Nothing from the CIA should be taken as gospel. In fact, it should be treated with utomost skepticism. For what it’s worth, the CIA now apparently believes Mohammad bin Salman was behind Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
With Turkey’s graphic recording of Khashoggi’s final moments finally in the hands of US intelligence agencies, the Washington Postjust confirmed what the New York Times first hinted at more than one month ago: That US intelligence agencies believe that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in what is just the latest example of the Trump administration and its intelligence agencies working at cross purposes (the first being, of course, the investigations that eventually coalesced into the Mueller probe).
But instead of focusing on the recording of Khashoggi’s murder, the CIA is reportedly in possession of another piece of evidence that it believes incriminates the Crown Prince: A phone call made by Khalid bin Salman, MbS’s brother and the kingdom’s ambassador to the US, to Khashoggi, during which he promised the journalist that he wouldn’t be harmed if he visited the Saudi embassy in Istanbul to pick up the paper needed to marry his Turkish fiance.
Iran’s position is stronger than it was in 2012 when Obama imposed sanctions. From Tom Luongo at strategic-culture.org:
Sanctions may indeed be coming but will they have the bite that Donald Trump is hoping for? It’s a good question as we open November with a flurry of edicts from Trump’s State and Treasury Departments.
Let’s go over them all and see just how contradictory they are while at the same time acceding to the reality of just how much the world has changed in the six years since President Obama first went nuclear on Iran with sanctions.
It starts with Trump’s tweet that “Sanctions are Coming.” Okay, fine we knew this. But sanctions don’t account for much if the State Department is handing out 180 day waivers to countries.
Next up was Pompeo saying on the same day that no less than eight countries would be exempt from sanctions for buying oil from Iran.
A little news for Mike Pompeo, Halloween was last week.
Contrast this with 2012 where India, for example, to get around the sanctions had to essentially barter to get much needed Iranian oil, because no such exemption was forthcoming.
Russia, Turkey, Germany and France are shaping the peace in Syria without the US and Britain. From a Strategic Culture Foundation editorial at strategic-culture.org:
There were several takeaways from the recent Quadrilateral Summit in Istanbul on finding a peaceful settlement to the war in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin convened with his counterparts from Turkey, Germany and France for a two-day summit last weekend in a convivial and constructive atmosphere.
The four powers signed a communique emphasizing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria. It was Putin who underscored the inviolability of the Syrian government of President Assad as the internationally recognized authority in the Arab country. The communique also endorsed the right of the Syrian nation to self-determination over the future political settlement, free from external interference.
These principles have been stated before in a previous UN Security Council Resolution 2254. But it seems more than ever that the sovereignty of Syria has been widely accepted. Recall that not too long ago, Turkey and France were calling for President Assad to stand down. That demand is no longer tenable, at least as far as the four powers attending the Istanbul summit are concerned.
That the US, which kills indiscriminately around the world, generally without consequences, expresses “outrage” over Jamal Khashoggi’s murder amounts to nothing more than hypocrisy. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:
The angst over the Jamal Khashoggi murder in the Saudi Arabian Consulate General building in Istanbul is already somewhat fading as the media has moved on in search of fresh meat, recently focusing on the series of attempted mail bombings, and currently on the mass shooting in Pittsburgh. But the affaire Khashoggi is still important as it potentially brings with it possible political realignments in the Middle East as well as in Europe as countries feel emboldened to redefine their relationship with Saudi Arabia.
The Turks know exactly what occurred in the Consulate General building and are now putting the squeeze on the Saudis, requiring them to fess up and no doubt demanding compensation. Some sources in Turkey believe that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will actually demand recreation of the Caliphate, which the Kemal Ataturk led Turkish Republic’s government abolished in 1924. That would diminish Saudi Arabia’s ability to regard itself as the pre-eminent Islamic state due to its guardianship over the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. It would be a major realignment of the Islamic umma and would be akin to a restoration of some semblance of Ottoman supremacy over the region.
The Jamal Khashoggi murder is helping Turkey in its rivalry with Saudi Arabia. From Burak Bekdil at gatestoneinstitute.org:
Turkey, pursuing its own Islamist agenda and trying to rival Saudi influence in the Sunni world, is just too happy to have discredited the Wahhabi royals.
