Several weeks ago, 15 Saudi Arabian men – one of them traveling with a bone saw, not a common traveling accessory – flew to Istanbul, Turkey, and drove to the Saudi Consulate there. The men, when identified, were known to be close underlings of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS, as he’s known), said to be the de facto current ruler of the country and a ruthless autocrat who rules by fear and violence.
Shortly after that, Jamal Khashoggi entered the building to get documents to permit his upcoming marriage while his fiancée waited outside.
Khashoggi – a longtime working Middle East journalist, a resident of Virginia and a columnist for the Washington Post – was never seen again.
A day or so later, the Saudi men and their luggage flew home.
People often “disappear” around Saudis with little fuss, but this time the vanished man was a well-known writer, one who’d become a real thorn in the side of leaders of Saudi Arabia. He also was a gregarious fellow, one with – and this is important – a lot of friends, many of them also journalists.
Pesky people, reporters, and they weren’t going to let their friend Jamal’s disappearance go unnoticed. They raised – and kept raising – the alarm. As speculation and suspicion about the fate of the reporter and columnist increased in fervor, the Saudis came up with a series of far-fetched reasons why Khashoggi could have disappeared, but skeptical journalists were having none of it.
In fact, Turkish authorities insisted it had audio tapes of the torture, murder and dismemberment, although as I write this (Friday) they’d not shared the gruesome evidence with others.
Finally, the Saudis escorted Turkish officials through the consulate – but only after a gang of cleaners and painters was photographed visiting the building – to show that the vanished columnist wasn’t stashed in a closet or cupboard. That didn’t fool anyone.
Saudi Arabia even made a $100 million payment to this country to “support U.S. stabilization efforts in Syria.” Can we say “hush money”?
President Donald Trump, eager to maintain the fiction that the Saudis are good guys who’d never countenance such terrible behavior, first just tried to ignore the entire controversy to avoid saying something that offended the sheiks. Then he wanted to withhold judgment until the Saudis investigated . . . well, themselves.
Finally, he trotted out the ridiculous theory that Khashoggi could have been done in by a dastardly gang of “rogue assassins” who’d somehow made their way into the heavily guarded consulate.
By that point, of course, reports were everywhere that in fact the reporter and columnist had been tortured, murdered and dismembered in the embassy, presumably being carried out in pieces in that luggage and either scattered in nearby forests or flown back to Saudi Arabia.
Journalists came up with photos of the accused assassins at the airport and, in the case of one man, a known associate of the Saudi ruler, entering the consulate several hours before Khashoggi’s arrival and his departure – carrying a large suitcase – later that day.
How can we – or at least the U.S. power structure and, specifically, our presidents – continue to defend the Saudis?
For several decades, at least, this country’s leaders have been Saudi Arabia’s biggest patrons, although with varying enthusiasm. Trump is especially protective of the “kingdom” and Mohammed bin Salman.
And why not? After all, MBS and the other Saudi sheiks have showered the president with over 80 gifts, estimated by one Middle East publication to be worth upward of $1.2 billion. The baubles lavished on the famously self-centered and insecure Trump on his first visit alone included expensive leopard skin clothing lined with white tiger fur, a gold armband studded with diamonds, a sword of pure gold encrusted with precious gems and a portrait of himself.
The value of the sword alone was estimated to be $200 million. (No estimate on the value of the Trump portrait.)
But if Trump shows particular fervor in his affection for the Saudis, the fact is that all our recent presidents have supported and protected the Saudi rulers.
We seem, magically, to forget that the Sept. 11 terrorists – the execrable Osama bin Laden and his fanatical thugs who were responsible for the atrocities of that day and who’ve vowed to savage the United States and its people – were overwhelmingly Saudi and backed financially by Saudi billionaires.
These are the same reactionary sheiks who import and abuse “guest workers” to do the everyday work of running the country, who shroud and repress women nearly as completely as do the loathsome Taliban.
These are still the men who not only themselves embrace a peculiarly primitive and intolerant brand of Islam but are busily trying to export it to such previously un-infested places as Bosnia, and who regularly underwrite anti-Israel terrorist organizations. They preside over a closed, anti-democratic society that’s only marginally less hostile to moderate Muslims than it is to Christians and Jews.
Yes, in recent years the sheiks have magnanimously reopened movie theaters (those dens of iniquity!) and they now “allow” women to drive and to vote (in local elections only) even if – in almost every other way – women remain bound in what amounts to medieval thrall, governed in every other thing they do by men.
The Saudis we protect are the same great Middle East “allies” who have not once in the last 30 years played square with us. They refused to cooperate when the FBI attempted – in vain – to investigate the 1996 bombing of our Dhahran military barracks, which killed 19 and injured hundreds. They stayed studiously aloof from our investigations of both the African embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole, despite evidence that the fingerprints of Saudi citizens were all over those two operations.
More recently the Saudis have prosecuted a vicious war against Yemen, relentlessly bombing and killing an estimated 18,000 Yemenis, including many thousands of children slaughtered in their schools and school buses.
And above all, even after parading themselves as our true allies, they refused for years to acknowledge that 15 of the 19 homicidal zealots who commandeered those planes on Sept. 11 and flew them into American buildings in New York and a barren field in Pennsylvania were Saudis.
What incredible gall!
The truth is that the Saudi government, even as it presents itself as a great friend of American democracy, is a corrupt and cruel autocracy that tortures and murders its own citizens, that imprisons critics and that is intent on keeping its control at all costs while it exports a pernicious form of religious intolerance around the rest of the world. If anything, it has become even more rather than less controlling of, and brutal to, its citizenry in recent years.
Americans know this, no matter what sort of soothing pablum the administration tries to serve up. We also know that we may have no choice but to cozy up to the House of Saud as long as it has oil that the rest of the world needs.
I wrote a column for the Monitor with these same themes 16 years ago. Things haven’t changed, except perhaps to get worse.
At the very least today we can stop pretending Saudi Arabia’s our friend and benefactor.
It’s worth noting that the furor about Khashoggi’s death – which the Saudis desperately want to quell and conceal from its own citizens – is being kept alive in the rest of the world by ordinary journalists continuing to follow the story and demanding answers.
And it’s also worth noting that Khashoggi’s last column – published posthumously by the Washington Post – was a fervent argument for the importance of developing and maintaining a free press everywhere, but especially in the Arab world.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)