Saudis murder journalist in Turkey

You'd think that killing more people would make it worse for them. The dead guy is apparently the one who can be heard on the tape cutting Khashoggi up.

Can't have 15 separate accidents though.

The others will likely all be on a bus together, which falls off the edge of a cliff.

Whilst resisting arrest.

I imagine the others will just disappear and be unavailable for interview.

How difficult this must be if you belong to a US intelligence agency. Everything you report will be immediately dismissed by Trump as some Deep State cabal to undermine his authority. Weakest President since Hoover.

And while all this is going on, we have Trump crowing about a Republican Congressman choke slaming a reporter...and his base laughing and cheering.

if that were true nobody would be an assassin because they know they would be killed afterwards.

whatever

"A car accident is good enough for one. Fifteen would've looked suspicious. Killed while attempting escape … now, that's convincing for all 15."

is that William Shatner? He's a character!

An adviser close to MBS has apparently been fired.

I'm guessing they're going to go with the "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"* defense. MBS will claim that though he may have expressed anger or frustration with regard to Khashoggi, it was one of his aids who (wrongfully, of course) took this as a desire to have the reporter killed and who arranged the whole operation.



*The quote is what Henry II supposedly said that inspired his knights to murder Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. Henry claimed that his knights were not acting under his orders.

Yes, the quote's re-worked from a similar one in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

The White House has issued quite possibly the most toothless statement it can (not unexpected frankly).

@Paladin is overjoyed.

Not overjoyed. And I'm not sure the official story's going to fly.

If there is an audio recording, the official story better align with it pretty closely.

There's no part of "interrogation turned into a quarrel" where somebody's fingers are cut off.

Your descendants are probably going to ask why you were all such shitty cowards in the face of the Saudis. Were you scared of them, or just easily bought off?

The Turks have been very smart not handing over the tapes to anyone else as they know Trump cannot be trusted and will turn it over to the Saudis so they can make a better excuse. As it is the Turks are doing a steady drip, drip of information to keep the story in the headlines but holding back just enough so they can hang the Saudis after what ever excuse they come up with.

It may well be that no audio actually exists. Has there been any independent confirmation of it?

It says a lot about Trump and his supporters.

If only that reporter had the training to beat the shit out of Zinke...

The "official story" is pathetic, and the fact that the Trump Administration is assisting in the cover-up is, while disgraceful, completely on form for them.

Also, it can't both have been a fight and the action of a rogue general within the regime. They'll probably want to at least make their lies consistent.

The audio recording is an inconvenient piece of evidence.

The "official story" is backed up if the audio on the tape shows a fight breaking out and there's a whole lot of "oh, shit, this wasn't supposed to happen...what do we do now?" after Khashoggi dies.

If the recording is several minutes of dismembering Khashoggi while he's still alive followed by "let's use the tools we brought to cut him up and carry him out in the bags as planned," there's no way the official story will stand.

I expect the next announcement to be that there was, in fact, no recording. Whether this is because there really wasn't one, or because the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have worked something out with Turkey to suppress it will be an open question. But without that recording, it's going to be harder to prove. Saudi Arabia's already seeing to the "witnesses."

I don't know what Trump and his team know, but it's very dangerous to stake out a position expressing some belief in the "official story" if there's any possibility of that audio recording dispelling it.

If the official version of a fight breaking out is true, questions still need to be asked regardless. One guy v 14 is not 'a fight' unless you are Arnie, Stallone, The Rock, or you are genuinley fighting for your life. Even if there was a fight, 14 guys dont need to kill a single man...

The US or any other country defending the Saudi regime really shows a dearth of any kind of moral accountability. While the UK havent taken Trumps position on this one, we really are often just as bad. Got to keep the guys with the money and oil, that buy our weapons happy.....

True.

And the number of guys is a real problem because that seems excessive for interrogating or even extraditing someone. It's about the right amount if you're going to parcel out a body and have each person pack a piece out in a small bag.

Certainly, it's in our national and economic interests to maintain good relations. One could, I suppose, also say that staying engaged with them may lead them to better behavior. If we broke the relationship up, who knows in what direction they'd go?

Nah, they'd just never get much experience.

The problem with this hypothesis is that there's no way to test it. We don't know if cutting them off would force them to change in a positive manner, or push them towards the Taliban side of the equation. That also ignores the idea that there's the possibility of anything other than the two extremes of either ignoring their atrocious behavior or isolating them completely.

This is a complete misunderstanding of what is happening. The story here is that Saudi Arabia has the power, and wants you to know they have the power, to gruesomely murder its enemies even on foreign soil. The 'official story' is just a part of the mockery of the West that drives home that the West can't stop Saudi Arabia. Nobody believes the 'official story', and nobody is supposed to. It is there only as a humiliating sign of other countries' acquiescence to the Saudis' new power.

That's certainly an interpretation, but it's clear that this situation is not what was intended by whoever ordered this. I think it likely they intended for Khashoggi to disappear in a foreign country and for people to whisper that it was the Saudis that did away with him, but without there being any definite proof of their involvement. I think they realize that this exposed act far exceeds Western moral boundaries and are now scrambling to get control of this situation before consequences become inevitable.

Likely true, the two scenarios aren't mutually exclusive, one can use political violence as a form of power projection without an actual visible murder. The footage and the numbers involved suggest strongly that this was an attempt to overpower and subdue him rather than kill him per se. After all, one doesn't need fifteen men to put a knife or bullet into an unsuspecting victim.

That doesn't preclude the intent being an unsubtle demonstration of their reach, merely a tidier one.

On the contrary, we should assume that this is pretty much exactly the impression they wanted to create: We can do wahtever we want, everyone knows we will murder you if you oppose us, the cover story is there only to show how weak the West is.

What inevitable consequences are those? The American President has already made it clear there will be none from the US, and it's not as if anyone else in the West is about to stand up other than rhetorically.