The reports about Jamal Khashoggi, the missing Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributor, whom I’ve known for more than 15 years, grow steadily more sickening.
Turkey claims to have audiotape of Saudi interrogators torturing Jamal and killing him in the Saudi Consulate. None of this is confirmed, and we still don’t know exactly what happened; we all pray that Jamal will still reappear. But increasingly it seems that the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MBS, orchestrated the torture, assassination and dismemberment of an American-based journalist using diplomatic premises in a NATO country.
That is monstrous, and it’s compounded by the tepid response from Washington. President Donald Trump is already rejecting the idea of responding to such a murder by cutting off weapons sales. Trump sounds as if he believes that the consequence of such an assassination should be a hiccup and then business as usual.
Frankly, it’s a disgrace that Trump administration officials and American business tycoons enabled and applauded MBS as he imprisoned business executives, kidnapped Lebanon’s prime minister, rashly created a crisis with Qatar, and went to war in Yemen to create what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis there. Some 8 million Yemenis on the edge of starvation there don’t share this bizarre view that MBS is a magnificent reformer.
Trump has expressed “great confidence” in MBS and said that he and King Salman “know exactly what they are doing.” Jared Kushner wooed MBS and built a close relationship with him — communicating privately without involving State Department experts — in ways that certainly assisted MBS in his bid to consolidate power for himself.
MBS knows how to push Americans’ buttons, speaking about reform and playing us like a fiddle. His willingness to sound accepting of Israel may also be one reason Trump and so many Americans were willing to embrace MBS even as he was out of control at home.
In fairness, he did allow women to drive. But he also imprisoned the women’s rights activists who had been campaigning for the right to drive. Saudi Arabia even orchestrated the detention abroad of a women’s rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, and her return in handcuffs. She turned 29 in a Saudi jail cell in July, and her marriage has ended. She, and not the prince who imprisons her, is the heroic reformer.
“MBS’ message to Saudis is clear: I will shut you up no matter where you are and no matter what laws I have to break to do it,” Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch told me.
Western companies should back out of MBS’ Future Investment Initiative conference later this month. That includes you, Mastercard, McKinsey, Credit Suisse, Siemens, HSBC, BCG, EY, Bain and Deloitte, all listed on the conference website as partners of the event.
If Saudi Arabia cannot show that Jamal is safe and sound, NATO countries should jointly expel Saudi ambassadors and suspend weapons sales. The United States should start an investigation under the Magnitsky Act and stand ready to impose sanctions on officials up to MBS.
America can also make clear to the Saudi royal family that it should find a new crown prince. A mad prince who murders a journalist, kidnaps a prime minister and starves millions of children should never be celebrated at state dinners, but instead belongs in a prison cell.
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