claiming the U.S. markets were in a “bubble”!

There are, in fact, a number of other issues coming to the fore suggesting that Trump’s glory days may end sooner or later, and that with a current “approval” rating of only about 38 percent of Americans, that number could fall dramatically in the months ahead.

As an observer, I have written time and again of the necessity for patience and forbearance, not merely by Americans disgusted with Trump, but by Iranians disgusted with the U.S., too. No question Iran looks more and more like the state Saudi Arabia may wish it could be, and don’t forget Trump himself dissed the Saudis this month saying that they would not last more than two weeks without U.S. support. The Islamic Republic of Iran has lasted for decades with nothing but venom and cruelty from the U.S. That is saying quite much. 

Martin Love