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Chumps lack of a moral compass.....

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    Posted: October 17 2018 at 4:44am
Saudi affair exposes Trumpism's moral apathy
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 1 hour ago Oct. 17, 2018
Washington (CNN) - Donald Trump has dug a moral hole through the middle of America's foreign policy -- and he's not sorry at all.
The President's reaction to the apparent murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul offers the clearest evidence yet of his turn away from a foreign policy rooted in universal human values.
The crisis is instead showcasing Trump's radical form of "America First" realpolitik, his promise not to infringe other nations' sovereignty with lectures on human rights and his trust in the word of autocrats.
In his unrepentant conduct of American foreign policy, Trump is lurching from a path taken by every president since World War II, who all believed to various degrees that American leadership was needed to create a world safe for democracy, open commerce and freedom.
And it will be seen around the world as an unmistakable sign that there is no cost for heinous behavior -- after all, it happened days after a US-based journalist for a top American newspaper was apparently killed before his body was reportedly chopped up in an official Saudi government building.
Washington often failed to honor its values -- in the carpet bombing of Cambodia, for instance, or its support for Arab dictators. And many in the Middle East saw post-9/11 foreign policy as deeply hypocritical.
But for 70 years, the United States has been a beacon for dissidents in totalitarian nations, acting as a guarantor of democracy and peace in Europe and Northeast Asia. It waged a Cold War to defeat Communism, enhancing its claims of benevolent foreign policy leadership.
It is that legacy of moral clarity that the Trump administration is burning in the mystery over what happened to Khashoggi.
Three days ago, Trump was promising "severe" punishments for Saudi Arabia after the journalist vanished, in an episode that flouts every conventional American principle on how governments should treat their people.
But now, the President has shifted his tone and is abetting the kingdom's evolving narrative on Khashoggi's disappearance.
Jarring footage meanwhile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo beaming in photo-ops Tuesday alongside King Salman and ruthless son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, encapsulated a closing of ranks with Riyadh.
The President told The Associated Press that blaming Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi's disappearance was another case of "guilty until proven innocent," an echo of his rhetoric concerning the sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
It all looked like an administration more concerned with insulating its relationship with the Saudi royals, key players in its effort to squeeze Iran, than seeking answers about what happened to Khashoggi.
Buying the Saudi story

Pompeo's spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the secretary of state had thanked the King for ordering "a thorough, transparent and timely investigation" into Khashoggi's disappearance. While body language and official statements do not convey everything that goes on behind the scenes, Pompeo's demeanor hardly suggested a rebuke was delivered.
His trip only compounded impressions created by Trump, who gave credence to shifting Saudi denials of involvement and acted as a PR agent for the king, on Monday, relaying his comment that "rogue killers" were to blame.
On Tuesday, Trump, who sources told CNN was frustrated with news coverage about the Khashoggi episode, bought into an explanation offered by the crown prince, who many experts believe knew what was in store for Khashoggi if he did not order his elimination himself.
"Just spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who totally denied any knowledge of what took place in their Turkish Consulate," Trump tweeted. "Answers will be forthcoming shortly."
Three sources familiar with the case say the Saudi mission to interrogate and possibly abduct Khashoggi was organized by a high-ranking officer with the main Saudi intelligence service. It's unclear whether the crown prince authorized either contingency but CNN previously reported that the operation could not have happened without his direct knowledge.
Saudi response fits Trump's view of sovereignty