Turkey’s message to the Western world was: See the difference between our peaceful Islamism and rogue-state Islamism? Stop discrediting us for our democratic deficit — also, presumably, for “only” imprisoning more than 100 journalists there.
Turkey, pursuing its own Islamist agenda and trying to rival Saudi influence in the Sunni world, is just too happy to have discredited the Wahhabi royals in the wake of the Jamal Khashoggi killing. Pictured: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (left) greets Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz on November 15, 2015 in Antalya, Turkey. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
It looked like a first-class spy thriller: A prominent writer enters the Saudi consulate in Istanbul but never leaves the building. Saudi officials said he left the building but could not offer footage from security cameras. When they did, the image was of a dark-haired body-double dressed in the writer’s clothes.
Should America’s foreign policy be driven by its potential effects on the stock market? That such a question can be seriously asked shows how out of whack things are. From David Stockman at antiwar.com:
During an appearance on Fox Business yesterday we were asked about the Khashoggi affair and whether any intemperate response by Washington might inconvenience the party kids’ reviling on Wall Street. Perhaps we were having a bad hair day, but the question did trigger a fairly intemperate response on our part.
For crying out loud, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) is hands down the most murderous thug operating on the middle eastern stage at the moment, and he’s got a lot of competition for the title.
For instance, last month General al-Sisi apparently spent some of the $1.5 billion Washington sends him each year to run a show trial against 700 Egyptians who have been in jail the past five years for protesting his bloody 2013 coup against Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Mursi.
Their sin, of course, was that they had exercised the right of free speech – which supposedly the Arab Spring had conferred upon them – in order to affiliate with the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter is the scourge of tyrants and greedy monarchs throughout the Islamic world; and is especially loathed by the House of Saud, which may explain a thing or two about the missing body parts of Mr. Khashoggi, who was also an outspoken brotherhood adherent.
In any event, 75 of these protesters are to be awarded the hangman’s noose, and the rest a long stay in General al-Sisi’s hospitality suites, which are widely understood to be not all that.
Still, that ain’t nothin’ compared to the virtual genocide that MBS has conducted against Yemen. And there the body parts in question are the fragments of Yemeni civilians – frequently women and children – who get in the way of MBS’ Washington supplied and targeted bombs, drones, shells and bullets; or who simply drop dead from starvation and the worst outbreak of cholera in recent times.
According to Save the Children, upwards of 50,000 children died from hunger and disease in 2017 alone, while the UN estimates that at least 16,000 civilians have been killed or maimed by the Saudi air attacks.
So we called a spade a spade on the matter, only to have our Fox host retort as follows:
“…..not making a judgment on the moral right or wrong of the matter…but if we crack down hard with sanctions and such, are you telling us you don’t think there is a financial market impact?”
Of course that wasn’t what we were saying. But what we were thinking was: Really?
Apparently this Foxified stock market cult-boy assumes even America’s foreign policy should be driven by the divine right of the casino to be pleasured by rising stock prices each and every day.
Then again, it looks like Fox’s greatest Fan-boy is slouching in the same direction and for the same reason. That is, to keep what he has now embraced as the Trump Bubble levitated come hell or high water.
As the Middle East Eye noted this morning, it would appear that Jared Kushner and/or the Donald have seized upon a solution. Namely, that the hotheaded 33-year old MBS, who has created the greatest murder spectacle since O.J. Simpson’s wild ride in the Bronco, could benefit from the steadying hand of, well, his 28-year old brother, Khalid bin Salman!
“In DC the talk is about Khalid becoming a deputy crown prince to show the world that MBS is basically opening up his autocratic and self-centered leadership to include others and create more accountability.
We don’t know whether this prospective Salman Brothers duo can make the Istanbul Bonesaw Massacre go away or not, or keep the stock market rising on its appointed ascent. But we can at least hope the MBS contretemps will stir a modicum of thought in the Imperial City about the larger issue involved.
Namely, that the biggest state sponsor of terror in the Middle East is Saudi Barbaria, not the Iranians. And that the house of Saud’s corrupt bargain with its own medieval Wahhabi clerics is the true source of jihadi terrorism in the region, not the Shiite/Alawite communities of Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The truth of the matter is that it was the Iran-led Shiite coalition – with the help of the Russian Air Force – which essentially extinguished the barbaric Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
So not only has Washington long been on the wrong side of the Shiite/Sunni divide, but owing to the Donald and Jared’s bromance with MBS, the Trump administration has taken the US right off the deep-end with its vicious attack on the Iran nuke deal and the ruling regime in Tehran.
