fbpx

Saudis Need A Scapegoat. Will They Blame A Black Man For Khashoggi’s Murder?

Saudis Need A Scapegoat. Will They Blame A Black Man For Khashoggi’s Murder?

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 25: Liz Burr

Jamarlin talks to digital media guru and MIT graduate Liz Burr. They talk about business prospects for podcasting, censoring Black artists and activists online, and how using the N-word got a top exec fired at Netflix.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Saudi Arabia’s rulers are considering blaming a top intelligence official close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of Saudi dissident and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, three people with knowledge of the Saudi plans told the New York Times Thursday.

They plan to blame to Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the deputy chief of Saudi intelligence and adviser to the crown prince, which shows the extent of concern over the backlash from the killing.

Al-Assiri was named a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition that attacked Yemen in 2015 and he became well known to the international news media. He gave interviews in French, English and Arabic, but often privately harassed reporters when he didn’t like their reporting, NYT reported.

U.S. lawmakers of both parties are expressing far greater concern over what appears to be Khashoggi’s brutal killing than they were with other “Saudi errors like the kidnapping of the prime minister of Lebanon and the killing of a busload of children in Yemen by a Saudi airstrike,” NTY reported.

scapegoat
FILE – In this Feb. 1, 2015, file photo, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks during a press conference in Manama, Bahrain. A pro-government Turkish newspaper on Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018 published a gruesome recounting of the alleged slaying of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, just as America’s top diplomat arrived in the country for talks over the Washington Post columnist’s disappearance. (AP Photo/Hasan Jamali, File)

Blaming Gen. al-Assiri could help deflect blame from the crown prince, who American intelligence agencies are increasingly convinced was behind Khashoggi’s disappearance.

But will it be a plausible explanation for the killing?

“The Saudi and American goal was to create a narrative that could persuade world opinion that Khashoggi’s murder was a rogue initiative, to find scapegoats to punish and thus resolve the issue. But the chances of this plan succeeding are swiftly dissipating since no one knows what information is in the hands of the Turkish government,” Zvi Bar’el wrote for HaAretz.

Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 to get paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancée — and has not been seen since.

Turkish officials say they believe 15 Saudi men arrived in Istanbul on Oct. 2 who were connected to Khashoggi’s death. Some of them appear to have high-level connections in the Saudi government, CNN reported.

Even with a Saudi-led investigation underway, the Saudis were already pointing to Gen. al-Assiri as the culprit, and people close to the White House were briefed and given Assiri’s name, NYT reported:

“The Saudi rulers are expected to say that Gen. Assiri received verbal authorization from Prince Mohammed to capture Mr. Khashoggi for an interrogation in Saudi Arabia, but either misunderstood his instructions or overstepped that authorization and took the dissident’s life, according to two of the people familiar with the Saudi plans. They spoke on the condition of anonymity.”

Gen. al-Assiri was close enough to the crown prince MBS that he has often sat in on meetings with visiting American officials. al-Assiri’s seniority makes it plausible that he may have carried out the operation without the further participation of MBS. Lower-ranking Saudi officers might have trusted that the general was giving them orders on behalf of the prince, NYT reported.

Madawi Al-Rasheed is a Saudi dissident and visiting professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics. She lost her Saudi citizenship in 2005 for criticizing Saudi authorities. She’s calling for King Salman to replace MBS.

“If the Saudi regime is allowed to find a scapegoat or a cover story that would absolve it from any responsibility for the murder of Khashoggi, I would attribute that to the purchasing power of the Saudi regime, rather than its integrity and the integrity of its patrons, the United States of America,” Al-Rasheed said in a Democracy Now interview.

https://twitter.com/AnnPicknie/status/1053350070442029056

https://twitter.com/GlamSquad09/status/1053017391507152896