The President's handling of the Khashoggi case epitomizes the doctrine of individual national sovereignty he laid out at the UN General Assembly.
"Whatever those values may be and they have been in the past in terms of foreign policy, they are no longer important and he has made that very clear," said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, co-author of a study of Trump's foreign policy, "The Empty Throne," published on Tuesday.
"His basic view is what you do is your problem as long as you leave us alone," Daalder said, maintaining Trump was closer to China's worldview in this context than a traditional American one.
Trump has left little doubt that in his deal-driven ideology is designed to leverage financial wealth and will not be deflected by human rights concerns.
"We are not here to lecture -- we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship," Trump said during his first foreign trip -- to Saudi Arabia -- last year.
Then, in a revealing interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday, the President frankly said that he didn't want to sanction Saudi Arabia because it could cost firms like Boeing and Raytheon billions in arms deals and cost jobs.
In the same interview, he indicated that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's repression would not disrupt their relationship -- which he had previously compared to a love affair.
"Let it be an embrace. Let it be whatever it is to get the job done," Trump said.
And he hinted that as long as Russian President Vladimir Putin did not kill his opponents on US soil, he would look the other way.
"I rely on them. It's not in our country," he said.
While Trump cozies up to autocrats and strongmen like Putin, China's Xi Jinping, Kim, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and MBS, he has insulted leaders of American allies. He has called journalists "the enemy of the people."
Critics believe such rhetoric has offered license to repressive leaders in places like Turkey, Russia and the Philippines -- not to mention MBS, whose recklessness has turned into a political embarrassment for the US.
Mona Charen, a conservative commentator, said on CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper" that Trump had taken realism to extremes and that Khashoggi's case was so "flagrant" it cried out for US moral leadership.
"The world is full of bad actors and sometimes you have to deal with them and that is the world we live in. But what isn't acceptable is an attempt to whitewash what they are, an attempt to let them off the hook," she said.
Broken trust

Trump views criticism of his approach as the naive complaints of a political establishment that led America into nearly two decades of foreign wars and disdained the voters that put him in office in 2016.
He thinks the United States has been a soft touch, letting its values get in the way of maximizing its power while savvier nations have taken advantage while getting fat on its generosity -- see NATO.
Even in his own party, there are those who believe his abandonment of American core principles and global leadership is catastrophic.
"There isn't enough money in the world to purchase back our credibility on human rights and the way nations should conduct themselves," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, said in an interview on CNN's "New Day" on Tuesday.
What Trump does next will decide whether Washington is able to credibly criticize strongmen like Putin and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, he said.
"We can't say anything about that if we allow Saudi Arabia to do it and all we do is a diplomatic slap on the wrist," Rubio said.
A senior administration official told CNN's Barbara Starr that the decision on what to do with the Saudis may be the "the most consequential" of Trump's presidency, since it will dictate whether US military leaders and diplomats can maintain a moral high ground on human rights.
That's unlikely to change Trump's mind, since any rupture with the Saudis would endanger his effort to destabilize and pressure Iran.
He is relying on Saudi Arabia to release more oil onto the market to meet demand after pressuring allies to stop imports from Iran.
Riyadh, of course, has considerable influence on the state of the global economy and therefore Trump's own prospects of re-election with its power to engineer spikes in global oil prices.
In the longer term, foreign policy traditionalists worry about what Trump's ideological turn means for the American-led world order.
"The order in essence was based in trust. People had to trust the United States to ultimately do the right thing. You were willing to give it room to fail and to make mistakes but then to come back," Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO, said.
"He has fundamentally broken that trust."
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 17 2018 at 4:51am
Money before honour= no honour........no morals.....

makes America look good.....

If you a money lender.....
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Technophobe Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 17 2018 at 7:12am
Don't ask whom it was; as I committed no name to memory. But some American was on the TV yesterday saying: "At least Trump makes us look good abroad."

Hubby, an old friend and I got a bad case of the giggles.

'Embarassing now I come to think of it. It is not seemly to laugh at old friends when they just lost out to a conman. Even if they have not cottoned on yet.
How do you tell if a politician is lying?
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote EdwinSm, Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 17 2018 at 7:42am
I wonder how long Turkey will run with this issue....

To Make Turkey Great Again implies the old days of the Ottoman empire, where Saudi Arabia was just one dusty back water (and this is not so far back in history). So I can see that Turkey would want to weaken the House of Saud.

This, with a proxy war in Yemen, will help keep the whole region destabilise just as the Syrian situation seems to be coming towards the end of one section of the civil war.

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote jacksdad Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 17 2018 at 12:11pm
Don't forget that Trump gloated when Turkey's currency tanked because of his tariffs. He's learning the hard way that international diplomacy is a lot more complex than a real estate deal.

