Despite overwhelming evidence that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated at the order of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, President Trump stood by Saudi Arabia Tuesday in an extraordinary written statement riddled with exclamation points and subtitled “America First,” writing, quote, “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t! That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Trump’s statement came even after The Washington Post reported last Friday that the CIA has “high confidence” that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination. Despite this, Trump repeated Saudi claims that Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Trump’s claims that Saudi Arabia is investing $400 billion in the United States is false. A new report from the Center for International Policy found investment from Riyadh is responsible for fewer than 20,000 U.S. jobs a year and just a fraction of the investment cited by Trump.
Ronen Bergman talking:
I think that what President Trump just did was the highest level of what the French call realpolitik. He took one interest of the United States, as he sees it at least, to have these huge deals, or alleged huge deal, with the Saudi Arabia government in their funding of huge arms deals, and put this as only one consideration and put aside all the rest—human rights, the horrific operation to kill a journalist in their territory, in the consulate, the, I would say, very conclusive evidence suggesting that high Saudi officials, if not the crown prince himself, were deeply involved, and said “I just don’t care about that.” And I think this is—he’s not the first one who did that; we saw that a few times, or many times, in world politics before. But it’s really done in a very blunt way.
We have published—David Kirkpatrick, Mark Mazzetti and myself—last week in The New York Times the [inaudible] case. This is not [inaudible] operation by one Saudi official, that as early as March 2017, more than a year ago, the Saudis were pitched by a group of businessmen, former operatives of Israeli and American intelligence—Israeli intelligence and American businessmen, who asked the Saudis to fund a $2 billion project to cripple Iranian economy, so to create something in a sort of a small Iran-Contra affair, to create a huge private intelligence organization that would use black operations to cripple Iranian economy.
While they were discussing this, and on the Saudi side, the manager of these negotiations was General Ahmed al-Assiri, the—I would say, the chief assistant to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, to MBS, one of the Saudi officials came to the Israelis and Americans and said, “Do you also do kinetics?” They understood him. They said—they knew that kinetics means to kill people—and said, “Who do you want us to kill?” He said, “We want you to take out some Iranian officials.” They asked, “Like who?” And he answered, “We want you to take out a few Iranians, including Qassim Suleimani,” the commander of the al-Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guard. That’s probably the most important Iranian official, the most powerful Iranian intelligence operative. And when the foreigners said no, the people of Saudi intelligence, the official said, “Well, maybe you can recommend us to someone.” And they recommended them a group of the former special operation expert, British one in London, who might do the kinetics.
What this proves is that as early as last—early last year, early 2017, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia changed its policy, and instead of diplomacy based mainly on bribes, on money and various things, very much away from secret operation, targeted assassination, they took a much proactive [inaudible] and considered and pitched even private businessmen. This is, you know, a very unprofessional move to involve people who are not among your own forces in these kind of sensitive operations. They asked them whether they are willing to take the assign of a lot of money [inaudible] some of the kingdom’s enemies.
– Israel, as you document in your book, has been practicing targeted assassinations now for decades. But I recall back in the ’60s, or even going back further to the ’50s, this was a rare situation. I remember, for instance, the story of a professor from Columbia University, Galíndez, who the dictator Trujillo had been kidnapped off the streets of New York City, a Columbia University professor, and he was put on a plane to the Dominican Republic and thrown out of the plane. Subsequently, the two assassins who had kidnapped him were themselves killed by Trujillo. But this was considered a rare situation back in the ’50s and the ’60s. Can you talk about how—whether your sense is that governments are now increasingly resorting to this kind of assassination to settle their political aims? I’m thinking now, for instance, of the several assassinations we’ve seen linked to Russian dissidents by the Putin government.
I think we need to differentiate. Israel has been using targeted killing more than any other country in the West post the Second World War. But Israel has defined enemies and defined targets for targeted killings either proliferators of weapons of mass destructions or terrorists. We are now talking about something very different. This is killing political opponents. And I think maybe someone in Saudi Arabia saw what Putin has been doing—allegedly, at least, doing—in the last few years, which is killing [inaudible] poisoning [inaudible] shooting them, and got maybe jealous of what the Russians have been doing, intimidating other rivals and dissidents, and tried to do the same.
But in that case, the operation was done in such an amateurish way, in such an unprofessional, so to speak, way, it was very easy to discover. I think that it’s either the Saudi [inaudible] and train [inaudible] very hubris, thinking that they can get away with everything. What we see, the technology, the ability of the Turkish intelligence to intercept calls and phone conversations and conversations inside the consulate, the fact that everything is being monitored by cameras, the way that metadata is being achieved, that makes operations for terrorists, but also to state-supported assassin, much, much harder these days. And here we have the British [inaudible] crack down the assassination [inaudible] and Turkish intelligence basically cracking open the botched operation to kill Mr. Khashoggi.
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Ronen Bergman
Israeli investigative reporter, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the senior national security correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth.
— source democracynow.org | Nov 21, 2018