Thread: Turkey says journalist was murdered in Saudi consulate

Lots of bollix going on here.

Let's say the US have absolute proof in the form of a video confession from the CP that he ordered the murder. So farkin what? Will this prompt Trump into shredding the latest multibillion arms deal he took the time and trouble to clinch with great fanfare? Or what, stop buying their oil, freeze their assets, blockade the Straits, recall ambassador...? Then let's get even more ridiculous and say he considers any or all...again so what, how does it benefit the US to have an Iran with growing might and influence face off against a militarily weaker Saudi? Iow, in the case of an Iran-Saudi confrontation every bullet of warplane he refused to sell to the scorpion because it dared to sting would be provided free of charge by his own forces.

Anything could change in this fluid mess, but bottom lines as ever are that the West have no effective tool to straighten out strategic rogue buddies, and is continuously having to choose between supporting the perceived best of evils, which for now is Saudi, against the perceived worst of evils, Iran.

Originally Posted by Cujo

Donald Trump has said .... the consequences for Saudi Arabia could be “very severe” if its leaders are found to have ordered the dissident journalist’s killing.

But of course they won't be found to have ordered it. Not by Trump, and one of the death squad is already dead. Dead men tell no tales.


Nobody seems to care much about extrajudicial killings in Cambodia or the Phillipines even when, in the case of PI, the president admits to it.

It will end up, in the US, as a Right V Left issue. The left will support the journalist, or what's left of him, the right will support the "strong US ally". Trump will endeavour to show support for the US economy and US jobs and will try to dismiss the whole issue as an issue that doesn't really affect the USA directly so no biggie, no biggly biggie. Or something like that.

Originally Posted by Neverna

The left will support the journalist, or what's left of him, the right will support the "strong US ally".

...and tRump will continue to support his Saudi business interests...aided, no doubt, by a sudden Saudi interest in any condos he may have to sell...

Now why is everyone looking at Trump or the U.S to take action ?
The other spineless Twats (Germany, France, GB, Canada, Russia, China, Japan etc. **) are just as much responsible for doing the right thing against the House of Saud as the U.S.

**Towel Head spineless twat countries are not worth mentioning

Originally Posted by tomcat

aided, no doubt, by a sudden Saudi interest in any condos he may have to sell...

Ahhhh! Yes. Golf course soon to be laid in Jedah and a Trump hotel in Riyadh.
Within a year of Trump's ousting. MOU already signed.

Originally Posted by jabir

Problem for Trump is that after stern denials from the highest Saudi sources, they have finally admitted killing Khashoggi;

Do you have a source for that, please?

Originally Posted by jabir

they have finally admitted Khashoggi is dead;

FTFY. I think that's a more accurate statement.

Funny that, the joos have been putting the boot into Khashoggi as well.

Originally Posted by HermantheGerman

Now why is everyone looking at Trump or the U.S to take action ?

Not everybody is "looking at Trump or the U.S to take action". It is really non of his business. However, Trump opened his big mouth and said the US will inflict "severe punishment" on Saudi Arabia if the kingdom is found to be responsible for the death of the journalist, so people are waiting to see what the big man with the big missiles will do - or not do.

Originally Posted by HermantheGerman

The other spineless Twats (Germany, France, GB, Canada, Russia, China, Japan etc. **) are just as much responsible for doing the right thing against the House of Saud as the U.S.

In what way do you think they are responsible?

Originally Posted by HermantheGerman

**Towel Head spineless twat countries are not worth mentioning

But you thought you'd mention them anyway.

Nev, I have entered the twilight zone today. Is everyone pissed.

Originally Posted by Maanaam

FTFY. I think that's a more accurate statement.

Well yes, he could have slashed his wrist or detonated, but more likely his demise was assisted or otherwise involuntary.

Originally Posted by cyrille

Do you have a source for that, please?

Donald Trump has said the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia “totally denied” any knowledge of missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s suspected murder.

In posts to his Twitter, the US leader wrote: “Just spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who totally denied any knowledge of what took place in their Turkish Consulate."

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/worl...-a3963676.html

Top level, CP to POTUS, not my words.

Originally Posted by tomcat

...Republicans start a campaign to protect tRump's connection to Saudi wealth:

Conservatives mount a whisper campaign smearing Khashoggi in defense of Trump
by Robert Costa and Karoun Demirjian (WaPo)

Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom.
In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.

