Summary: The assassination of Jamal Khashoggi may be expected, over the medium to long term, to have significant effects on the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and, more significantly, on the House of Saud itself. The Saudi response to Khashoggi’s murder has morphed from posture of what Winston Churchill might have called “injured guilt,” to one of acknowledgment of the fact of the crime while denying culpability, attempting, against the overwhelming weight of evidence, to suggest that Khashoggi’s murder was the result of “rogue” operators. The now apparent complicity of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a culture that places a premium on revenge, retaliation, and retribution, may be the spark that sends his aging and unbelievably corrupt Dynasty up in flames.
----------------------------------------------------------------
When Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, nephew of notorious multi-zillionaire Adnan Khashoggi and cousin of sometime Princess Di boyfriend Dodi Fayed, was murdered inside the Turkish Consulate in İstanbul at the beginning of this month, the initial official Saudi response was one of indignant protestations and denial. To use Winston Churchill’s mordant description of Sir Stafford Cripps, the Saudi response to the initial and overwhelming evidence that Jamal Khashoggi had, in fact, been murdered in the consulate was an outburst of “injured guilt.”
In the better part of a month that has followed, the Saudi response has shifted from denials delivered in that tone of “injured guilt” to acknowledgment that Khashoggi had indeed been dispatched within the consulate, while denying any official culpability on the part of the Kingdom in Khashoggi’s murder.
In the meantime, all manner of lurid stories and conspiracy theories have been circulating. In the vacuum caused by the official unwillingness of the kingdom to come clean with what really happened when Jamal Khashoggi entered the consulate but never emerged, conspiracy theories and lurid stories have abounded.
Perhaps the most lurid of them all is the story circulating in Turkey and in parts of the American leftist media that Khashoggi was dismembered while still alive, a story lent credence by reports of screams from within the consul general’s study, together with the presence of a bone saw in the possession of one of the apparent kill team.
The “dismembered alive” narrative is certainly convenient to Ankara. It plays well into Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman diplomatic Kriegßpiel against Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It certainly plays well among the left-progressive media in this country, which have long had a conspicuous disdain for the monumentally corrupt House of Saud.
Nevertheless, as convenient as such a narrative is for Ankara, inasmuch as it shocks the consciences of civilized people everywhere, the Turkish narrative is open to serious question because it postulates a violation of one of the fundamental rules of intelligence tradecraft; use minimal force necessary to accomplish the intelligence objective at hand, which was to liquidate Jamal Khashoggi as efficiently, quietly, and expeditiously as possible.
A well-executed intelligence “wet work” would have involved a swift administration of a deadly nerve agent such as Novichok (or its United States equivalent). Given that the Saudis learned the lion’s share of their intelligence tradecraft from us, it is by no means unreasonable to expect that a fight may have been stayed inside the consulate in order to give the Saudi intelligence operatives of the kill team enough time and opportunity to administer the fatal poison.
If in fact a kill team of 15 men was lying in wait for Khashoggi inside the consul-general’s study, the scream referenced in Turkish and Western media reports can be fairly easily accounted for as Khashoggi’s exclamation of surprise or cry for help as he was put in the headlock that has also been referenced in Turkish and Western media reports. Alternatively, the scream could be accounted for by the jabbing of a needle and syringe into some part of his body, probably his neck.
If a nerve agent had been administered in such a fashion, the scream would have been Jamal Khashoggi’s last audible utterance. Novichok, or the US equivalent thereto, can be fatal within seconds or minutes. If the operatives of the kill team had Khashoggi in a headlock, and shot him full of Novichok, there is no doubt that Jamal Khashoggi would have been dead by the time his body was lowered to the floor. It certainly is more in keeping with best practices of intelligence tradecraft to kill your victim quickly rather than dismember him alive. Saudi intelligence operatives should have learned at least that from their US instructors.
After all, when all is said and done, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is no fool. MBS certainly recognizes that Jamal Khashoggi was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the Arab nation. After all, you don’t enjoy a certain measure of entrée to Saudi royal circles unless you are the nephew of the late, fabulously wealthy Adnan Khashoggi and the cousin of Dodi Fayed.
