Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi

JAKs conjectured demise is currently a major news item. My only interest in it is that is an example of how little Americans know or understand of what goes on in the world. The media controls what you are allowed to know.

I have lived in a different world than most of you and many of you discount what I say. Some of what I know isn’t reported elsewhere, not because it isn’t true, but because it is intentionally hidden or obscured. I have worked with military personnel from over a dozen countries. I also have known American civilians who work in foreign countries in official and unofficial capacities.

For this story, someone who unexpectedly missed our daughter’s funeral in late August, recently returned from an assignment in Turkey. That is all I will say about a source for this incident. I am sure some of it can be verified in the media, but not all of it. I’m not going to search for verification because it takes too much time. If this is a violation, just delete the thread.

This is a typical view of JAK from US media:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/did-the-saudis-murder-jamal-khashoggi

JAK has been presented to anyone reading US media as a liberal Saudi Arabian journalist. He is a Saudi Arabian journalist of Turkish descent. He has also worked for a Saudi Ambassador to the US. He also worked for Saudi Intelligence. He also is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He also was a friend of Osama bin Laden. He is a nephew of Adan Khashoggi, a major international arms dealer, who has been in the news several times. He is also a cousin of Mohammed al Fayed, the boyfriend of Princess Diana. JAKs close ties to the royal family date from his grandparent’s service to the Royal Family.

JAK had a complex relationship with bin Laden, who was a Saudi Prince, and his friends and relatives within the ruling family. You might remember the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi Arabian. He knew all of the connections and who funded what activities. This was sometimes a benefit to the monarchy and sometimes not.

JAK’s knowledge became a threat to Crown Prince Salman when he became close to Prince Alwaleed, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood who are struggling against Crown Prince Salman’s attempt to westernize Saudi Arabia. They also are against Salman’s attempts to suppress Islamic extremism in the Middle East, specifically Yemen, Qatar, Syria, Lebanon and most importantly, Iran. Turkey has come out in support of Qatar, as Turkey moves toward being an Islamic state.
Salman made significant early progress in his westernization.

JAK was probably assassinated for betraying the Saudi Monarchy. However, there is no conclusive proof. Keep in mind that both Turkey, where the incident took place, and Qatar, which Turkey supports and which has financed JAK’s recent career, have an interest in embarrassing Saudi Arabia and destabilizing Salman.

Americans want to judge other countries by US standards. Much of the world operates on different standards. The Middle East is mostly Islamic. Some countries have pushed out all Jews and all Christians. Islam requires killing apostates and their teachers. Islam requires persecution of homosexuals. Islam holds victims of rape responsible for their situation. Islam condones “honor” killing within a family. Public displays of affection (kissing) are a crime for which even foreigners go to jail. “Justice” in Islam is mostly controlled by tribal leaders enforcing their interpretation of Sharia law.

This is a recent story that is as close to the truth as you are ever likely to hear about US assassination teams:

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2018/10/16/uae-hired-american-death-squad-to-assassinate-yemeni-opposition

This is an older story about what was claimed to be the first US outsourced team, which implies earlier teams were in-house:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-terrifying-background-of-the-man-who-ran-a-cia-assassination-unit/259856/

Many countries use assassination teams as a part of their foreign policy. The Russians are the ones who get caught most often. Their activities in England make the news.

You will not hear much about the teams run by US government entities. I have known members of these teams. They exist and they take on missions that someone in the US government condones. I have known they existed since the Cold War era, but I assume they have always existed.

You will never convince me that JAK’s assassination was as tragic as the 1985 attempt by the CIA and British Intelligence to kill Fadlallah in Beirut. 80 innocent civilians died and 200 were injured. He was accused of plotting the bombing of the Marine barracks and 2 other bombings. 307 people died in the Marine barracks bombing.

The Marine barracks bombing, from an early report:

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/24/nyregion/monday-october-24-1983-bombings-in-beirut.html

The attempted Fadlallah assassination:

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/27/world/casey-reported-behind-85-lebanon-bombing.html

The court decision this year that wasn’t covered by the media:

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/beirut_barracks_bombing_victims_awarded_920m_judgment_against_iran

A good US-Saudi relationship is important to peace in the Middle East, which I hope comes someday. Salman has taken a stand against Iran and its activities in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. It also has identified Qatar as an enemy. Qatar was a financial supporter of JAK. Salman also wants a better relationship between Islam and Israel. If we act in a way that destabilizes Salman, Alwaleed’s faction is likely to return Saudi Arabia back to the country that created bin Laden and his fellow terrorists.