Trump’s remarks about reporters amid the Khashoggi fallout have inflamed existing tensions between his allies and the media. At a Thursday rally in Montana, Trump openly praised Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) for assaulting a reporter in his bid for Congress last year.
“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said.
Hours earlier, prominent conservative television personalities were making insinuations about Khashoggi’s background.

“Khashoggi was tied to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asserted on Thursday’s highly rated “Outnumbered” show. “I just put it out there because it is in the constellation of things that are being talked about.” Faulkner then dismissed another guest who called her claim “iffy.”
The message was echoed on the campaign trail. Virginia Republican Corey A. Stewart, who is challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), told a local radio program Thursday that “Khashoggi was not a good guy himself.”

While Khashoggi was once sympathetic to Islamist movements, he moved toward a more liberal, secular point of view, according to experts on the Middle East who have tracked his career. Khashoggi knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactions with bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.

Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen, left his home country last year and was granted residency in the United States by federal authorities. He lived in Virginia and wrote for The Washington Post.
Nevertheless, the smears have escalated. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and key political booster, shared another person’s tweet last week with his millions of followers that included a line that Khashoggi was “tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden” in the 1980s, even though the context was a feature story on bin Laden’s activities.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh on Tuesday. (Leah Mills/AP)

A Tuesday broadcast of CR-TV, a conservative online outlet founded by populartalk-radio host Mark Levin, labeled Khashoggi a “longtime friend” of terrorists and claimed without evidence that Trump was the victim of an “insane” media conspiracy to tarnish him. The broadcast has been viewed more than 12,000 times.

A story in far-right FrontPage magazine casts Khashoggi as a “cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about,” and features a garish cartoon of bin Laden and Khashoggi with their arms around each other.
The conservative push comes as Saudi government supporters on Twitter have sought in a propaganda campaign to denigrate Khashoggi as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement once tolerated but now outlawed in Saudi Arabia as a terrorist organization.
“Trump wants to take a soft line, so Trump supporters are finding excuses for him to take it,” said William Kristol, a conservative Trump critic. “One of those excuses is attacking the person who was murdered.”

Several Trump administration aides are aware of the Khashoggi attacks circulating on Capitol Hill and in conservative media, the GOP officials said, adding that aides are being careful to not encourage the disparagement but are also doing little to contest it.
The GOP officials declined to share the names of the lawmakers and others who are circulating information critical of Khashoggi because they said doing so would risk exposing them as sources.

Fred Hiatt, The Post’s editorial page editor who published Khashoggi’s work, sharply criticized the false and distorted claims about Khashoggi, who is feared to have been killed and dismembered by Saudi operatives.
“As anyone knows who knew Jamal — or read his columns — he was dedicated to the values of free speech and open debate. He went into exile to promote those values, and now he may even have lost his life for his dogged determination in their defense,” Hiatt said in a statement. “It may not be surprising that some Saudi-inspired trolls are now trying to distract us from the crime by smearing Jamal. It may not even be surprising to see a few Americans joining in. But in both cases it is reprehensible.”

Trump said Thursday it appears Khashoggi is dead and warned that his administration could consider “very severe” measures against Saudi Arabia, which is conducting its own self-investigation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also announced that he would not attend the Future Investment Initiative summit in Saudi Arabia next week, delivering the Trumpadministration’s first formal rebuke of Saudi Arabia’s royal family.
“The president is concerned. He believes the relationship is important, so do I, but he also understands he’s a leader on the world stage and everybody is watching and he is very concerned,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who met with Trump on Thursday.

Trump, whose grip on his party remains strong less than three weeks before the midterm elections, has seen his cautious approach to Saudi Arabia bolstered not only by the maligning of Khashoggi, but also by a conservative media infrastructure that is generally wary of traditional news organizations and establishment Republicans. As criticism of Trump grows, powerful players in that orbit have stood by the president.

“Donald Trump is keeping his eye on the ball, keeping his eye on the geopolitical ball, the national security ball. He’s not going to get sidetracked by what happened to a journalist, maybe, in the consulate there. He’s not giving cover to anybody,” syndicated talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday.
“For those who are screaming blood for the Saudis — look, these people are key allies,” evangelical leader Pat Robertson said this week. “We’ve got an arms deal that everybody wanted a piece of. . . . It’ll be a lot of jobs, a lot of money come to our coffers. It’s not something you want to blow up willy-nilly.”

