{"id":180277,"date":"2018-12-10T05:48:56","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T05:48:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=180277"},"modified":"2018-12-13T06:10:13","modified_gmt":"2018-12-13T06:10:13","slug":"spare-me-americas-tears-for-jamal-khashoggi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=180277","title":{"rendered":"Spare me America\u2019s tears for Jamal Khashoggi"},"content":{"rendered":"

This excuse for Trump-bashing ignores the CIA’s past crimes<\/em><\/h2>\n

Robert Fisk \u2013 The Independent Dec 6, 2018<\/h1>\n
\"Evidence<\/a>

Evidence suggests journalist Jamal Khashoggi was tortured to death, dismembered and smuggled out of a Saudi Consulate. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Can I be the only one \u2013 apart from his own sycophants \u2013 to find the sight of America\u2019s finest Republicans and Democrats condemning the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia for murdering Jamal Khashoggi a bit sickening? \u201cCrazy\u201d. \u201cDangerous\u201d. A \u201cwrecking ball\u201d. A \u201csmoking saw\u201d. These guys are angry. CIA director Gina Haspel, who was happy to sign off on the torture of her Muslim captives in a\u00a0secret American prison in\u00a0Thailand, obviously knew what she was talking about when she testified about Mohammed bin Salman and the agony of Jamal Khashoggi.<\/span><\/p>\n

US government leaks suggest that Haspel knew all about the shrieks of pain, the suffering of Arab men who believed they were drowning, the desperate pleading for life from America\u2019s victims in these sanctuaries of torment in and after 2002. After all, the desperate screams of a man who believes he is drowning and the desperate screams of a man who believes he is suffocating can\u2019t be very different. Except, of course, that the CIA\u2019s victims lived to be tortured another day \u2013 indeed several more days \u2013 while Jamal Khashoggi\u2019s asphyxiation was intended to end his life. Which it did.<\/span><\/p>\n

A generation ago, the CIA\u2019s \u201cOperation Phoenix\u201d torture and assassination programme in Vietnam went way beyond the imaginations of the Saudi intelligence service. In spook language, Khashoggi was merely \u201cterminated with maximum prejudice\u201d.\u00a0If the CIA could sign off on mass murder in Vietnam, why shouldn\u2019t an Arab dictator do the same on a far smaller scale? True, I can\u2019t imagine the Americans went in for bone saws. Testimony suggests that mass rape followed by mass torture did for their enemies in Vietnam. Why play music through the earphones of the murderers?<\/span><\/p>\n

But still it goes on. Here\u2019s Democrat senator Bob Menendez this week. The US, he told us, must \u201csend a clear and unequivocal message that such actions are not acceptable on the world\u2019s stage\u201d. The \u201caction\u201d, of course, is the murder of Khashoggi. And this from a man who constantly defended Israel after its slaughter of the innocents in Gaza.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what on earth is going on here? Perhaps the \u201cworld\u2019s stage\u201d of which Menendez spoke was the White House \u2013 an appropriate phrase, when you come to think about it \u2013\u00a0where the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has been no stranger. Yet when at least one recent US presidential incumbent of that high office can be considered guilty of war crimes \u2013 in Iraq \u2013 and the deaths of tens of thousands of Arabs, how come American senators are huffing and puffing about just one man, Mohammed bin Salman, who (for a moment, let us set aside the Yemen war) is only being accused of ordering the murder and dismemberment of one single Arab?<\/span><\/p>\n

After all, world leaders \u2013 and US presidents themselves \u2013\u00a0have always had rather a soft spot for mass murderers and those who should face war crimes indictments. Trump has infamously met Kim Jong-un and invited him to the White House. We are all waiting for Rodrigo Duterte to take up his own invitation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama lavished hospitality at the White House on a host of bloody autocrats \u2013 from Gambia, Burkina Faso and Cameroon \u2013 before we even recall Suharto, whose death squads killed up to half a million people; and\u00a0Hosni Mubarak, whose secret police sometimes raped their prisoners and who sanctioned the hanging of hundreds of Islamists without proper trials,\u00a0and his ultimate successor, Field Marshal-President al-Sisi, who has around 60,000 political prisoners locked up in Egypt and whose cops appear to have tortured a young Italian student to death. But Giulio Regeni wasn\u2019t murdered in an Egyptian consulate. This list does not even include Ariel Sharon, who as Israeli defence minister was accused by an Israeli inquiry of personal responsibility for the massacre of 1,700 Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut in 1982.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what is this \u201cclear and unequivocal message\u201d that senator Menendez is rambling on about? The message has been clear and unequivocal for decades. The US \u201cnational interest\u201d always trumps (in both senses) morality or international crime. Why else did the United States support Saddam Hussein in his attempt to destroy Iran and his use of chemical warfare against Iran? Why else did Donald Rumsfeld plead with Saddam in December 1993 to allow the reopening of the US embassy in Baghdad when the Iraqi dictator (a \u201cstrongman\u201d at the time, of course) had already used mustard gas against his opponents? By the time Rumsfeld arrived for his meeting, more than 3,000 victims had fallen amid Iraqi gas clouds. The figure would reach at least 50,000 dead. Which is, in mathematical terms, Jamal Khashoggi times 50,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Gina<\/a>