And that’s the real evil being perpetrated by MBS. His infantile yet bloodthirsty vendetta against Iran is the driving force behind much that roils the middle east at present.
Thus, MBS’ political and economic attack on Qatar was motivated not only by the Muslim Brotherhood friendly policies of its ruler, but more especially by Qatar’s friendly relations and diplomatic recognition of Iran, with which it shares the largest natural gas field in the world.
Likewise, he recently kidnapped, roughly interrogated and humiliated Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon for being too soft on Hezbollah. Never mind that the latter controls the largest bloc in Lebanon’s parliament and is a participant in the nation’s constitutionally prescribe three-way split of power – wherein the Shiite elect the Speaker of the Parliament, the Sunnis name the Prime Minister and the Chrisitians select the country’s President.
But none of this mattered because MBS is determined to confront Tehran and its allies from one end of the Mideast to the other. And that’s the real reason for his genocidal attack on Yemen.
The latter is among the poorest, most industrially backward redoubts in the entire world and doesn’t remotely have the capacity to threaten Riyadh. Its GDP of just $18 billion or a paltry $650 per capita is less than 3% of Saudi’s stupendous oil-fueled GDP, which funds the fourth largest military budget in the world.
And now Yemen’s polity has been completely shattered, too, by civil war and the relentless Saudi bombing campaigns.
The west and north are controlled by the Houthi government, which sized power during 2015 in the country’s capital city of Sana’a. So doing, they inherited a large cache of American weapons left behind by the fleeing official government.
At the same time, the south and east are fragmented between former President’s Hadi’s Saudi puppet government and regions controlled by al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and various tribal potentates and small time warlords – some or all of whom are warring with each other as well as with the Houthi.
In a sane world it would be instantly obvious that America has no dog in this fratricidal bloodletting in one of the true armpits of the planet. But the Houthis, who have long dominated their region of the country, practice a form of Shiite Islam. In turn, that makes them a confessional ally of Iran and therefore a convenient target for MBS’ proxy war on Tehran.
That’s the sum and substance of the Yemen catastrophe: It’s a genocide launched three years ago by the then 30-year old Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia and son of its dementia-enfeebled king for no other purpose than to kick the Iranians in the shins.
But one thing has led to another – including the aforementioned bromance of the Donald and his son-in-law with a reckless power-hungry young tyrant who has gotten the White House to fall hook, line and sinker for his anti-Iranian agenda. And that didn’t take much doing – since Bibi Netanyahu had already polluted their thin grasp of the region with his own demonization of Tehran.
The irony is palpable. The boys and girls on Wall Street may get by accident that which they desperately do not want: Namely, a material oil outage in the Persian Gulf and a temporary surge in oil prices back to $150 per barrel.
That eventuality would make no matter in the longer run because world supply and demand would adjust, and high-cost deep water oil and shale production would get an added incentive, as would conservation and all the various flavors of alternative energy.
But a Persian Gulf oil interruption would instantly shatter an egregious stock market bubble that is being held aloft on fumes and awaits only for a windshield on which to splatter.
At the end of the day, however, that may well be the silver lining.
The Donald’s demented sanctions campaign to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero after November had already threatened to upset the applecart in the global oil market; and, apparently, it had also given the reckless Crown Prince the impression that he could operate with impunity, and that no act of thuggery was to brazen to be eschewed.
But now the Khashoggi imbroglio threatens to get totally out of hand. Mohammed bin Salman’s recklessness in Istanbul may yet send the house of Saud into an existential crisis – especially if the Donald’s stubby little hands are forced to severely punish the Saudi’s owing to the overwhelming sentiment of the world community.
That is to say, along with the collapse of the stock market we could also see the collapse of the monarchy, and the seizure or sabotage of its Persian Gulf oil fields. After all, they happen to lie in the eastern region of the country which is heavily populated by Shiites, who have been brutally prosecuted by MBS.
Needless to say, you will be worse for the wear if you hang around the casino in the face of this potential double collapse.
But the world will be far better off on both counts.