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill, on the other hand, are discussing the possibility of legislative action against Saudi Arabia or other ways to lessen U.S. support.
Intelligence community officials this week have been providing continuous briefings on the investigation into Khashoggi’s disappearance to the intelligence committees, whose members enjoy special clearance to view and hear sensitive information.

But in both the House and Senate, lawmakers without such clearance, including the leading Republicans on foreign policy matters, have grown frustrated with what many see as a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to slow-walk responses to congressional requests for information about Khashoggi’s disappearance, or in some cases ignore lawmakers’ questions outright.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) have taken the step of invoking the Global Magnitsky Act to force Trump to report to Congress on whether people should face sanctions over Khashoggi’s alleged death, including Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Yet there has been little confidence among senators that Trump will suddenly feel pressure to penalize high-ranking Saudi officials or take other sweeping punitive measures.

In the House, a perceived lack of cooperation from the White House on Khashoggi has compelled some Republicans to take new interest in a bill to invoke the War Powers Resolution to curtail U.S. military support for the Saudi-led coalition operating in Yemen’s civil war. But the legislation has not secured the support of leading Republicans.
Last year, the House voted 366 to 30 to approve a nonbinding resolution stating that the United States’ support for the Saudi-led coalition had not been congressionally authorized — an effort that did not rattle the administration, which continued to build its relationships with Saudi royalty.
Earlier this year, the Senate failed to enact legislation that would have curtailed U.S. support for the Saudi war effort, after appeals from Saudi officials and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis not to pass the measure.

Being killed and dismembered doesn't make him an angel.

Anyone have a clue how Trump and the other righteous western leaders might react if a similar though failed attempt at murder occurred involving the Russians?

Originally Posted by jabir

Being killed and dismembered doesn't make him an angel.

Anyone have a clue how Trump and the other righteous western leaders might react if a similar though failed attempt at murder occurred involving the Russians?

So you're justifying it ?????

Originally Posted by Cujo

So you're justifying it ?????

Justifying what? Do you mean would I have offed him, or that all murder victims are nice guys?

Any comment on the second part of my post, also?

Originally Posted by jabir

Justifying what? Do you mean would I have offed him, or that all murder victims are nice guys?

Any comment on the second part of my post, also?

Don't be specious it doesn't suit you.

I made a statement of fact, here it is in case you would care to clarify your rather creepy attack.

Being killed and dismembered doesn't make him an angel.

Anyone have a clue how Trump and the other righteous western leaders might react if a similar though failed attempt at murder occurred involving the Russians?

What do you suggest I am trying to justify, do you have any comment on the second part, and which of those do you think is specious?

That's a very actual example of double standard and hypocrisy as we see it anyway daily in the politics and the world events...

Originally Posted by Klondyke

very actual

‘US Congress has no Russian policy other than sanctions’ – Stephen Cohen
Published time: 19 Oct, 2018

Inconvenient thoughts on Cold War and other news. Intelligence agencies, Nikki Haley, sanctions, and public opinion.

1. National intelligence agencies have long played major roles, often not entirely visible, in international politics. They are doing so again today, as is evident in several countries, from Russiagate in the United States and the murky Skripal assassination attempt in the UK to the apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Leaving aside what President Obama knew about Russiagate allegations against Donald Trump and when he knew it, the question arises as to whether these operations were ordered by President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) or were “rogue” operations unknown in advance by the leaders and perhaps even directed against them.

There have been plenty of purely criminal and commercial “rogue” operations by intelligence agents in history, but also “rogue” ones that were purposefully political. We know, for example, that both Soviet and US intelligence agencies - or groups of agents - tried to disrupt the Eisenhower-Khrushchev détente of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and that some intelligence players tried to stop Khrushchev’s formal recognition of West Germany, also in the early 1960s.

It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the attacks on Skripal and Khashoggi were “rogue” operations undertaken by political opponents of the leaders’ policies at home or abroad, with the help of one or another intelligence agency or agents. Motive is a - perhaps the - crucial question. Why would Putin order such an operation in the UK at the very moment when his government had undertaken a major Western public-relations campaign in connection with the upcoming World Cup championship in Russia? And why would MbS risk a Khashoggi scandal as he was assiduously promoting his image abroad as an enlightened reform-minded Saudi leader?

