Khashoggi Death Belies How U.S.-Saudi Arabia Relationship Enables Kingdom to Murder with Impunity

Interview with Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink Women for Peace, conducted by Scott Harris

Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, Washington Post columnist and a leading critic of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, disappeared on Oct. 2 after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, where he was directed to go to retrieve documents needed to marry his fiancée. The Turkish government says it has audio and video recordings that confirm suspicions that Khashoggi was interrogated and murdered inside the Saudi consulate, with his body dismembered and later removed.
Condemnation of the Saudi monarchy has reverberated around the world for what many believe was Saudi de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman’s order for Khashoggi’s murder.  President Trump parroted Saudi denials of responsibility for the murder and dismissed calls for the U.S. to sanction Saudi Arabia, stating that Khashoggi was not a U.S. citizen and that canceling weapons sales to the oil rich kingdom would cost Americans jobs.  Recent press reports indicate that the Saudi government may soon admit their plan was to abduct Khashoggi and take him back to Saudi Arabia, but that the journalist was accidentally killed during an interrogation.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink Women for Peace, and author of the book, “Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.” Here, she examines charges that Saudi Arabia is responsible for Khashoggi’s death in the context of the kingdom’s gross human rights abuses, ignored by successive U.S. administrations over many decades.
MEDEA BENJAMIN: Saudi Arabia has been a repressive country for many decades, but this has gotten worse under Mohammed bin Salman when he came to basically be the one in power because his father, King Salman is old, has dementia. This is about three years ago when he was only 30 years old. He was the one that got Saudi Arabia in the internal affairs in Yemen, causing a catastrophic war. He’s been responsible for a crackdown on human rights activists and he’s also been involved in many overseas adventures that have divided the Gulf states like the economic blockade that he’s put on Qatar; the temporary kidnapping of the prime minister of Lebanon and his vicious attacks on Iran. And that sort of sets the stage because he’s been portrayed in the United States as a great reformer and a liberal, which he is not. So this latest episode in which a journalist for the Washington Post, a Saudi national, but a U.S. resident with children that are American citizens, was told to go to Turkey to get the papers he needed for his divorce so he could remarry.

And, when he went in, he did not come out alive. And so for the last almost two weeks, the Saudi government denied that it knew anything. They said he came in and he came out. Of course, there was no camera footage of him having left and his fiancee had been waiting and waiting and waiting. It looks like now they’re going to announce that indeed they did kill him, but it was an accident. It was done by rogue elements in the government. They were supposed to kidnap him and bring him back to Saudi Arabia and things went badly. And instead he was killed.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Medea, summarize for us a bit about Donald Trump administration’s response to the allegations against Saudi Arabia for the charge that they murdered this dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: There has been quite an outcry in the United States, even from very conservative Republican Congresspeople like Lindsey Graham, who said there would be hell to pay or like Marco Rubio, who said we’d have to recalibrate our relations with Saudi Arabia.

But from Donald Trump, first it has been silence. Then it was downplaying it. Then it was saying that, well, no matter what happened, we’re not going to want to cut off weapons sales because that’s jobs and a lot of money and that those orders would just go to the Chinese or the Russians. And then he threw out this idea of maybe it was a rogue element, which really set the stage for what the Saudis are going to make up now as their excuse. So all along, he’s been trying to either make this story go away or cover it up.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Medea, in your view, what is the proper response of the United States here to what almost certainly was the death of this journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. What should the United States be doing here?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: They should certainly be cutting off not only all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, but immediately stop aiding and abetting the Saudis and the horrendous war in Yemen. They should impose sanctions on anybody who is involved in this heinous act of killing a journalist. They should stop intelligence cooperation with the Saudis. And, I think then there’s also an issue about businesses and businesses really should sever their ties, particularly those businesses that are hired to be foreign agents of the Saudi government and there are over two dozen of them.

And then there’s also the responsibility of the thinktanks. The universities in the United States that receive Saudi money and the high tech companies that have been courting large investments from the Saudis. All these kind of connections really need to be rethought. And then on the larger issue, what really would be the positive silver lining that could possibly come from all of this is a rethinking of U.S. policy that has been one that is focused on the interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel, instead of the United States. And it’s dragged the United States into wars it shouldn’t be in; put the United States on a collision course with Iran that is hurting many Iranians because of the draconian sanctions, but could also lead us to another war there.

So I think with the American public now having somewhat of an understanding of how repressive Saudi Arabia is, perhaps it is a moment when we could create some distance between U.S. policy and the interest of the Saudi government.

For more information on Code Pink Women for Peace, visit codepink.org.

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