All of the noise coming out of Washington and the media has already caused numerous cancellations of Salman’s projects in the US. If this continues, it will be disastrous for the Middle East and US foreign policy.

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For another perspective:

Conservatives mount a whisper campaign smearing Khashoggi in defense of Trump

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In gratitude forever … .

V,

Your point is a non-sequitur to mine. Mine is that the media outrage is disproportionate to the assassination when you look at what governments, including my example of the US, do to their enemies. JAK was considered an enemy of the state by the Saudi government. Middle East justice can be harsh for things we don’t even consider crimes. This was business as usual, and far less horrific than the Beirut bombing by the CIA.

The WP article just looks like another anti-Trump slam that has nothing to do with reality. Of course, it created a chorus of similar stories. At about the same time even the NYT ran an article giving Trump credit for recognizing Saudi responsibility and repeating his threat to punish them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/us/politics/trump-khashoggi-dead.html

If you can't pass their paywall, try this similar story:

http://time.com/5428968/trump-believes-saudi-journalist-jamal-khashoggi-dead/

Trump has been consistent in his opinion that if the Saudi government is responsible, it should be punished. If anyone can cite a quote of him saying otherwise, I would like to see it. Only the future will tell, but I suspect he will foolishly go along with the media and treat this as a significant event, which is a serious mistake for US foreign policy and any hope for straightening out the mess in the Middle East his predecessors left behind.

Since the noise is elevating on this issue, I took some time to provide a little evidence of some of the information I passed on about JAK’s background.

The first is from the New Yorker and indicates JAK was linked to Turki Faisal who is a former head of Saudi Intelligence. JAK also worked for Faisal when he was Saudi Ambassador to Britain. It also points to JAK’s relationship to bin Laden. I would say JAK sounds like an apologist for bin Laden.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/09/11/the-master-plan

'Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who is currently the press aide to the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, Prince Turki al-Faisal, met Qatada and Suri in the early nineties. They struck him as far more radical than Osama bin Laden; at the time, Al Qaeda was primarily an anti-Communist organization. “Osama was in the moderate camp,” Khashoggi recalled recently. He coined the phrase “Salafi jihadis” to describe men, such as Abu Qatada and Suri, who had been influenced by Salafism, the puritanical, fundamentalist strain of Islam. “Osama was flirting with these ideas,” Khashoggi said. “He was not the one who originated the radical thinking that came to characterize Al Qaeda. He joined these men, rather than the other way around. His organization became the vehicle for their thinking.”'

This Huffington article indicates JAK’s relationship to Alwaleed. The Saudi government caused Bahrain to shut down their joint journalistic venture shortly after it started. Alwaleed was later arrested by Salman.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/faisal-abbas/saudi-prince-alwaleed-alarab_b_959969.html

This UK media article identified JAK as an “advisor to the government” in 2015, which indicates JAK's fall from grace occurred between 2015 and 2017 when he was aligned with Alwaleed as shown I the previous link.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/a-young-prince-may-cost-syria-and-yemen-dear-10156167.html

This 2017 NBC article identifies JAK’s link to Faisal:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/how-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-purged-rivals-n820141

There are other statements about his work for Saudi Intelligence, but not in a media outlet you would appreciate. The most credible is in a John Batchelor interview in the last week.

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Are you suggesting that the US should condone assassination of Journalists?

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The Vinyamars on Stage! This time at Bag End

The arguments that because our country has done bad things we should keep quiet when other countries do bad things is.... unconvincing to me.

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

At the very least, beat them up (or at least that is what Mr. Trump celebrated at his Montana rally, praising now Rep. Greg Gianforte for his assault on a journalist during his campaign).

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In gratitude forever … .

But then how will our $100 billion arms deal go through??

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When you can do nothing what can you do?

Voronwë, on of the very first things that made me turn against Trump was when he encouraged people at his campaign rallies to beat up people who were opposed to him, and he'd pay the medical bills.

Contrast this with Obama, who rebuked Hillary's supporters for trying to remove a protester from one of the democratic rallies:

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When the night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows,
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love, in the spring becomes The Rose.

What petty reactions to a serious subject. Of course I condone neither what happened to JAK nor to 80 innocnt Lebanese. The Obama administration assassinated targets in the Middle East, one of which inspired the revenge attack in Benghazi. Even the collateral damage probably wasn't something you were concerned about.

