I called it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be the Saudi Consul in Istanbul right now. I’d have him in my death pool if I did that sort of thing:
"Daily Hürriyet columnist Abdulkadir Selvi claimed on Oct. 18 that Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consul Mohammad al-Otaibi could be “the next execution” as Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman “would do anything to get rid of evidence.”
And if you ever wonder why dictatorships peons are never willing to back them up when the shit hits the fan, here is why
I heard the Saudis have completed their investigation. Apparently Khashoggi fell down the stairs and accidentally dismembered himself.
Why would he enter the consulate alone? If I were him I would have taken a posse of folks with me.
Perhaps he thought he was safe in Turkey.
It doesn’t always work that way - many consulates require appointments and will only let the person who has the appointment enter. I believe I read that his fiancée was refused entry, which is why she waited outside with his phones.
Remind me which party is pro-life again?
Pro-fetus.
I just clicked on this thread and am surprised to see nobody has mentioned the “elephant in the room.” Khashoggi didn’t write on American politics, but naturally his writing touched on it, and he did not toe the pro-Trump party line.
An American reporter was assassinated by a foreign government. Does anyone of you think that Trump would have been so pleased with this killing had the reporter been pro-Trump rather than anti-Trump? (I’m not sure it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that the Saudis had express permission for the killing, from Kushner or some other lackey.)
(What does the success of Mayor Duggan have to do with Trumpism? Are you joking? In the Trumpist alternate reality Duggan cannot even exist — every Democrat is a hateful hypocrite who wants to worsen the lives of the underclass so they will vote Democratic.)
So now the “truth” comes out.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/world/saudi-arabia-khashoggi-intl/index.html
Good thing they brought that bone saw with them or those dozen officials could have never held their own against one intrepid reporter!
Obviously 12 aren’t enough to safely subdue a man without killing him.
So now they should be able to turn over his remains, right? Right?
Thread is typically revealing. It’s being made such a big deal of in part for US domestic political purposes. If Trump ‘underreacts’ he can be tarred as complicit. If he overreacts maybe we get an oil price spike that favors the party out of power*. Note, same crap has become typical with either party in power. ‘Politics ends at the water’s edge’ is a totally obsolete concept.
Which doesn’t mean it’s a zero deal even in a completely realistic view. But the Obama admin’s theory of the Middle East centered on rapprochement with the odious Iranian regime. The Trump theory has swung back to more closeness with the odious Saudi regime. Neither of those general themes are automatically wrong because both rivals are odious. And the (former) mushy middle concept of basing our ME policy just on closeness with Israel (now on the left it’s becoming more of a requirement to be skeptical of Israel which did not used to be as true) doesn’t really address the dilemma anyway.
*despite the big increase in US oil production, to where the impact on the whole US economy from oil price rises has become indeterminate at least for modest oil price increases, on a voter-weighted basis increases are still a negative, and a big increase is a negative (in part for knock on effects on demand in other trading partners).
Oh come on. This game is going to cost the House of Saud billions in “investments” in the US and elsewhere and Abu Ivanka Al Ameriki knows it.
After the Kavanaugh debacle and now this, maybe Bin Fred is smarter than he looks.
The Ibn Saud are that already.
While they publicly support Wahhabism and all that, their private behavior is quite something else. Which of course is the main reason they are sitting on a powder keg of religious resentment. They are quite unlike the Iranian-type Ayatollahs.
Ma sha’allah, al Khabr… It is supposed you are informing me about the hypocrite behavior of the Ibn Saud in private? I have the personal knowledge my dear.
Of course, they have less popular legitimacy inside of their own political and religious system.
But that is not at all relevant to what I wrote.
The person said, what would replace the Ibn Saud, the Sunni version of the ayatallah of the Chia.
The Ibn Saud are the Sunni version of the Ayatallah.
This makes it sound as though both administrations took sides, when the rapprochement was at best a small move towards the center.
And the nuclear deal was not at all about trusting Iran, quite the opposite.
Whereas the current administration very actively and overtly paints Iran as the bad guys, and cozies up to SA while they do basically the same things.
Updating this thread about another Saudi journalist tortured to death–with Twitter also at fault:
The UN has published a report on the murder.
Washington Post summary:
The complete report: