Jamal Khashoggi Is Dead, Saudi Arabia Says (breaking news)

Money talks and bullshat walks.

 

This murder was so obvious that it makes me wonder if it was done to drive a wedge between the new prince and the US and possibly drive the new prince from power. There is a large Saudi contingent that doesn't like what he's doing and this may be part of a plot to get rid of him. I just can't imagine murdering a guy in your own embassy with his fiance waiting in the car outside. It's almost like they wanted this crime to be exposed.

 

That very well could be the case.

 

Jimmy carter asked the same question judt before he lost iran to the crazy mullahs

And look how that turned out

 

Crazy indeed -- in your own embassy and then remove the target's body to your ambassador's house? Why would a monarch do that?

One good assassin could have handled the mission elsewhere leaving no traces with no possibility of verifying the speculations that would have followed.

What a circus.

 

This was either the keystone cops hit squad or a purposeful attempt to drive a wedge between the prince and Trump which is a relationship the Saudi deep state does not like at all. It may even be an attempt to remove the prince from power much like democrats are trying to with trump except in a much more violelent Mideast fashion.

 

Let's not give Jimmy Carter too much credit for taking a principled stand against a tyrant.

 

Americans should stop assuming that other countries have ignorant, impulsive, egomaniacal leaders too.

The guys ruling Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey ... most if not all other serious powers ... are not stupid. Now, sometimes intelligent people do stupid things ... or things that turn out to be stupid later because of unforeseen events (Nixon, Watergate).

So it's possible that any or all of these people could do something -- like having an annoying 'traitor' killed in some obvious, blatant way -- but it would have to be ordered in a moment of blinding rage, where their better judgement was seriously impaired. Thus we must always look for other explanations when a country led by an intelligent person does something that anyone could predict will result in a huge international hoo-hah, and discredit the putative authors of the act.

Yes, back in the 70s, American-supported dictators could have their critics murdered on American soil, and not much would happen. You could even put a bomb on a civilian airliner and kill dozens of innocent people and, if that airliner belonged to a government we didn't like, you'd be safe in America.

But times have -- thankfully -- changed. So ... we should consider other possibilities than that MBS, an intelligent guy in a very touchy situation, with lots of internal enemies, was so screamingly stupid as to say, "Hey, this Kashoggi guy has been writing insulting things about us for years ... let's lure him into our embassy in Turkey, murder him, cut up his body, and sneak it out in suitcases... and let's send fifteen guys over to do the job. He's just a Washington Post reporter, well known in the international community, no one will pay any attention to it, and if they do, it'll just enhance my reputation as a modernizing liberalizing reformer, and show what swell place Saudi Arabia is to invest your money in."

Well ... maybe. But I think we should wait and see what Bellingcat can uncover.

 

I don't think that you have a concept of what kind of money we're talking about globally. It's not as easy as just freezing Saudi assets. Saudi Arabia money is embedded in industries around the world.

It's pretty common knowledge that both Trump and Kushner have benefited greatly from their close associations with the Saudi government, Trump has bragged about it many times at his rallies regarding his 'Saudi money'. He's been doing financial dealings with the Saudis for more than 20 years. But what about the rest of the world, what does Saudi Arabia have over them? Here's a few
things....

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/business/ceos-saudi-money.html
Some excerpts from the article;

Saudi Arabia is pouring $20 billion into a new investment fund run by Wall Street’s Blackstone Group. The French oil giant Total just inked a nine-billion-euro petrochemical deal with the kingdom.

The British defense company BAE Systems is selling 48 Typhoon combat jets to Riyadh for an estimated five billion British pounds.

Saudi Arabia was awarded $138.9 billion in potential military contracts under the United States’ Foreign Military Sales rules. American companies including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, not to mention President Trump, are salivating over recent Saudi pledges to buy nearly $110 billion worth of arms in coming years.

Companies like BAE and Thales of France have also profited handsomely, as European defense companies exported €57 billion worth of armaments to Riyadh between 2001 and 2015.

Saudi Arabia has also dished out billions in fees to American and European banks for advising on business deals. The kingdom bought around $20 billion worth of American products last year, including Ford autos and Boeing jets.

Riyadh also sealed $15 billion in deals with General Electric for goods and services in areas like power generation, mining and health care.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund recently invested $1 billion in Lucid, a competitor to Elon Musk’s Tesla car company, and $3.5 billion in Uber.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has pledged $45 billion to Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund for technology investments intended to help modernize the oil-dependent Saudi economy by 2030.

