The Tragedy of Jamal Khashoggi The sad irony of the Saudi journalist's disappearance: His fate may.
International pressure including from the US may topple him. We will see. Lindsey Graham has a big hat--we will see if he has cattle to go with it.
The Tragedy of Jamal Khashoggi
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/12/the-tragedy-of-jamal-khashoggi-221306
The sad irony of the Saudi journalist’s disappearance: His fate may seal that of the reckless leader he criticized.
By KRISTIAN ULRICHSEN
October 12, 2018
The Friday Cover
An illustration of a human head, with dozens of faces of Donald Trump where the brain should be.
It’s not just Jamal Khashoggi.
The disappearance and reported killing of the reform-minded Saudi journalist at a consulate in Istanbul is only the latest in a succession of developments that have cast serious doubt upon the trajectory of Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Since the 33-year-old son of King Salman leapfrogged dozens of older and more experienced cousins to become Saudi Arabia’s next-generation leader in 2015, he has lurched from one mistake to another.
He launched a seemingly unwinnable war in Yemen. He demanded a blockade of neighboring Qatar that appears more pointless with every passing month. He ordered the detention of hundreds of journalists, clerics, activists, officials and businesspeople, including, briefly, Lebanon’s prime minister, Saad Hariri. He oversaw a diplomatic rupture with Canada in a furious overreaction to fairly routine criticism.
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All that now may change if it is proved beyond reasonable doubt that Khashoggi was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate on October 3, or that senior policymakers in Riyadh either ordered or were aware of the plan to target him. Circumstantial evidence, and the fact that Khashoggi remains missing a week after he was last seen alive entering the consulate, has accumulated to the point that the burden of proof falls on the Saudis to show that Khashoggi left the consulate unscathed and of his own accord. This the Saudis have been unable to do, on the flimsy pretext that the surveillance system at the consulate was livestream only and did not record video footage. A drip-drip of other tidbits of detail, such as the suggestion that Khashoggi was asked to return to the consulate three days after his initial appointment to complete paperwork needed for his forthcoming marriage to a Turkish woman, or that local Turkish staff reportedly were told not to come to work the day of his disappearance, and the discovery that a team of 15 Saudi security personnel flew into Istanbul and were at the consulate during Khashoggi’s visit, have added to the crescendo of accusations that the Saudis have been unable to explain away or offer even a plausible alternative course of events.
If the Saudis indeed killed Khashoggi and thought they could get away with it, they have made a grave miscalculation. Not only was he a contributing writer for the influential Washington Post op-ed page — which has been thundering in its demands for accountability — but Khashoggi was well-known on Capitol Hill as a leading Saudi reformer. Members of Congress, including prominent Republicans such as Foreign Affairs chairman Bob Corker of Tennessee and Trump-whisperer Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have expressed outrage at Saudi Arabia’s behavior and threatened to invoke sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act, a bill that allows the executive branch to impose targeted sanctions and visa bans on individuals worldwide responsible for human rights violations...........................................
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