Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan
Was the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald still getting as much media coverage three weeks after his death as it did that first week after Nov. 22, 1963? Not as I recall.
Yet, three weeks after his murder, Jamal Khashoggi, who was not a U.S. citizen, was not killed by an American, and died not on U.S. soil but in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, consumes our elite press.
The top two stories in Monday’s Washington Post were about the Khashoggi affair. A third, inside, carried the headline, “Trump, who prizes strength, may look weak in hesitance to punish Saudis.”
On Sunday, the Post put three Khashoggi stories on Page 1. The Post’s lead editorial bashed Trump for his equivocal stance on the killing.
Two of the four columns on the op-ed page demanded that the Saudis rid themselves of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the prime suspect in ordering the execution.
Page 1 of the Outlook section offered an analysis titled, “The Saudis knew they could get away with it. We always let them.”
Page 1 of the Metro section featured a story about the GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia that began thus:
“Corey A. Stewart’s impulse to use provocative and evidence-free slurs reached new heights Friday when the Republican nominee for Senate disparaged slain Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi…
“Stewart appears to be moving in lockstep with extremist Republicans and conservative commentators engaging in a whisper campaign to smear Khashoggi and insulate Trump from global rebuke.”
This was presented as a news story.
Inside the Business section of Sunday’s Post was a major story, “More CEOs quietly withdraw from Saudi conference.” Featured was a photo of JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who had canceled his appearance.
On the top half of the front page of the Sunday New York Times were three stories about Khashoggi, as were the two top stories on Monday.
The Times’ lead editorial Monday called for a U.N. investigation, a cutoff in U.S. arms sales to Riyadh and a signal to the royal house that we regard their crown prince as “toxic.”
Why is our prestige press consumed by the murder of a Saudi dissident not one in a thousand Americans had ever heard of?
Answer: Khashoggi had become a contributing columnist to the Post. He was a journalist, an untouchable. The Post and U.S. media are going to teach the House of Saud a lesson: You don’t mess with the American press!
Moreover, the preplanned murder implicating the crown prince, with 15 Saudi security agents and an autopsy expert with a bone saw lying in wait at the consulate to kill Khashoggi, carve him up, and flee back to Riyadh the same day, is a terrific story.
Still, what ought not be overlooked here is the political agenda of our establishment media in driving this story as hard as they have for the last three weeks.
Our Beltway elite can smell the blood in the water. They sense that Khashoggi’s murder can be used to discredit the Trump presidency, expose the amorality of his foreign policy and sever his ties to patriotic elements of his Middle American constituency.
How so?
First, there are those close personal ties between Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, son of the King, and Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the president of the United States.
Second, there are the past commercial connections between builder Donald Trump, who sold a floor of a Trump building and a yacht to the Saudis when he was in financial straits.
Third, there is the strategic connection. The first foreign trip of the Trump presidency was, at Kushner’s urging, to Riyadh to meet the king, and the president has sought to tighten U.S. ties to the Saudis ever since.
Fourth, Trump has celebrated U.S. sales arms to the Saudis as a job-building benefit to America and a way to keep the Saudis as strategic partners in a Mideast coalition against Iran.
Fifth, the leaders of the two wings of Trump’s party in the Senate, anti-interventionist Rand Paul and interventionist Lindsey Graham, are already demanding sanctions on Riyadh and an ostracizing of the prince.
As story after story comes out of Riyadh about what happened in that consulate on Oct. 2, each less convincing than the last, the coalition of forces, here and abroad, pressing for sanctions on Saudi Arabia and dumping the prince, grows.
The time may be right for President Trump to cease leading from behind, to step out front, and to say that, while he withheld judgment to give the Saudis every benefit of the doubt, he now believes that the weight of the evidence points conclusively to a plot to kill Jamal Khashoggi.
Hence, he is terminating U.S. military aid for the war in Yemen that Crown Prince Mohammed has been conducting for three years. Win-win.
I feel the pain of these particular goat humpers. They claim K was accidentally killed in a fist fight. Apparently someone delivered what Rocky Marciano use to call his “Suzie Q” punch (ask Ezzard Charles). It’s a laughable bullshit story for sure but hey-it follows the script invented by mericans. It’s called ‘plausible denial’, i.e. a boldfaced lie that barely passes the laugh test but does provide a fig leaf. It’s like “They attack us for our freedoms’ or “We have to free the Libyan people from Gaddafi” or, for that matter, the “Magic Bullet Theory”. But now THEY are all fucked up because this particular plausibly deniable bullshit story is just too much to bear. Killing a bus load of Yemeni children is fine but THIS???? An outrage.
“All I was trying to do was slug the guy back, but my elbow hit the ‘on’ switch on my bone saw, and I accidentally cut off his torso”.
It was an interesting read. The writer paints the picture of Trump taking a stand for evidence while the MSM enters their umpteenth integration of “we finally have to goods to dump Trump.”