"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep"
"Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 17 2018 at 2:40pm
"look good abroad " ?????

now that is a FUNNY............LMAO

he's a very sick clown over here................
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 18 2018 at 4:24am
Why do we still know so little about Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance?
By Nick Paton Walsh, CNN
Updated 2 hours ago Oct. 18, 2018
Editor's Note: Nick Paton Walsh is a senior international correspondent for CNN International. The opinions in this article belong to the author.
(CNN) - "I don't want to talk about any of the facts" -- Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State, King Salman Air Base, Riyadh, October 17, 2018.
A truer statement has not been made, frankly, since October 2, when Jamal Khashoggi disappeared into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
While a hunger for the truth has rarely been more acute in a bizarre and macabre story like this, the three parties most involved appear substantially disinterested in providing it.
In fact, 15 days on, all three sides seem, one way or another, involved in some form of cover-up.
First, the Saudis.
Obviously, whatever happened, one of its citizens at the very least -- even if Khashoggi miraculously turns up alive in a Dubai hotel -- was involved in some form of woeful misconduct.
At the worst, a large part of the Crown Prince's inner security circle premeditated and executed a gruesome and unprecedented dismembering of a mildly outspoken critic, on foreign soil, using diplomatic immunity as cover.
If what happened is as alleged, then it was a bizarrely naive, arrogant and blundering plot that exposes the likely brash and short lifespan of the current de facto Saudi administration.
If it can overreach like this, in a relatively small matter, it will soon overreach in ways that damage Saudi Arabia both regionally and permanently.
By floating -- or having floated on its behalf -- the idea that a key figure could be thrown under the bus as the culprit, the Saudis provided themselves with an off-ramp that can be gratefully seized upon by unscrupulous and overly pragmatic allies.
But in no way will Saudi Arabia exonerate itself. What's startling, this far on, with the resources that Saudi Arabia has even to bring in outside help, it has put up no convincing refutation of the slow drip of charges against it.
It gets worse every day. And every day the strategy from Riyadh is to hope that another major world event sweeps in and distracts everyone.
It hasn't happened yet. And the longer it goes on, the bigger the event will have to be.
Second, the Trump White House.
Its top emissary has just flown to meet a possible accessory in a gruesome alleged murder that has appalled even the US President. He grinned next to him and shook his hand.
You can't but find it bizarre that Pompeo had Trump call Mohammad Bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, while he was there to repeat the Saudi denial.
Then Pompeo leaves and emits the line that facts are not what he wants to talk about.
This from a former CIA director, who surely at one point in the last 18 months walked past its motto, etched on their lobby wall: "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."
Perhaps he remembered it as: If you know the truth, it'll likely be a serious pain in the ass, as you're really gunning for Iran now, and don't need high oil prices.
It is impossible to believe that the US -- with its own startling technology and assistance from NATO ally Turkey -- doesn't have a clear view of exactly what happened both inside and outside the Istanbul consulate.
The paucity of the actual alliance between Saudi's new rulers and the US's most powerful diplomat is tragically on display.
He traveled across the world to shake their hands, rather than grimace sternly, and was still unable to patch this up. The Saudis didn't appear to want to concede anything at all to Pompeo.
He left with the very strong denial of Saudi royalty and its promise to investigate quickly. It is testament to the spinelessness of the West's current political elite that this explanation was deemed something that could be presented in public.
Surely a proper alliance would have found a scapegoat faster, had them arrested, accepted a few tokenistic sanctions or travel bans and a lukewarm admonishment of the Crown Prince -- all safely delivered with the knowledge that it'll be business as usual in a few months when the world forgets and moves on.
Instead, President Trump makes comparisons to the Kavanaugh affair and the lack of presumed innocence there. Actually, perhaps the surest similarity the Kavanaugh affair affords is that of an elite bent on never losing face, regardless of charges against it, and insisting their order of things be upheld.
Third is Turkey.
The leading per-capita jailer of journalists (according to the Committee to Protect Journalists) has been cast in the unlikely role of Chief of Outrage about an outspoken journalist's murder.
But the role its taken is not that of the virtuous prosecutor, but of the exploitative politician.
The slow, purposeful, yet absolutely deliberate series of leaks to the media of evidence pointing towards the involvement of the Saudi Crown Prince and his immediate entourage has been disrespectful to the cause of justice itself, let alone to Khashoggi's grieving relatives.
Turkish officials have used what information they have to keep up the pressure on Riyadh - and on the White House to demand explanations.
The passports, the CCTV, the alleged audio tape that may have recorded the ghastly moment of death and dismemberment, the phone calls from Saudi phones. These were surely all in the hands of the highly competent Turkish intelligence -- MIT -- within hours of the crime.
Yet they are not retained and later laid out in full, in the open, to present a public case about a crime committed on Turkish soil, against a man with significant connections to its ruling party.
They are not even presented swiftly to explain Khashoggi's disappearance. Instead, they are drip-fed first to Turkish media -- who will presumably be less questioning -- and then to their foreign counterparts to be sure the case never falls from public attention.
Turkey clearly does not want to go it alone, in its confrontation with Riyadh, and wants the US to put pressure on them.
But it is clearly enjoying antagonizing the House of Saud.
Just over a year ago, regional alliances were taken to the brink when the Saudis banded together Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain in a blockade against Qatar, who they believed were getting too close to Saudi Arabia's regional nemesis, Iran.
Qatar was dubbed a financier of terrorism. Yet Erdogan upped food exports to the Qataris and dubbed the effective siege of the tiny peninsula: "a death sentence".
He said: "Along with Turkey, it is the country with the most resolute stance against ISIS which has caused grave damage to our region."
Trump at first seemed to join the Saudi onslaught, but later calmed his rhetoric. In return, the Qataris have helped Turkey with a bailout in its currency crisis this year.
Erdogan clearly sees the Saudis in the wrong here, and is seeking to maximize the discomfort he can cause them, whilst enjoying the appearance of being seen as the just upholder of international law.
Yet the Turkish case is flawed by its opaque and selective omissions. We do not know for sure if the audio recording of the killing actually exists, as we have not heard it. And we do not know how it was obtained.
We know the select things that the Turkish officials want us to know. So how can we expect to learn what they do not want us to know? Erdogan has a plan, and it is going quite well here, due process be damned.
The question we may be left asking at the end of the grisly episode is which of the three acted with the most grotesque hypocrisy?
The killers themselves? The investigators who used the murder to their own ends? Or the alleged murderer's allies, who didn't want to talk about facts, lest they upset an alliance that's clearly weaker than they would like to admit?
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Technophobe Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 18 2018 at 5:56am
Thanks, Carbon. I confess, I am watching this one with great interest.

