CIA director Gina Haspel is the only person at the Trump White House who will admit to having listened to the audio of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. In hearings last week, Haspel was explicitly kept away from Congress by order of Donald Trump. But on Tuesday, Senators will finally get to hear what she says — and get an even clearer picture of just what Trump is covering up for his friend, Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Mike Pompeo has claimed he has not listened to the audio. John Bolton gave the ludicrous excuse that he “does not speak Arabic.” And Trump, of course, doesn’t have to listen to any audio but that provided by Fox News. But Haspel has heard what Turkey’s intelligence services recorded on October 2, and on Tuesday, she’s expected to pass what she heard along to Senators.
Khashoggi, a US resident, was lured to the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on the pretense of obtaining paperwork he needed for an upcoming marriage. Once inside, he was waylaid by a team of military operatives who beat him, tortured him, stripped him naked, and began dismembering him before he died. All the while, accounts of the audio indicate, the Saudi consul stood by complaining not about the brutality of the actions, or the gross violation of international law, but about the mess the butchers were making as they snipped off Khashoggi’s fingers and killed the experiencing journalist in screaming agony.
Following the murder, Saudi Arabian officials lied repeatedly and blatantly about what happened to Khashoggi. They first claimed he had left the consulate unharmed. Then that he had slipped out a back door. Then that they simply had no idea. Finally, they indicated that Khashoggi had died “by accident” in a “fist fight” between one 59-year-old journalist and 18 special forces assassins thirty years his junior.
Every investigation so far as come to the same conclusion — Khashoggi was killed on the explicit orders of, and with full knowledge, of bin Salman. That also appears to be the conclusion of the CIA. But Trump has continued to protect bin Salman on the basis that he buys a lot of US-made weapons. In fact, Trump’s protection of the Saudi crown prince has not stopped short of saying that the man is so important, that the United States should ignore bloody and brutal murder. Forget shooting a man on Fifth Avenue. Mohammed bin Salman can take a man apart joint by bloody joint, in the middle of a diplomatic consulate, and Donald Trump will still call him friend.
As CBS reports, Senators on both sides of the aisle are less willing to grasp bin Salman’s murderous hand. Or at least, most of them are. Following Haspel’s no-show last week, they voted 63-37 to cut off military assistance to Saudi Arabia.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that relationships with bin Salman are too important because of a “$110 billion deal” for US arms. Trump initially claimed that this sale would create 5,000 US jobs. Then he moved the number up to 40,000. Most recently, Trump has said the deal was responsible for “hundreds of thousands” of US jobs. He might as well move straight to a trillion, because Trump has provided absolutely no basis for any of these numbers.
In fact, there is massive arms deal. Trump, who announced the “deal” after he made dropping in on bin Salman his first trip outside the US, simply lumped together the total of many existing arms deals, many of them already delivered and done, and some speculative potential for future orders that have not been signed. The whole “big Saudi arms deal” is nothing but an illusion Trump created to make his first foreign trip look like a success. And he’s been defending the size and importance of that deal ever since, even if it means looking the other way on murder.
At last week’s G20 summit in Argentina, bin Salman and Vladimir Putin shared a notable laugh and a high five. The Saudi leader and Putin, himself fresh off murdering a British woman in an attempt to kill an ex-Russian spy, seemed to be gloating over how the United States no longer gives the slightest concern to human rights. As far as Donald Trump is concerned, running the country like a business, means ignoring all the people that have to die to make a profit.