This is from a liberal media outlet, so it may not be trustworthy:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147

There were 41 assassination targets but 1,147 were killed, the vast majority during the Obama administration. Where was your outrage?

“President Obama needs to be straight with the American people about the human cost of this programme. If even his government doesn’t know who is filling the body bags every time a strike goes wrong, his claims that this is a precise programme look like nonsense, and the risk that it is in fact making us less safe looks all too real,”

What I am very strongly against is selective outrage.

Those of you concerned about Republican violence should think about Steve Scalise. The violence against Republicans is ridiculously disproportianate, which you probably haven't noticed. Antifas is an international terrorist organizatin that liberals in this country have embraced.

From an Antifas protest in Europe:



A more recent attack in the US on a Republican candidate:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2018/09/12/ill-show-you-man-allegedly-tried-stab-gop-candidate-after-ranting-about-trump/?utm_term=.536ab37dea05

Does poison count as violence? Ricin sent to Trump, Mattis, and Richardson:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/02/politics/pentagon-ricin-mail/index.html

Trick or treat? I couldn't find this in the NYT or WP:

https://bangordailynews.com/2018/10/15/news/bangor/police-presence-at-collins-bangor-home-monday-afternoon-after-suspicious-letter-received/



Am I allowed to say you condoned a Bernie Sanders supporter's attempt to kill Republican Senators?

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Who is "you"?

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

I accept that neither side is blameless. The clergy in Charlottesville would have been beaten to a pulp if Antifa hadn't stepped in to help:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ville.html

The clergy were doing their best to protest non-violently. As you can tell from this photo the white supremacists had an entirely different agenda:

_________________
When the night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows,
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love, in the spring becomes The Rose.

There was an article I saw earlier this morning by a widow of the 9/11 attack, saying how Obama had blocked their efforts to bring sanctions against Saudi Arabia for the attacks. I can't find that specific article, but what she said is true:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-vet ... di-arabia/

And of course, she pointed out that only now, with the death of ONE journalist, is the U.S. taking any action against the Saudis.

_________________
When the night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows,
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love, in the spring becomes The Rose.

First - I merely explained why JAK might have been assassinated, why this isn’t unusual in the Middle East, and that even our own government has done far worse. Normally, this would not have raised much attention but as an anti-Trump tool, it has ballooned to the worst crisis since Kavanaugh. This is in spite of Trump saying exactly what the media wishes he would say.

I neither condoned the assassination or condemned it. I just explained what happened. I was then asked if I condoned it. I wasn’t asked if I condemned it. Yes, I have stopped beating my wife.

Second - So, do you (whoever you are) condone Obama’s killing of a thousand innocent people?

Third - That’s a great picture for use in describing what happened in Charlottesville.

This is an NPR article about the official report on Charlottesville.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/01/567824446/charlottesville-made-major-mistakes-in-handling-protest-review-finds

 Charlottesville Police and Virginia State Police did not sufficiently coordinate their plans. On August 12, their officers could not communicate over the radio with one another because they were on different channels.
 Police did not adequately separate conflicting groups, which led to physical altercations.
 Police commanders instructed their officers not to intervene in all but the most serious physical confrontations. They prepared to respond to violence by declaring an unlawful assembly and dispersing the crowd.
 Once unlawful assembly was declared, police efforts to disperse the crowd generated more violence, as conflicting groups were pushed toward each other.

This isn’t inaccurate but is somewhat watered down.

Before the gathering, the local police were told by the mayor not to arrest anyone without his permission. Both sides criticized the police and, after the report, the Chief resigned.

At first, crowd control was the responsibility of the local police. They seem to have done their job. The picture you used shows the radical right facing the stage. Behind them on the edge of the road are the clerics. Behind them, which you don’t see in the picture, is a line of local police separating the radical left from the clerics and the radical right. Things went well until Governor Terry McAuliffe told the mayor the State Police were going to take over. This is the point at which “unlawful assembly” was declared. McAuliffe told the mayor to withdraw his police. The State Police lined up behind the stage and move forward toward the road you see in the picture. This forced the radical right and the clerics into the radical left on the other side of the road. That created a confrontation between the two radical groups with the remaining clerics caught in the middle.

In the 1970s, as a senior NCO, I held military training sessions on crowd control. What the governor ordered, and the State Police did, violates every rule of crowd control. The main objective is to keep the 2 groups separated and force them to move in different directions.