We lack the evidence and official candor needed to study these questions, as is usually the case with covert, secretive, disinforming intelligence operations. But the questions are certainly reason enough not to rush to judgment, as many US pundits do. Saying “we do not know” may be unmarketable in today’s mass-media environment, but it is honest and the right approach to potentially fruitful “analysis.”

2. We do know, however, that there has been fierce opposition in the US political-media establishment to President Trump’s policy of “cooperating with Russia,” including in US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI - and at high levels of his own administration.

We might consider Nikki Haley’s resignation as UN ambassador in this light. Despite the laurels heaped on her by anti-Trump media, and by Trump himself at their happy-hour farewell in the White House, Haley was not widely admired by her UN colleagues. When appointed for political reasons by Trump, she had no foreign-policy credentials or any expert knowledge of other countries or of international relations generally. Judging by her performance as ambassador, nor did she acquire much on the job, almost always reading even short comments from prepared texts.

More to the point, Haley’s statements regarding Russia at the UN were, more often than not, dissimilar from Trump’s—indeed, implicitly in opposition to Trump’s. (She did nothing, for example, to offset charges in Washington that Trump’s summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in July, had been “treasonous.”) Who wrote these statements for her, which were very similar to statements regarding Russia that have been issued by US intelligence agencies since early 2017? It is hard to imagine that Trump was unhappy to see her go, and easier to imagine him pushing her toward the exit. A president needs a loyalist as secretary of state and at the UN. Haley’s pandering remarks at the White House about Trump’s family suggests some deal had been made to ease her out, with non-recrimination promises made on both sides. We will see if opponents of Trump’s Russia policy can put another spokesperson at the UN.

As to which aspects of US foreign policy Trump actually controls, we might ask more urgently if he authorized, or was fully informed about, the joint US-NATO-Ukraine military air exercises that got under way over Ukraine, abutting Russia, on October 8. Moscow regards these exercises as a major “provocation,” and not unreasonably.

3. What do Trump’s opponents want instead of “cooperation with Russia”? A much harder line, including more “crushing” economic sanctions. Sanctions are more like temper tantrums and road rage than actual national-security policy, and thus are often counterproductive. We have some recent evidence. Russia’s trade surplus has grown to more than $100 billion. World prices for Russia’s primary exports, oil and gas, have grown to over $80 a unit while Moscow’s federal budget is predicated on $53 a barrel. Promoters of anti-Russian sanctions gloat that they have weakened the ruble. But while imposing some hardships on ordinary citizens, the combination of high oil prices and a weaker ruble is ideal for Russian state and corporate exporters. They sell abroad for inflated foreign currency and pay their operating expenses at home in cheaper rubles. To risk a pun, they are “crushing it.”

Congressional sanctions - for exactly what is not always clear - have helped Putin in another way. For years, he has unsuccessfully tried to get “oligarchs” to repatriate their wealth abroad. US sanctions on various “oligarchs” have persuaded them and others to begin to do so, perhaps bringing back home as much as $90 billion already in 2018.

If nothing else, these new budgetary cash flows help Putin deal with his declining popularity at home - he still has an approval rating well above 60 percent - due to the Kremlin’s decision to raise the pension age for men and women, from 60 to 65 and from 55 to 60 respectively. The Kremlin can use the additional revenue to increase the value of pensions, supplement them with other social benefits, or to enact the age change over a longer period of time.

It appears that Congress, particularly the Senate, has no Russia policy other than sanctions. It might think hard about finding alternatives. One way to start would be with real “hearings” in place of the ritualistic affirmation of orthodox policy by “experts” that has long been its practice. There are more than a few actual specialists out there who think different approaches to Moscow are long overdue.

4. All of these dangerous developments, indeed the new US-Russian Cold War itself, are elite projects—political, media, intelligence, etc. Voters were never really consulted. Nor do they seem to approve. In August, Gallup asked its usual sample of Americans which policy toward Russia they preferred. Fifty-eight percent wanted improved relations vs. only 36 percent who wanted a tougher US policy with more sanctions. (Meanwhile, two-thirds of Russians surveyed by an independent agency now see the United States as their country’s number-one enemy, and about three-fourths view China favorably.)

Will any of the US political figures already jockeying for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 take these realities into account?

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/441702-us-s...-haley-russia/