Then at the end, he calls out Trump to stop leading from behind and cave to the MSM and dump the prince; ignoring the fact of his beginning argument that this story should have just curled up and died weeks ago.
By starting your piece with your opinion and then erasing the reasons for your opinion, your stance becomes exactly zero.
Was the destruction of the World Trade Center still getting as much media coverage three weeks after 9/11 as it did that first week in Sep 2001? Not as I recall.
Roll up the pants legs, shit’s going to get deep, it’s the official apologist for the administration.
Anyone here actually slaughter an animal before? Dismember one using a knife and a saw?
I have, a lot of them.
No one cut up a living human being with a bone saw- that much didn’t happen. That was the first story.
No one with the kind of experience these Saudi hit squads allegedly had plots a hit and then buries the pieces in the garden out back. Where did they get that from, Rear Window? Again, another pant load.
So where is the proof? The evidence we keep hearing about? The recorded execution he allegedly stored to the iCloud? Or the tape the Turkish Secret Service made? How does anyone know that they buried it in the garden out back> At least we know there are spy satellites that can see anything on the ground below, where’s those high resolution photos?
My sense of this is that if anyone killed Khashoggi, if he is even dead, it’s almost certainly the people MAKING the claims. There’s no other reason for the guy to dominate the news cycle the way he has for his position. He’s a mid level spook that obviously had ties to the CIA, spent most of his life travelling in spook circles, was embedded in one media slot after another that allowed him access to people like OBL and he was so fearful of the Saudis that he calmly walked right into their KZ?
Come on already.
This is one of those times where you need a deep sea diving suit to get through the bull.
Kinda like the migrant invasion. Lots of funny business going on there too.
This is only going to get worse until a large percentage of people wake up to the fact that they are being played.
But I’m not sure they even want to wake up.
October comes around and the clown prince has to pull a funny joke on Americans, a helo ride in Vegas accompanied by the music of a mass shooter. A remake of chainsaw massacre in a Saudi embassy; those cwazy Saudis!
Another October, another blood bath.
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal co-owns the Four Seasons Hotel together with Bill Gates. The Four Seasons Hotel is located within the 5 top floors of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. A man that amazingly looked like Alwaleed bin Talal was escorted out of the Tropicana Hotel Casino by security and what looks like special forces shortly after the Oct 1, 2017 shooting in Las Vegas. All the other casino goers were ordereded to get on the floor and not to look up during this event.
I saw a video of this shortly after it happened, but now it seems to have gone down the worm hole. The Saudi’s have a lot of clout here in the USSA so there is no telling what will happen next.
Lots of stuff going down the memory hole. I wonder if they will purge TBP real-time comments? There are a few here whose job it seems is to minimize and dissuade questioning the official story while re-directing you to the concocted national emergency.
Yet another example of everything being prosecuted through the media. “They” control the narrative… Chip
Still don’t care.
Muslim Brotherhood lover, Ex-Saudi insider, WaPo rabble rouser…who gives a fuck?
Sounds like addition through subtraction to me.
Lose Lose you mean. Now the attempted murder of a former Russian agent by means of a nerve agent was rightly condemned in the West and led to additional sanctions being imposed on Russia. But what if Russia had arrested three senior generals at the GRU and 15 other officials involved in the murder attempt? Would we not see this as a good faith effort to punish those responsible? OK Putin didn’t place himself under arrest but we know that just doesn’t happen even if Putin, as Russia’s leader, was ultimately responsible. Same would apply to Saudi’s Crown Prince. Underlings take the fall. Always have always will.
The war in Yemen is unrelated to this affair. It is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates and Iran. Over 200 missiles have been launched from Yemen at Saudi Arabia. These are not homemade rockets of the sort Hamas fires at Israel but large guided missiles of the Scud variant that could only have been supplied by Iran. Illiterate Houthi rebels did not cobble them together in some hut. Saudi Arabia is totally justified in using every means at its disposal to crush these Iranian backed rebels in Yemen.
I have the perfect solution for this and I am amazed no one else thought of it: I say we bomb the fuck out of ….. Lebanon.
(After all … 19 SAUDS were involved on 9-11, and we bombed the fuck out of ….. IRAQ. And that worked out just swell for everybody.)
[img
[/img]
Saudis have been killing people in Yemen and repressing journalists for a long time now, should Russia of all countries change its course because this time it was a WaPo guy who got the short end of the stick?
Putin has made no bones that Russia is moving out of transactions in dollar currency. If Russia and Saudi Arabia at some point begin to trade in non-dollar currencies, it will be a fatal blow to the western banking system. (China has also been pressing Saudi Arabia for trading in yuan currency.)
https://russia-insider.com/en/saudi-arabia-gets-friend-need-russia/ri25147
What bothers me is that Turkish Intelligence seems to have been well aware of what was going on in the Saudi consulate even before Khashoggi was killed. How clean are Turkey’s hands if, in order to score political points on the Saudi Crown Prince, they let Khashoggi walk into the consulate knowing his killers were lying in wait?