The kingdom has been signing deals for futuristic buildings, AMC movie theaters and swank French hotels as part of a $500 billion blueprint for Neom, a modern city to rise from the desert by 2025.

The kingdom has generated about $1.1 billion worth of fees for banks since 2010 in a variety of deals, including mergers and acquisitions and the arranging of loans and bonds.

JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, are still working for Saudi Aramco in its negotiations to buy a majority stake in a Saudi chemical maker known as Sabic.

Saudi Arabia has also showered billions of dollars on private equity firms so they can strike deals. The kingdom has pledged to provide up to $20 billion for a $40 billion infrastructure investment fund run by Blackstone.

Some companies did not even try to distance themselves from the Saudis amid the Khashoggi furor.

The bottom line is very simple, with enough money you have enough power to kill at will.

 

The shah was not as bad as the mullahs who replaced him

 

Yeah, it's a hard world, kid. If somebody got plenty money, somebody is going to have the time, Willy said. It might as well be American citizens who get the good wages and the profits.

 

Everyone knows this isn't about MBS or the Saudi government. It's about the Trump's and their connection to MBS.

 

You're right about that, for sure.

The problem is that he became widely hated in Iran -- and not just by the fundamentalists, but by the people who ought to be our natural allies, the liberal-minded (not liberal in the American sense, but in the classical sense) middle classes. [There's an interesting book by a brave Iranian woman called Daughter of Persia which goes into some detail about the impact our overthrow of this man had on her liberal-minded father. Fortunately, I think the new generation of Iranians, who hate the mullahs, have more or less forgiven us for it. At least the ones I know have.]

The fundamentalists hated the Shah because he was modernizing Iran -- rights for women and so on -- and the liberals hated him because he wasn't doing it fast enough, and in the European way (whether that was ever a possibility is another matter). And the nationalists, whom you find right across the political spectrum and up and down it as well in Third World countries hated him because he was seen to be a creature of the Americans.

I am sure you know that we overthrew a democratically-elected fellow there in 1953. The Left make a big thing about how evil this was, but the reality is that, as in Vietnam, we were trying to pull our colonialist partners' chestnuts out of the fire, and we also over-estimated the dangers of a Soviet takeover there. The idiot Left blame our oil companies, but in fact these companies had to have their arms twisted by the government, to get involved. (All spelled out in detail in the book The Prize.) And the fellow we overthrew -- impulsive and erratic -- was already hated by the fundamentalist mullahs -- we just ended up inadvertently doing their dirty work for them while getting the Iranian hatred of the British transferred to us.

But whatever you think about Iran, let's not let the liberals get away with putting all the blame on Republicans. It was a bi-partisan deal.

 

I would say that nation states going after international journalists is everyone's business.

That said - if we are going to take a hands off approach and only take note when a US citizen is involved - then we should have not weighed on on the Skripal issue.

 

As I inderstand it the.british were more opposed to the overthriwn prime
minister than we were

 

Why have we not invaded Moscow? That's their day job.

 

Right. "Hands on" (that is, if you're not going to be "hands off") is military operations with boots on the ground or bombers overhead, or both.

Piss and moan and complain and weep using words? Don't work unless you are ready to use the big stick with no qualms. Sanctions? Scant results if any.

 

I don't understand what people want Trump to do...

He can "condemn" these actions till he's blue in the face...but that does absolutely nothing. If the left were serious about this, they should be pushing for serious consequences. However I don't believe they are serious.

 

Some of the alternate narratives in this thread are as ludicrous as the evolving "official" narrative.

Strange times.

 

Damn right we should have, (after 9/11) but elements of our government and Mossad were also involved. It would not surprise me if the Saudi Royals publically execute the people they ordered to kill Khasoggi. These people are and have always been deranged animals once you look beneath the surface.

 

The Shah and the Mullahs are all killers.

 

Definitely not worth starting a war over.

BTW: Congrats on Sox disposing a really great team in 5...Looking forward to Series next week.

 

KSA will not go to war with us. We can merely cut ties to them. They know where we're positioned in the middle east and they know that if they want to poke the bear, we'll maul them. Hell, Iran would be like "Sure guys I'll be glad to assist".

There's no win for the KSA in this position if we decided to cut ties with them. They would have no choice but to go with the flow.

Yea the Sox series was intense. I thought Houston was coming back in that last game given their lineup. No matter who wins between LA and Mil, it's going to be a tough series.

 

I agree. Both NL teams are definitely worthy opponents. Should be great!

 

The shah wanted to modernize iran but the iranian people preferred to remain in the 7th century instead