At the begining, I found myself backing Trump's stance; Saud has a truly terrible track record on human rights and Trump's strongly worded response gave me a glimmer of hope that things might begin to change. Sadly, he slammed the lid back down on hope like a modern, male Pandora.

Perhaps he will yet find the courage to open the box lid one last time and end America's "Deal with the Devil".

All the previous Presidents have failed this test of their morality; money won every time.

If Trump truly wants to leave a legacy that people admire; if he wants his "glorious place in history"; if he wants to be a drainer of a swamp the others ignored, his big chance lies in tackling SA.

Perhaps he will return to his first position. Perhaps his desire to be worshiped and adored will drive a shred of decency. Who knows?

Pompeo's comments may be loud, but I can still hear Hope calling to be let out.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 18 2018 at 2:30pm
dont hold your breath,the UK's response has been Deafening,NOT.......

as has our government,

Game of Thrones or what.............
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Technophobe Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 18 2018 at 5:10pm
Oh, be assured, the dirt of this shame forms an even carpet over at least half the globe. I am just as ashamed of our government. For once though, I see Trump as a potential saviour. Not likely, but more likely than the rest of the political elite.

We all seem to have made the same dirty deal. Yet, it seems to me, that most of the World's problems stem either from Saud or the religion it helped pervert. Complicit = just as guilty.

