SNIP Joe Biden is expected to call Saudi Arabia’s King Salman on Wednesday, as his administration prepares to release an unclassified intelligence report that many experts expect will name the royal’s son and heir as complicit in the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The decision comes as the White House is facing calls by human rights activists and Saudi dissidents to “strike a blow” against Saudi human rights violations with new sanctions that they say could help rein in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s crackdown on dissidents and turn the page on the Trump administration’s “embrace of despots”. Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser, said last week in an interview on CNN that the administration was preparing to accompany the release of the classified report in the 2018 murder with a “further answer” by the administration that will hold individuals accountable for the crime. It is far from clear what kinds of actions Sullivan had in mind. ENDSNIP https://www.yahoo.com/news/jamal-khashoggi-us-report-expected-155845890.html Oh boy... this ought to get interesting for our SA relations... first the sound Biden policy on the war in Yemen, then outright dissing MBS as NOT the equivalent of the US POTUS, now this... Unless somebody opens a new thread, I'll post this report in this thread when released (not sure where)... should make for an interesting read... You can get away with a lot as an ally of the US in an unstable region, but there have to be lines.... ordering the murder of a US-associated journalist needs to be one... Anybody have a problem with the release of this report if it's as reported? What could Sullivan's "further answer" be?? BTW, Embrace of Despots? Dibs on that band name....
Here's the actual report.... MBS 'approved' the operation to capture or kill https://int.nyt.com/data/documentto...l-khashoggi-killing/ddc9578e0994f690/full.pdf Still redactions.... there is no longer such a thing as a declassified report, it seems... Not much to it, at the end of the day.... Still, cannot discount the potential impact of accusing a major ME ally of a felony...
Calling the Saudis an ally is a stretch. But also, whatever political conveniences our political betters got from the Saudis, the Saudis could decide to shrug their shoulders and themselves break relations with the US.
I think you'll find that very few people give a damn about this. Its dry, its disconnected, and for the players involved its kinda just par for the course. Fact is this saga was hyped beyond the realm of reason because the MSM had no other mission in life at the time but to attack Pres Trump and the vehicle for doing so couldn't have mattered less. I give this story another day of being on the homepage of CNN and then its probably going to be dropped. Because the indisputable fact is that the MSM will never hit Pres Biden or any Democrat for that matter as hard as they will Republicans. We need only look at the Cuomo sex harassment scandal to prove that. When it was Justice Kavanaugh (even though fake-Doctor Ford had been proven to have repeatedly lied and even her own friends called b.s. on her b.s. story) the left spent months banging war-drums of 'believe all women' so loud you literally couldn't find 15 seconds of MSM coverage that didn't contain it. Now that Cuomo is the target, on top of his intentional nursing home cover up and intimidation corruption schemes, the MSM ignores it entirely. So, ya, don't expect much from this story. And honestly what does the far-left outrage machine want? Hell, what did they want Pres Trump to do? Send in Seal Team 6 and assassinate a few members of the royal family? Carpet bomb the region? Do we expect Pres Biden to do the same? Hell no.
That's why I prefaced ally with ME... O Simply acknowledge the conclusions of his Intel community, which he failed to do time and time again. Then perhaps recognize it's not a good thing to have journalists killed, but that would have also been against his personal ethos. I suspect this will be a slow burn story that will never burn bright, but rarely go away when US/Saudi relations are discussed.
Saudi royals murder who they want, when they want. It's Arabia after all. Been that way since the Prophet Muhammad said so. He was the first major religious figure to declare dinking camel piss a sacrament you know.
With energy independence and a smaller military presence in the region we wouldn't need to keep KSA happy. Two things we achieved under Pres Trump, two things we just lost under Pres Biden. Now, we need them agian and if that means looking the other way when they want to snuff out someone they don't like, well Ego, its just going to have to be the cost of doing business this way.
You completely lost me at "energy independence achieved under President T****".... I snorted lemonade out of my nose... Having people killed matters... always has and always will, with a brief 4 year exception...
Energy independence is a phrase that describes when a country's domestic energy production is higher than its consumption. Under Pres Trump the expansion of domestic production of petroleum, natural, gas and coal fuel types put us ahead of our net consumption (all types import or export) thus we achieved energy independence for the first time since the 1950s. However thanks a number of EOs Pres Biden signed in his first week we will not be able to achieve this again for the foreseeable future.
Why would we spend money to investigate something we aren't going to do anything about? Stupid spending never stops.
