«Obviously there\u2019s been deception, and there\u2019s been lies.\u201d<\/b>
\nTrump says he hasn\u2019t seen or heard anything. So does Mike Pompeo. Which raises the question: Did the Turks refuse to provide a copy of the recording to the U. S., possibly not wanting to share their big leverage point against Saudi Arabia?
Or are Trump and Pompeo deliberately quarantining themselves from the evidence, so that they can go before the public and say with a semi-straight face that the Saudis\u2019 story of a fight gone wrong is \u201ccredible\u201d? That\u2019s the whole U. S.-Saudi relationship in microcosm, really: Without a blind eye it\u2019s morally untenable.
Interestingly, although \u201ccredible\u201d was the word Trump chose on Friday to describe the Saudi account, his tune had changed by the time he spoke to the Washington Post for an interview.
President Trump strongly criticized Saudi Arabia\u2019s explanation for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi late Saturday, saying that \u201cobviously there\u2019s been deception, and there\u2019s been lies.\u201d\u2026
CIA officials have listened to an audio recording that Turkish officials say proves the journalist was killed and dismembered by the Saudi team, according to people familiar with the matter. If verified, the recording would make it difficult for the United States to accept the Saudi version that Khashoggi\u2019s death was effectively an accident. Officials agreed to speak for this article on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic\u2026
\u201cIf Secretary Pompeo was offered to listen to the audio recording, he was smart to say no,\u201d said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. \u201cYou can\u2019t unlisten to it, and once you listen to it, you can\u2019t say certain things.\u201d
It\u2019s not just the CIA that\u2019s heard the audio. Two sources tell the WSJ that the Saudis sent Prince Khalid al Faisal to Turkey this month to handle the Khashoggi fallout and that while there he \u201chad access to a short audio recording that offers evidence that Mr. Khashoggi was drugged, killed and dismembered minutes after walking into the consulate.\u201d There\u2019s nothing on the tape about a brawl that led to an accidental death or whatever, allegedly, and al-Faisal told the king and other members of the regime as much. The \u201cfight\u201d storyline is pure fiction, not an interpretation of the audio.
This Reuters report delving in depth into the Saudis\u2019 account of events is worth your time. Supposedly the orders given to the Saudi team that confronted Khashoggi at the consulate were to merely convince him that he should come back with them to the Kingdom. But they misunderstood and thought their mandate was to bring him back whether he wanted to go or not:
According to the latest version of the death, the government wanted to convince Khashoggi, who moved to Washington a year ago fearing reprisals for his views, to return to the kingdom as part of a campaign to prevent Saudi dissidents from being recruited by the country\u2019s enemies, the official said\u2026
According to the plan, the team could hold Khashoggi in a safe house outside Istanbul for \u201ca period of time\u201d but then release him if he ultimately refused to return to Saudi Arabia, the official said\u2026
[Inside the consulate Maher] Mutreb [told Khashoggi], \u201cYes, we will drug you and kidnap you,\u201d in what the official said was an attempt at intimidation that violated the mission\u2019s objective.
When Khashoggi raised his voice, the team panicked. They moved to restrain him, placing him in a chokehold and covering his mouth, according to the government\u2019s account.
Allegedly, in their zeal to quiet him down, they suffocated him. My understanding is that it takes several minutes of applied pressure to cause death by strangulation; if they had drugs onhand to sedate him for a kidnapping, as Mutreb supposedly claimed, it\u2019s inexplicable that they wouldn\u2019t have used those to knock him out quickly instead of choking him. (It\u2019s even more inexplicable that they wouldn\u2019t have anticipated some resistance from Khashoggi in the first place and had a plan ready to deal with it.) One shot of ketamine would have done the trick. It\u2019s also odd, if the plan was to abduct him and his death was completely unforeseen, that they had a forensic expert present who happens to specialize in mobile autopsies.
My favorite part, though, the part where this cover story turns into dark comedy gold, is the idea of sending a team of people abroad to abduct someone and hold him in a \u201csafe house\u201d until he complied with their wishes, and then to have them \u2026 just give up and let him go if he refused. That might be the first case in recorded history where an abductee survived despite his captors getting nothing whatsoever out of the kidnapping. Worse, letting him go would have cost them a bunch in international relations given that Khashoggi was a writer for the most prominent newspaper in America\u2019s capital city. He would have written about his abduction for WaPo, outrage would have followed, the Saudi royals would have been humiliated. Any abduction scenario had to end in death, logically. But this is the sort of nonsense that must be contrived to protect Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s \u201cgood name\u201d: Whatever his henchmen might have understood their mandate to be, surely the fair prince never would have condoned the forcible rendition and ultimate killing of a prominent critic.
Reuters\u2019s source also claims, by the way, that Khashoggi\u2019s body wasn\u2019t dismembered but was rolled up in a rug and handed over to a \u201clocal cooperator\u201d to dispose of. The condition of the body, if and when it\u2019s recovered, would be one easy way to disprove that Saudi narrative. Is it intact, as Reuters\u2019s source claims, or was it hacked up, as the Turks allege the audio proves? Although even if they do recover Khashoggi\u2019s remains in pieces, I suppose the answer from Khashoggi truthers will be that the Turks dismembered the remains themselves to make the Saudis look even worse.
Exit question: Why did Trump go from saying he thought the Saudi account was \u201ccredible\u201d to complaining to WaPo about \u201cdeception\u201d and \u201clies\u201d? Was he briefed by the CIA on the audio in the interim? Is he worried that angry Republicans in Congress might do something rash to jeopardize the U. S.-Saudi relationship if he doesn\u2019t show a little more indignation?<\/p>\n

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