Mamon's life-blood is oil.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 17 2018 at 11:18pm
The Khashoggi case just won't go away for Trump and his Saudi allies
Analysis by Angela Dewan, CNN
Updated 1 hour ago Nov. 18, 2018
(CNN) - The death of Jamal Khashoggi continues to hang over the heads of both US President Donald Trump and his allied Saudi officials.
On Thursday, Saudi prosecutors formally charged 11 people over the journalist's killing, five of whom will face the death penalty. Just hours later, the Trump administration announced sanctions against 17 Saudi government officials. The powerful Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was not, of course, among those blamed.
The timing of the two courses of action was surely no coincidence. It seems both parties were hoping their responses together would shield the Crown Prince from growing accusations of involvement.
But what a difference a day makes. On Friday, the CIA concluded the Crown Prince personally ordered the journalist's killing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last month, a senior US official and a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, however, said the government had not drawn any final conclusions about who was responsible, adding "numerous unanswered questions" remained.
Still, the CIA's explosive assessment makes Riyadh's repeated denials that bin Salman was connected to Khashoggi's death much harder to swallow, and if it's true, the development may be a major blow to the special relationship Trump has fostered with the Saudi royals.
Saudi Arabia has offered so many narratives of how journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed that it's difficult to believe it will now tell the whole truth.
Riyadh first claimed to know nothing about Khashoggi's disappearance, but weeks later, the Saudi attorney general finally admitted his murder had been premeditated. Saudi prosecutors on Thursday offered yet another version of events, saying Khashoggi was killed by a lethal dose of a sedative in an abduction attempt gone wrong.
Despite the reports about the CIA's findings, Trump is sticking by his friends in the Middle East.
Before he was briefed by the CIA on Saturday, Trump repeated his belief in the Crown Prince's innocence, saying he had been "told that he did not play a role" and that the country had been "a truly spectacular ally."
"They give us a lot of jobs, they give us a lot of business, a lot of economic development," he said on Saturday.
The CIA's assessment, first reported by the Washington Post, is based on a recording provided by the Turkish government and other evidence, including US intelligence, the senior US official said.
Among that intelligence is a phone call from the Crown Prince's brother Khalid bin Salman and Khashoggi, in which Kalid encourages the journalist to make the trip to the consulate, according to the Post. Sources told the Post that Khalid made the call at his brother's command.
Khalid denies the Post's reporting, saying on Twitter he never spoke to Khashoggi by phone and "never suggested he go to Turkey for any reason."
A Saudi embassy spokeswoman said in a statement the reported claims were false. "We have and continue to hear various theories without seeing the primary basis for these speculations."
Trump's not alone
It's not only Trump who would find a guilty Crown Prince a geopolitical problem.
Soon after Khashoggi's death, several world leaders called for an independent investigation. Those calls have turned to whispers in recent weeks and few other countries, besides Canada, are still talking of sanctions.
Ayham Kamel, head of Eurasia Group's Middle East practice, said that is largely because few leaders want to see a faltering Saudi Arabia.
"None of the key Western countries that have relations with Saudi Arabia-- the US and its allies -- want to destabilize the kingdom, or create the situation where there is an open-power struggle," Kamel told CNN.
"There are too many hot spots in the Middle East and leaders don't want to add Saudi Arabia to the list. Open power struggles are difficult to predict and difficult to control."
A challenge to bin Salman's authority would be particularly messy.
The 33-year-old wields an extraordinary amount of power that the kingdom has never seen before among princes. He oversees almost every major agency in the country that deals with the economy, security and intelligence.
To put his dominance in perspective, it was the Crown Prince who was tasked with shaking up the country's intelligence apparatus in response to Khashoggi's death.
Bin Salman consolidated his position by intimidating his main rivals in a spectacular show of power. The Crown Prince had hundreds of senior government officials, advisers and businessmen detained for months in Riyadh's Ritz-Carlton, transforming the hotel into a gilded prison, in a masked "anti-corruption" drive.