MBS must have been aware that to murder a Khashoggi would have been to provoke one of the famously endless cycles of revenge, retribution, and retaliation that have figured so prominently in the history of the Arab nation. Surely, MBS cannot be utterly unmindful of the revenge-based 1975 assassination of King Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, the 1951 assassination of King Abdullah I of Jordan, the brutal 1958 murder of King Faisal II of Iraq, or the 1981 jihadist assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
MBS should be fearful that somehow, somewhere, some Islamic cleric will issue a Fatwa sanctioning and calling for MBS’s assassination or that the Saudi ulema (the senior Islamic clerics of the Kingdom) will issue some kind of similar declaration.
Indeed, MBS may have crossed a so-called red line in the Kingdom’s politics. For most of its history, Saudi Arabia has been an absolute monarchy tempered by the realization of the royal house that its absolute rule depends for its legitimacy — and its survival — upon cultivating consensus among the kingdom’s leading families, and among the historic regions of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi control, al-Hasa, the Hejaz, ‘Asir, and Najd.
But under the “stewardship” of MBS, the Saudi model of rule has shifted from one of consensus-based absolute rule to one of royal totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, MBS and his acolytes seem altogether blind to the historical reality that absolute monarchy, whether hereditary or de facto, has become, to all intents and purposes, a thing of the past, an historical curiosity increasingly regarded by a majority of the world not as a quaint holdover from times past, but as a positive social evil to be eradicated whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Of course, none of this relieves the kingdom of any of its culpability in the matter. Moreover, because MBS is no fool, he would no doubt have sought to shore up his flanks before moving against the Khashoggi family. He would have sought, in short, to avail himself of the cravenness, venality, corruptibility, and gullibility of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s equally craven, venal, corrupt, repulsive, and gullible son-in-law Jared Kushner.
By drawing Trump and Kushner into what was an evident plot to assassinate the inconvenient journalist, MBS could feel comfortable of having the power of the United States behind him in the event of any attempt at revenge by Khashoggi’s friends or family. Thus, it is not unreasonable to conclude that it is highly doubtful that MBS would have sanctioned and intelligence wet work against Jamal Khashoggi if he did not have an advance green light from the White House.
Indeed, it is also reasonable to infer that MBS did, indeed have a green light for the killing from the highest reaches of the Trump administration. Knowing Donald Trump’s poisonous hatred for the Washington Post, we may infer the Trump would have seen in the Saudi operation against Jamal Khashoggi and opportunity to fire a warning shot across the bow of the Post as an institution and its journalists as individuals.
Trump, whom the evidence now suggests was read in to the Saudi operational plan before green-lighting it, probably saw the assassination/murder of Jamal Khashoggi as an excellent vehicle for intimidating what he plainly sees as a significant domestic political enemy. When all is said and done, the evidence appears to be mounting that Donald Trump was indeed either read in before the operation took place, or, even more damning, that it may have been Donald Trump himself who gave the go order for the planning and execution of actual operation itself.
Unfortunately for him, since The Donald has not got the self-awareness that God gave an axolotl, or any insight into the history of the English-speaking peoples, he plainly has absolutely no knowledge or recollection of the story of St. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose assassination, on December 29, 1170 on orders from King Henry II, sparked outrage throughout Christendom.
Now while Khashoggi himself of course was Muslim, and not a high-ranking cleric (in a religion that has neither priests nor bishops), he was a fearless journalist and somewhat after being the conscience of the Arab nation. For Trump to allow the United States to be seen as complicit in the murder of a witness for freedom of expression, a virtue much put upon and derided throughout much of the Arab world, is to put the United States in the position of gathering to itself yet further reservoirs of ill will, not just from the Arab nation, but from much of the Islamic ummah as a whole.
By parroting the Kingdom’s line, Donald Trump, his ridiculous, neotenous lap dog Jared Kushner, and the administration as a whole may well have filled the vials of wrath among the ummah and in the Arab nation to overflowing.
By their supine acquiescence in a gross crime against humanity and against human freedom, Trump and Kushner may well have also exposed this country to a new wave of terror when, not if, the unbelievably corrupt House of Saud finally collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions and inconsistencies.
MBS would have done well, before sanctioning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to have reacquainted himself with the words of the 81st sura of the Holy Qur’an:
When the sun is overthrown,
And when the stars fall,
And when the hills are moved,
And when the camels big with young are abandoned,
And when the wild beasts are herded together,
And when the seas rise,
And when souls are reunited,
And when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked
for what sin she was slain,
And when the pages are laid open,
And when the sky is ripped away,
And when hellfire is lighted,
And when the Garden is brought nigh,
[Then] every soul will know what it hath done!
Qur’an 81, Sura at-Takwir (The Overthrowing): 1-14
