John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS BY AS’AD ABUKHALIL
"The Strange Disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi
"Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, who disappeared in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week is not quite the critic of the Saudi regime that the Western media says he is, writes As’ad AbuKhalil."
Sorry, but I think this article a bit of what they call a "straw man" argument in logic.
You might even call it a red herring.
Refuting the hyped and exaggerated claims of the "western press" about an event like this has almost nothing to do with the actual event or its importance.
It's rather like entering the ridiculous set of false and uninformed arguments, on all sides of the American political establishment, about Russian influence, which, in fact, any critical observer instantly can see is virtually zero, all while Washington and those allies under its thumb scream and whoop, "the sky is falling."
The Crown Prince is a usurper, kidnapper, extortionist, murderer, and a war criminal, full stop.
He is also a supreme narcissist and is well known for having a very thin skin.
Look at the way he furiously retaliates at anything he regards to be a slight, as at Trump and his “pay for your security,” and as at Canada and its pitifully little squeak of a remark about human rights.
The Washington power establishment likes the prince, exceedingly. Remember how he was taken around on a grand goodwill tour, meeting American officials and important people, almost as though he were the new President of France rather than a murderous, usurper absolute monarch of a desert kingdom? He’s proven his worth in waging aggressive war in Syria, covertly, and, openly, in Yemen.
He has also proven his worth in ending Saudi Arabia’s old antagonisms towards Israel and, indeed, in becoming virtually a secret ally of that state. Just the kind of thing the Neocon empire-builders in Washington want to see. So, he is a key player in Neocon plans for the Middle East. He has embraced Israel’s antagonism towards Iran, too, which has nothing to do with threats and security and anti-Semitism but everything to do with who is to be the most influential country in the region.
The Crown Prince, also, something rarely noticed, has a great deal in common with Israel, representing monied privilege in the region, relative newcomers ruling over ancient residents (the Royal Family does not go back much longer than re-created Israel itself), antagonists against both indigenous democracy in the region and independent-minded other leaders, and both are shills for American influence.
This is an extremely dangerous man, even though our mainline press has dedicated itself, at least until now, to building him up in an almost laughable manner with lines straight out of a disinformation crib sheet from Langley Virginia. Our press made a huge big deal out of a few privileged women in Saudi Arabia now getting driver’s licences while this Crown Prince busied himself slaughtering thousands of women in Yemen and in Syria and in brutally suppressing Shia minorities in parts of Saudi Arabia itself – all of the latter activity going without comment.
It would not have taken much for Khashoggi to earn the prince’s enmity. Stuff about being Khashoggi being a resistance figure for enlightened values is as silly as the streams of garbage about Putin determining American national elections. It represents noise covering other matters. He only had to look vaguely like a threat or roadblock, for whatever reasons, to the path of a murderous prince. The prince is also quite nervous about opposition to himself by other clans of the large Royal Family - people he has already deeply offended and committed crimes against, his acts generating opposition both open and covert. The usurper Prince’s position is not a one-hundred percent stable and secure.
My guess is that the prince arrogantly over-played his hand in getting rid of someone he resented, for whatever reasons, overplayed his hand because now at least part of western interests cannot just ignore such obvious butchery.
God, we even have security-camera views of the gang of Saudi security forces-related killers (some identified) coming and going, and the Turks have secret recordings of Khashoggi being tortured and killed. Our good old dependable press tried a planted story about how maybe Khashoggi’s smart-watch had recorded his torture and execution, but the recording likely came from planted Turkish security spyware in the Saudi consulate. We have Khashoggi photographed going into the Saudi consulate and never coming out. We have his fiancé waiting for him. We have pictures of a van parked by the consulate, a van whose licence was not immediately traced.
They are now going through the dumb-show of allowing Turkey to search the Saudi consulate, after a considerable delay. Unless they bring a gallon jug of luminal (to check for invisible blood traces), they won’t find a thing. And unless they were simultaneously searching the Saudi consul’s house and digging up the garden where Khashoggi’s butchered body parts were likely buried, they still won’t find a thing. Everything will have been disposed of.
Current delays in the West are just cover for behind-the-scenes scrambles, scrambles to create a covering story, for a way to exonerate this very useful murderer-prince, and perhaps to create a fall-guy. After all, Putin only has to hiccough to be instantly subjected to new sanctions and condemnations.
But here we have something close to an open-and-shut case of high-level political murder, and we see no sanctions, we see no slowing-up in hundreds of billions in arms sales, we hear no false clamoring over human rights or even journalistic freedom. We see no diplomatic personal being expelled, as we saw Theresa May doing against Russia without a shred of evidence anyone could credit.
It all makes Theresa May’s unsupported claims in the Skripal Affair really look silly. Here’s the real thing, right out a John le Carré novel, but we see no ethics-inspired acts or hear no histrionic words by British or American or Canadian authorities which might endanger hundreds of billions in arms sales.
You see, it really isn’t that anyone cares about the fate of a man like Khashoggi, whether he was a decent man or not, whether he was a journalist or not. These events concern the very public tipping of the imperial apple cart, which cannot be just ignored. The prince’s blundering act threatens a vast, partly-secret engineering project in the Middle East. Now, in Washington, that has to be taken seriously.
Here, once again, is the kind of ugly business to which we are regularly exposed in Washington’s vast new drive for world dominance.
Just as we see the regular line-up of Israel snipers shooting unarmed demonstrators in Gaza from behind a fence, including women and children and medics and journalists. And then we have the brutally black humor of Israel’s halting fuel shipments into Gaza until “the violence stops.” Do we see one serious effort in the West to question public butchery? Do we see one serious call for a mass-murderer Prime Minister to receive justice?
No, because if something serves the American empire, it serves God.
AFTERWORD:
Only just now I read this in The Guardian:
'After speaking to the Saudi king by phone, the US president said Salman “denies any knowledge of whatever may have happened” to the journalist and was “working closely with Turkey” to find out what happened to him.
'“The denial was very, very strong,” Trump told reporters. “It sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers. Who knows?”
"Rogue killers"? So, the games of cover-up begin. That's the morality of America's empire.