This is a CNN report of the opinion of the New York BLM president:

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/police-response-charlottesville-trnd/index.html

"The police actually allowed us to square off against each other," Newsome said. "There were fights and the police were standing a block away the entire time. It's almost as if they wanted us to fight each other."

That is just one real oddity of Charlottesville. The strangest thing is the rally organizer, Jason Kessler. From the very biased SPLC file on him:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/jason-kessler

‘Detractors point to involvement in the Occupy movement around 2011 and past support for President Obama. An individual who knew Kessler during his involvement with Occupy alleged Kessler had shown up at then-Lee Park with “his own tent and literature,” and noted Kessler was eventually voted out of the group for advocating violence against police using bricks and Molotov cocktails.’

Kessler’s “conversion” took place in November 2016 days after Hillary lost the election. He immediately began a very public campaign against the Democrat mayor for the mayor’s “sexist, homophobic, and bigoted tweets”. His accusations seem to have been accurate and were carried on national media.

Kessler has been ostracized by the radical right, as reported in an SPLC article:

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/08/07/unite-right-2-approaches-few-big-names-expected-rally-amid-lots-questions-about-size

“Many major players in the first rally — alt-right golden boy Richard Spencer, the League of the South, Radical Agenda podcaster Christopher Cantwell and multiple militia groups — have all very publicly distanced themselves from Kessler…”

It’s difficult to know which side he was really on.

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Personally, I thought that some of the killings that happened under the Obama Administration were appalling. But I also think the comparisons are a profoundly false moral equivalent - to my knowledge, the administration never purposefully targeted innocent civilians. This is not to excuse appalling cases of "collateral damage" and the like, but I do think it is a significant and meaningful difference.

_________________
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

Idylle, yeah, I heard about the crowd control at Charelottesville being a real clusterf***. What would have made the most sense would have been for police to prevent ANYONE from getting to the monument, and keeping the different factions separate. Did not happen, unfortunately.

I also am aware Antifa has done some horrible things in Europe, and have heard stories about them doing it in Berkeley, too. However, the Berkely story was from a person who had links to White Power FB pages on his feed, so am skeptical about that one. The video footage showed people dressed in black with black face masks with no identifying logos beating people up. It could have been ANY group with an agenda.

Last time I saw something like that on FB, the poster claimed it was Muslims behaving badly. Turned out it was French taxi drivers rioting over the government allowing Uber (or something similar) to steal rides from them! Fortunately, the internet makes it fairly easy to fact check stuff like this - I just haven't bothered to do it for the Berkeley riots.

As humans, we like everything to be black vs. white/good vs. evil but the real word is rarely that simple. Yes, what happened to Khashoggi is horrible, and bringing sanctions against the Saudis seems like the right/moral thing to do, but as you pointed out, what will be the long term consequences of doing so?

_________________
When the night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows,
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love, in the spring becomes The Rose.

I got you covered.
viewtopic.php?p=331732#p331732

You will note that, although the explicitly stated purpose of the Nazi visitors was to incite a riot, and although the Black Bloc is usually only too happy to oblige, the day was quite peaceful. And no one brought a bone saw.

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“I am not so blind that I can't see darkness.”
Dangerous Beans
Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Ah, okay, so the people dressed all in black were the Black Bloc. That makes sense now. They deliberately hide their faces to avoid arrest.

But this thread is about Khashoggi, so enough about them. I just want to say there are times when I hate labels. Yes, I am anti-Fascist. My parents were part of the generation that fought Hitler - what else could I be? (Seriously, what else could ANY sane person be??) Does that mean I'm going to be labelled Antifa?? I sure as hell hope not!

Edit:

Missed that on first reading... nearly splurted my coffee on the screen!

_________________
When the night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows,
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love, in the spring becomes The Rose.

Can someone explain to me why -- in a thread about someone who reportedly was dismembered -- this is funny? Because I'm afraid to me it is just the opposite.

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In gratitude forever … .

It's black humor, Voronwë. It's funny because it's so awful, and I wasn't expecting it.
Funny and horrible at the same time.

_________________
When the night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows,
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love, in the spring becomes The Rose.

I would prefer that that kind of humor be avoided in this forum, particularly in a serious discussion about a heinous crime. I'm not saying it violates any "rules" but I personally find it very distressing.

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In gratitude forever … .