[MAIL] At 1.14pm on October 2, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul and off the face of this Earth. He vanished as if he had never existed. But the fallout from his disappearance grows by the day.
It is now widely believed that Mr Khashoggi was killed in the building by members of a 15-strong Saudi regime hit squad that had flown into the city earlier the same day.
On Monday, police and prosecutors inspected the consulate building in Istanbul for more than eight hours.
Now Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said they found fresh paint in the building where Mr Khashoggi vanished.
Turkish officials believe he was killed and dismembered in the consulate. According to reports, the government has an audio recording which they have shared as evidence with Saudi Arabia and the US.
Yesterday, it was alleged that a recording suggested the journalist had had his fingers cut off one by one while still alive.
A former adviser to the inner circle of the autocratic House of Saud, rulers of the super-wealthy desert kingdom, Mr Khashoggi had become an emigre critic of its abuses. The Sauds wanted him ’out of the picture’, he recently told a journalist.
They have succeeded, but only in the physical sense. His image is now all over the internet, newspapers and television screens.
Parallels with the nerve agent poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal by agents of Russia’s GRU military spy agency in Salisbury have been drawn. Here was an authoritarian regime seeking to eliminate a dissident on foreign soil in a brutal and flagrant manner.
#2
The new Saudh leader is a monster. If he can get away with this to another human being US citïzens will some day share the same fate. Satan has a plan. He is no better than ISIS.
#3
By the way. He just issued a threat to ANYONE who dissagrees with his extreme human rights violations and there are many Americans at his disposal in his country.
#4
...Not that it makes it any better, but there's a possibility that this was a rendition gone horribly wrong. Low-level Saudi minions are about as well trained to deal with the unexpected as a brand-new Soviet 2LT - and several orders of magnitude more likely to panic. If they got this dude in there (and remember he was no angel - at the very least he was covering for the Muslim Brotherhood in his writing; at worst he was actively assisting them) planning to take him back to the Magic Kingdom and something went wrong, they lost their shiat and whacked him. Then they had to explain the corpse in the conference room to the Consul - almost certainly a member of the royal family or with connections to it - and we end up with the current mess.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
10/18/2018 5:55 Comments ||
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#5
He is no better than ISIS.
And actually Stalin was worse than Hitler killing more of his people than the Austrian German, but sometimes you really don't get to choose.
#6
So, unless we get rid of this reformer, Americans are going to get it? WTF?
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
10/18/2018 7:00 Comments ||
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#7
The official media narrative™ is that Khashoggi was a noble journalist, just searching out the truth™ and that he was eliminated by a regime that took offense to his speaking truth to power™
The substitutes in this morality play are the courageous US media and the evil OrangeMan.
Look for hand-wringing analysis in the coming days along the lines of, "Can something like this happen here?"
Posted by: Bob Grorong1136 ||
10/18/2018 7:13 Comments ||
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#8
Huh. Rantburg was visited by one of Ben Rhodes' Iranian lie farmers.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Erdogan had him tossed in a shredder, and the whole thing is part of Iran's war on the Saudis.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
10/18/2018 7:34 Comments ||
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#9
something went wrong, they lost their shiat and whacked him.
#10
Nothing will bring Khashoggi or the others back. I recommend a strongly worded UN letter of condemnation and a foreign military sales surcharge to help pay for Israeli military preparedness and the US-Mexican border wall.
#11
From all I've read this is a black hole as far as facts and information goes with as many unanswered questions as there are about a certain email server.
#12
There are too many people who would like to take MBS down. From the Turks to his own family, many of whom were detained, heavily fined and remain more than a little pissed. The Khasshogi thing doesn't make much sense for an individual who has been a calculating and sophisticated operator on a large stage, like him/them or not.
Personally, the first thing it brought to mind was the terminus of a royal rant centuries ago, 'Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?'. No matter how much he may have wanted Beckett disappeared I doubt the King wanted him hacked to pieces in front of an altar in his own cathedral.
#13
President Trump succeeded in bringing the Arab world together & MbS helping in the terrorist financing department. Who is seething and ranting? And if the US intercepted communications, I imagine others with interests in the region also have intel. I hope Putin or Netanyahu can clarify the issue.
#14
Media is wringing their hands over a journalist, who was actually a spy and a rabid Muslim Brotherhood advocate and propagandist.
The timing of the hit is odd, dogpiled as it were right on top of a bunch of KSA USA dialog and weapons deals.
The media is using the death of this loathsome person to beat on Trump for holding to the arms deal and saying very diplomatically nice things about KSA.
#16
Frankly I don't give a moment's fuck about this NOT-A-CITIZEN, who's a Wash Post foreign stringer for anti-US/anti-Saudi (other than OBL) Muslim Brotherhood tool's fate. Journolists are using it to further Iran's policies. Ask how Iran treats oppo journalists? I thought not
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/18/2018 20:27 Comments ||
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[AlAhram] For months on end, Ottoman Turkish President Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First ... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey... , his entire entourage and, of course, the 95 per cent of the Ottoman Turkish printed and audiovisual media that marches in lockstep to his tune, have stuck to the narrative that the American pastor Andrew Brunson was a spy, a Gulenist and a supporter of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), all rolled into one.