Gina Haspel reportedly participated in the torture of detainees because she “enjoyed it”. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet we are supposed to recoil with shock and horror when Haspel \u2013 who might herself have a few admissions to make to senators on other matters \u2013 suggests that America\u2019s latest favourite Middle Eastern tyrant knew about the forthcoming murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Does Menendez think that Saddam hadn\u2019t signed the death sentences of thousands of Iraqi men and women \u2013 which, as we know from his later \u201ctrial\u201d, he did \u2013 before meeting Rumsfeld? Or that Duterte, who has compared himself to Hitler, doesn\u2019t sign off on the killing of his murdered drug \u201csuspects\u201d? Or that Suharto had absolutely nothing to do with half a million murders in Indonesia?<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s instructive, indeed, that the thousands of innocents killed in the Yemen war, an offensive undertaken by Mohammed bin Salman himself with logistical support from the US and UK \u2013 and it doesn\u2019t need Haspel to tell us this \u2013 hasn\u2019t exactly left US senators shocked. Just another bunch of Arabs killing each other, I suppose. Starvation didn\u2019t get mentioned by the senators emerging from Haspel\u2019s closed hearing. Yet the senators know all about the mosque bombings, wedding party bombings, hospital bombings and school bombings in Yemen. Why no tears for these innocents? Or is that a bit difficult when the US military \u2013 on every occasion by accident, of course \u2013 has bombed mosques, wedding parties, hospitals and schools in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria?<\/span><\/p>\n

No, the shock and horror and the need for full disclosure about the Saudis is primarily about Trump, and the need to tie him in to the cruel murder of a Washington Post<\/em> journalist and US resident whose gruesome demise has been blamed by the American president upon a \u201cvicious world\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But there is something more than this, the appalling fact \u2013 albeit only a folk memory, perhaps, for many with scarcely any institutional memory at all \u2013 that 15 of those 9\/11 hijackers were Saudis, that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi, that George W Bush secretly flew bin Laden family members out of the US after 9\/11, that the Saudis themselves are heir to a blighted, rural, cruel version of Sunni Islam \u2013 based on the pernicious teachings of the 18th century Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab\u200b \u2013 which has inspired the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Isis and all the other killer cults whom we have proclaimed to be the West\u2019s Enemy No 1.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nailing Mohammed Bin Salman to a crucifix \u2013 a method of execution favoured by the Wahhabis \u2013 is an easy kill for US senators, of course. You hit the president and smash those unhappy historical details all in one fell swoop.<\/span><\/p>\n

But don\u2019t bank on it. Oil and arms are a potent mix. Old Abd al-Wahhab\u2019s home is protected in a new tourist haunt in the suburbs of Riyadh. Come to think of it, the national mosque of Qatar \u2013 hostile to rapacious Saudi Arabia but another recipient of US weapons and a supporter of Islamist forces in Syria and Iraq \u2013 has a capacity for 30,000 souls, was built only seven years ago and is named after Abd al-Wahhab himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the dangerous world in which America and its allies now tread, disdainful of the thousands of Muslims who perish under our bombs and missiles and mortars \u2013\u00a0proxy-delivered by those we should distrust \u2013 ignorant of the religious currents which rumble on beneath our feet and beneath the House of Saud. Even the virtually useless information Haspel learned in the CIA\u2019s \u201cblack centres\u201d could have told senators this. If they had bothered to ask.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The shock and horror about Khashoggi and the Saudis is primarily about Trump, writes Robert Fisk, and the need to tie him in to Khashoggi\u2019s cruel murder <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=180277"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180279,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180277\/revisions\/180279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=180277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=180277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=180277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}