Slimy financial and political opportunists will make hay while the sun shines on the Khashoggi murder. From Tom Luongo at strategic-culture.org:
Every crisis is also an opportunity. Don’t worry I’m not about to go all Rahm Emmanuel, Mr. Realpolitik, on you today. The disappearance/death/dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi is both a crisis and an opportunity for the worst people in the world.
And all of them are seizing the day, as it were.
Frankly, most of it makes me sick to my stomach. Because where were these virtue-signaling champions of human rights like Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan or Lindsay Graham (R – AIPAC) for the past three years as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) prosecuted a starvation campaign in Yemen with U.S. complicity?
Does Lindsay not know that MbS is funding the U.S. occupation in eastern Syria he’s so in love with?
Now all of a sudden, every war-monger in Washington and Wall St. wants to cut ties with him because killing a political opponent is “beyond the pale?” Even Christine LaGarde of the IMF will be a no-show at MbS’s big “Davos in the Desert” conference.
Trump will have to make some big decisions about Saudi Arabia. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:
They can’t help themselves even as they hurt themselves. Look guys, chill! I saw someone imply on Twitter that Donald Trump is an accomplice in a murder cover-up. This person knows as well as all the ones who liked the tweet that they all just don’t know. They don’t know exactly what Trump knows about the chilling Khashoggi execution.
Just like they don’t know exactly what happened in the consulate. Information from anonymous Turkish sources is dripping through drop by drop, and it looks terrible -and terribly graphic-, but the conclusion that Trump wants to cover up a murder is multiple tokes over the line.
The Saudi attempt at labeling the execution a kidnapping gone wrong is out the window if only a tenth of the Turkish sources’ claims is true. What emerges is a picture of premeditated torture and murder. And one that was ordered by someone in the royal family. Which can really only be one of two people: the King or his son, MbS, and the latter seems more suspect. But what any of it has to do with Trump remains to be seen,
It is long past time for the US to change, and perhaps end, its “special” relationship with the corrupt, repressive, and criminal Saudi Arabian government. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
The Saudis are doubling down on their denial that they had anything to do with the disappearance of Washington Post journalist and sometime Saudi insider Jamal Khashoggi: “enemies of the Kingdom,” they say are responsible. Nowadays that includes an awful lot of people, as the Washington cognoscenti rush to distance themselves from a regime once hailed as an exemplar of “reform.” It’s a stampede for the door, and soon there will be no on left standing: one rarely sees a collapse like this, at least when it comes to entire countries. One minute they’re on top of the world with Donald Trump, playing with swords and getting away with murder: the next minute they’re international pariahs.
Threatening “major consequences” if it turns out the Turks are right and the Saudis interrogated, tortured, and murdered Khashoggi, Trump may do far more than merely cut off Riyadh’s arms supply. He may decide to stop backing the Saudis entirely, abandoning their role as the anchor of US policy in the region, and subsequently downplaying and eventually abandoning the anti-Iranian obsession that has so far overshadowed our regional policy.
The line out of the Trump administration, the mainstream media, and the well-funded Saudi Arabian public relations machine is that Saudi Arabia is becoming less repressive and is changing in other positive ways. It and Israel are the US’s strongest allies in the Middle East. From Jason Ditz at theantimedia.org:
he disappearance of high-profile Saudi journalist, and regular writer for the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi has put the Trump Administration into an uncomfortable position, obliging them to raise the questions about the disappearance and presumptive murder of the man by Saudi officials.
Khashoggi’s connections with the Washington Post made this a much bigger story than the disappearances of most dissident journalists in the Middle East. That he was in exile for writings critical to the Saudi Crown Prince, and entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, but never came out, making it very likely he came to a bad end.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is calling for a “thorough” investigation by the Saudis into Khashoggi’s disappearance as well, which also virtually obliges the US to follow through when such an investigation doesn’t happen.
The Saudis, after all, insist that nothing happened to Khashoggi, and barring the Turkish government coming across his corpse at some point in the near future, that’s a position they’re likely to stick to.
Turkey, pursuing its own Islamist agenda and trying to rival Saudi influence in the Sunni world, is just too happy to have discredited the Wahhabi royals in the wake of the Jamal Khashoggi killing. Pictured: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (left) greets Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz on November 15, 2015 in Antalya, Turkey. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