Not that they saw any logical inconsistency in the fact that the pastor is Christian whereas Fethullah Gülen
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Posted by: trailing wife ||
10/18/2018 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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[PJ] On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump praised the Cherokee Nation for its remarks that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a "mockery" out of DNA tests and tribal nations. According to Trump, the Native American tribe revealed Warren as a "complete and total fraud."
"Thank you to the Cherokee Nation for revealing that Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas, is a complete and total Fraud!" the president tweeted.
He noted that Warren, whom he referred to as "Pocahontas (the bad version)," is "getting slammed. She took a bogus DNA test and it showed that she may be 1/1024, far less than the average American. Now Cherokee Nation denies her, 'DNA test is useless.' Even they don’t want her. Phony!"
#1
One amusing aspect of this is that for years we have been told there is no such thing as race, that it's purely a social construct. Now we're talking about measuring it down to a tenth of a percent. I'm so confused.
Nah, no I'm not. It's all about grasping for power and advantage by any available means.
#3
I have donated DNA tests to native Americans (the kind who are enrolled in federally-recognized tribes) who have a very high "blood quantum". This kind of testing has been going on in recent years, "under the radar" so to speak, by other researchers than myself. Members of a given tribe very frequently are related to each other as 4th cousins or closer by the standards of the testing companies (e.g. 23andme). This is particularly useful in identifying native children who were (1) taken away from birth parents by various children's services or (2) given up for adoption by native parents. These adopted-out children are usually NOT eligible to join the tribes they descend from due to the regulations of the tribes. One elder turned out to have distant cousins in Central America, dating back 200 years or longer for the most recent common ancestor. Links like this one will probably turn out to be more common than the ignorant (i.e. Ivy League researchers and the MSM) currently believe.
[American Thinker] America has undergone enormous change during the nearly eight decades of my life. Today, America is a bitterly divided, poorly educated and morally fragile society with so-called mainstream politicians pushing cynical identity politics, socialism and open borders. The president of the United States is threatened with impeachment because the other side doesn’t like him. The once reasonably unbiased American media has evolved into a hysterical left wing mob. How could the stable and reasonably cohesive America of the 1950s have reached this point in just one lifetime? Who are the main culprits? Here’s my list of the 10 most destructive Americans of the last 80 years.
#6
Soros. He's been in America enough and thrown discord and disruption wide and far in the US with his blood money, trying to destroy us from within.
Posted by: Boss Spoper5850 ||
10/18/2018 11:40 Comments ||
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#7
I think a lot of people these days don't remember Lyndon Johnson but the whole country went nuts during the 1960s, was damn near torn apart, and LBJ was the reason. I continue to wonder at the irony of LBJ claiming to fight communism in Vietnam while he implemented his communist inspired Great Society policies here in this country. He claimed to be fighting for democracy but he sent draftees, who were deemed too young to be allowed to vote, into harm's way to defend South Vietnamese regimes that were little more than military dictatorships.
I'm sure even most Rantburgers weren't alive during Franklin Roosevelt's administration. But I think FDR and LBJ should occupy the #1 and #2 positions. Social Security, Medicare, Affirmative Action and HUD typify the modern Democrat approach with big government interference in the lives of people. ObamaCare is the direct descendant of these communist based policies that could eventually lead to the bankruptcy and downfall of our nation. The taxes take enormous chunks out of our incomes which in turn erodes our freedom. But even these taxes are not enough and we continue to incur astronomical amounts of debt.
We are still suffering from the policies that FDR and LBJ implemented and I don't know how we can ever recover from them.
Kerry may be a treasonous bastard but he thankfully never had the kind of power that FDR or LBJ had.
Interesting that, instead of even mentioning Richard Nixon, the writer goes after Mark Felt. Nixon was a Boy Scout compared to Cronkite's beloved Kennedys.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
10/18/2018 13:14 Comments ||
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#8
No Rachel Carson?
No Herbert Marcuse?
No John Dewey?
Not a bad list by AT, but there's some recency bias.
BLUF:
[Breitbart] Wilkerson, who now teaches at the College of William & Mary, spoke Thursday on a panel titled "The Impact of War on Military Readiness," sponsored by the Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy. No comments from the Defense Contracting establishment.
Wilkerson argued that maintaining a presence in Afghanistan or conducting presence operations around the world that are not existential was wearing down the military’s ability to fight in future existential wars, such as against China.
"When you spend 17 years in Afghanistan and don’t fire your main tank gun, don’t fire your 8″ Howitzer or your 155 Howitzer, don’t fire your MLRS or anything else, you atrophy in terms of your ability to fight in an existential or near-existential conflict," he said.
"Or when you do nothing but Freedom of Navigation exercises ... and suddenly you’re thrust into a real naval battle on the high seas, and you don’t have enough escorts even to rescue your own people off a carrier, you’re in trouble," he said.
He said the ongoing wars in Afghanistan ‐ which entered its eighteenth year last week ‐ has already taken a heavy toll on the one percent of Americans who serve in the nation’s military.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[MAIL] At 1.14pm on October 2, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul and off the face of this Earth. He vanished as if he had never existed. But the fallout from his disappearance grows by the day.
... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey...