He has enemies within his own family too. Bin Salman skipped over dozens of other princes who would normally precede him as heir to the throne, and any implication of the Crown Prince's involvement in the Khashoggi case could be enough of an opportunity for his rivals to reemerge.
"Once the dust settles on the Khashoggi killing, pressure on the Crown Prince to share power with the rest of the family will remain, if not increase," Stratfor, the geopolitical intelligence firm, wrote in a recent article.
Saudis under the US' wing
Trump was reluctant to issue sanctions on Saudi Arabia in the first place but was forced to under pressure from Congress and he is less likely to want to target the Crown Prince, even if it means going against his own intelligence agencies.
Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has built a cozy relationship with bin Salman, and was instrumental to designing the US' Saudi policy, largely centered around the Crown Prince and his vision to modernize the kingdom's economy.
In a conversation with Saudi King Salman two weeks after Khashoggi's death, Trump not only seemed to buy into the monarch's version of events that he and the Crown Prince knew nothing at all of the killing, he even laid out the Saudis' first narrative for them, telling reporters that Khashoggi was murdered by "rogue killers" completely removed from the King and his son.
It was the first sign in the case that Trump would side -- even coordinate -- with the King and Crown Prince. Then too, he made clear that one journalist's life wasn't worth risking lucrative arms and trade deals (though he grossly exaggerated just how valuable those deals were to the US).
It has been under this protective wing of the Trump administration that the Saudis have been able to pursue an aggressive foreign policy and act on with a sense of impunity, according to Stratfor.
"For Riyadh, the calculation that it can afford to upset relations temporarily with friends, only to restore them later, is a reasonable one," Stratfor wrote.
"Saudi Arabia's growing assertiveness is driven in part by the political cover it receives from its special relationship with the current US administration. The White House relies heavily on Saudi Arabia in its effort to contain their mutual adversary, Iran. Washington also seeks Saudi cooperation to temper oil prices."
Saudi Arabia is projecting that assertiveness around the region, whether it be in a consulate in Turkey, in the world of Lebanese politics or a brutal war in Yemen.
Even Canada has felt the wrath of the Crown Prince's overreach. When officials in Ottawa demanded the release of imprisoned activists, Riyadh froze new trade and investment deals, suspended flights to Canada, expelled Canada's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, while recalling its own, and even moved Saudi students studying there.
Turkey's possible motives
The greatest pressure on Saudi Arabia, however, has come from Turkey, which says Khashoggi was strangled to death as soon as he arrived at the consulate and his body then dismembered in a premeditated murder.
Turkish officials have been releasing information around Khashoggi's death drip by drip, trying to draw out the world's interest and keep Riyadh in focus.
Turkey has said for more than a month that it has audio evidence of how Khashoggi was killed and, more recently, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country had shared that evidence with several Western allies.
It is this drip feed of information that has forced Saudi officials to keep changing their story and that appears to have cornered them into admitting Khashoggi's murder was premeditated.
But Turkey, which is undergoing a brutal crackdown on journalists of its own, is likely to have other motives in pursuing Saudi Arabia so aggressively, Eurasia's Kamel said.
"This is being used for geopolitical competition between Sunni powers in the region. Ankara and Riyadh are longtime competitors in the Middle East, and Turkey is using this case to expand its regional power while ensuring Saudi Arabia's rise is contained," Kamel said.
"The agenda Mohammed bin Salman has introduced on foreign policy is more Arab-centric, not only containing Iranian influence but containing Turkish influence too. So Saudi Arabia reemerging as a leader of the Arab world doesn't necessarily align with Turkey's strategic interests.
In the meantime Khashoggi's family is still hoping to discover where their relative's body -- or remains -- may be. The absence of Khashoggi's body at a funeral in an Istanbul mosque on Friday was a dark reminder that the whole truth has still not been revealed and may never be.
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Marcus Aurelius
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 17 2018 at 11:20pm
Do jobs trump. ( pardon the pun )

MURDER......

Or MURDERS......
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

Marcus Aurelius
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