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The murder of Jamal Khashoggi


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This deserves its own thread.  This happens just weeks before the midterms and there are a lot of links between high-ranking people in the Trump administration.

 

 

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Audio Offers Gruesome Details of Jamal Khashoggi Killing, Turkish Official Says

ISTANBUL — His killers were waiting when Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago. They severed his fingers and later beheaded and dismembered him, according to details from audio recordings described by a senior Turkish official on Wednesday.

 

Mr. Khashoggi was dead within minutes, and within two hours the killers were gone, the recordings suggested.

 

The leaking of such details, on the same day Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was visiting Turkey, reflected an escalation of pressure by the Turkish government on Saudi Arabia and the United States for answers on the fate of Mr. Khashoggi, a prominent dissident journalist who wrote for The Washington Post.

 

Fifteen days after he entered the consulate in Istanbul and was never seen coming out, the Saudis have yet to give an explanation.

 

After he was shown into the office of the Saudi consul, Mohammad al-Otaibi, the agents seized Mr. Khashoggi almost immediately and began to beat and torture him, eventually cutting off his fingers, the senior Turkish official said.

 

“Do this outside. You will put me in trouble,” Mr. al-Otaibi, the consul, told them, according to the Turkish official and a report in the Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak, both citing audio recordings said to have been obtained by Turkish intelligence.

 

“If you want to live when you come back to Arabia, shut up,” one of the agents replied, according to both the official and the newspaper.

 

As they cut off Mr. Khashoggi’s head and dismembered his body, a doctor of forensics who had been brought along for the dissection and disposal had some advice for the others, according to the senior Turkish official.

 

But the leaks appeared to resume on Wednesday after Saudi leaders repeated their denials of involvement to Mr. Pompeo, and Mr. Trump defended the crown prince as having been unfairly accused.

 

 

 

 

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All I want is for the people who mocked Obama for bowing to them to treat Trump the same way. They are the only people who can put pressure on Trump, whose response to this so far is disgusting. He’s signaling to the world that we will look the other way, even if they murder people who live in the U.S.

 

Coincidentally, Trump is one of the people who mocked Obama for bowing to them.

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5 minutes ago, teachercd said:

This story confuses me...why did he go back there?  Maybe I don't get it but he left and was already sort of on a list...but he went back?  

He went to a Saudi consulate in Turkey, apparently to get some documents for his wedding. That's why this thing involves the Turkish government. He didn't go back to Saudi Arabia.

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2 minutes ago, ZRod said:

He went to a Saudi consulate in Turkey, apparently to get some documents for his wedding. That's why this thing involves the Turkish government. He didn't go back to Saudi Arabia.

Ahhh, thanks!

 

1.  I could not imagine what it would be like to have your fingers cut off

2.  I hope they killed him THEN dismembered him for his sake

 

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Ooof x 1000.

 

This is where naked transactionalism as foreign policy fails. This seems a whole lot like out and out bribery to look the other way. I wasn't aware Trump was still using Kavanaugh to defend his weakness, though.

 

 

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Over the summer, the Saudi Arabian government promised the Trump administration $100 million for the U.S.’s efforts to stabilize parts of Syria liberated from the Islamic State, a coup for Donald Trump, who regularly complains about other countries not coughing up enough money on defense. But despite the pledge, one official involved in Syria policy toldThe New York Times that it was unclear when, if ever, the money would actually materialize in American bank accounts. But as luck would have it, just this past Tuesday, it did—the same day Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Riyadh to get some answers on the fate of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and dissident who entered the kingdom’s consulate in Turkey on October 2 and was never seen again. Some people have dismissed the notion that the two events are connected—“The specific transfer of funds has been long in process and has nothing to do with other events or the secretary’s visit,” Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, told the Times. But others aren’t so convinced!
 

“The timing of this is no coincidence,” the American official working on Syria policy told the Times on Tuesday. “In all probability, the Saudis want Trump to know that his cooperation in covering for the Khashoggi affair is important to the Saudi monarch,” Joshua Landis, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, surmised to The Washington Post. “Much of its financial promises to the U.S. will be contingent on this cooperation.” Coincidentally, the $100 million hit the U.S. accounts on the same day Trump stepped up his defense of the kingdom, telling the Associated Press that what we have here is another case of “guilty until proven innocent,” which is exactly what happened with Brett Kavanaugh,who the president believes is “innocent all the way.” Trump also informed his Twitter followers that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman maintains he knows nothing about nothing, and if you can’t trust the word of the guy who imprisoned his own cousins, who can you trust?

 

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Here is his final column.

 

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I was recently online looking at the 2018 “Freedom in the World” report published by Freedom House and came to a grave realization. There is only one country in the Arab world that has been classified as “free.” That nation is Tunisia. Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait come second, with a classification of “partly free.” The rest of the countries in the Arab world are classified as “not free.”

 

As a result, Arabs living in these countries are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative. Sadly, this situation is unlikely to change.

 

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/jamal-khashoggi-what-the-arab-world-needs-most-is-free-expression/2018/10/17/adfc8c44-d21d-11e8-8c22-fa2ef74bd6d6_story.html?utm_term=.5f09f9d20b38

 

 

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Two days after Donald Trump’s election, Jamal Khashoggi returned to the Red Sea port city of Jeddah from Washington where he’d given a foreign-policy talk lightly critical of then president-elect Trump, when he received a phone call from the media adviser to the kingdom’s ascendent deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, better known by his initials M.B.S. “He said, ‘You’re not allowed to tweet or write your column or give comments to foreign journalists,’” Khashoggi recalled to me in March 2018. “I was ordered silent.”

 

As a member of the Saudi elite for decades, Khashoggi understood that political expression had strict limits in the kingdom, but M.B.S.’s apparent determination to quell even mild dissent on foreign soil left Khashoggi unnerved. Ten months later, in September 2017, he fled to Washington. “I began to feel whatever narrow space I had in Saudi Arabia was getting narrower. I thought it would be better to get out and be safe,” he told me.

 

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/how-jamal-khashoggi-fell-out-with-bin-salman

 

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