Trump and Saudi America – following the same old script

To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump has sided with Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. All that Trump required was a denial by bin Salman and his father the king to feel that the there was sufficient uncertainty to prevent his taking any meaningful steps. Of course, in these days, there is no amount of evidence that can be produced that he could not dismiss by saying that it was fake news, so this was a foregone conclusion.
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Serial Saudi admissions of lying about Khashoggi murder

Can anyone trust anything that the Saudi Arabian government says about the death of Jamal Khashoggi? Their lies have been so shameless that it is no wonder Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman are so close because they are both cut from the same cloth, using one lie to cover up earlier lies and never bothering to explain why they uttered the earlier lies. Take the latest concessions by the Saudi government.
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Hasan Minhaj’s new show is brilliant

I just watched the first two episodes of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix and was blown away by them. Each show focuses largely on one issue, somewhat like John Oliver does, but whereas Oliver mixes hard news and analysis in the form of a news show with him as the anchor seated behind a desk, Minhaj uses a high-energy stand-up comedy format to mix hard news with analysis, with him moving around on a stage with large screens behind and below him and talking in a fast pace. He, like Oliver, provides lots of facts and background information that one does not often hear even on news shows but interspersed with plenty of comedic analyses. It really kept me glued to the show. The fact that I agreed with everything he said on both shows may had aided my enjoyment.
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Mohammed bin Salman goes into damage control mode

In the wake of the widespread outrage over the involvement of the Saudi Arabian government in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has gone into full damage control mode. He has allowed Khashoggi’s eldest son Salah, who had been barred from leaving the country and was forced into a photo op with bin Salman a few days ago, to leave the country. bin Salman is also trying to placate the Turkish president,the person most dangerous to him because of his ability to release all manner of damaging information. After not saying anything for three weeks, bin Salman has now said that Saudi Arabia and Turkey must work together.
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Erdoğan’s speech and the UAE connection to Saudi Arabia

The speech today by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan turned out to be somewhat underwhelming. It had been expected that he would provide at least some of the evidence that Turkish investigators have accumulated on the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But he did not do so, choosing instead to reject the Saudi account of the killing and pointing the finger at the ‘highest ranks’ of the Saudi government.
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Why the Saudis have the US over a barrel-and it’s not an oil barrel

That the Saudi government and its powerful figure crown prince Mohammed bin Salman are brazenly lying about what happened to Jamal Khashoggi is now blindingly obvious. There is an unbridgeable gulf between their initial response that Khashoggi had left the consulate and they did not know where he was to their most recent grudging admission that he died after he got into a ‘fist fight’ with people inside the consulate. The body has still not been produced. What we are now seeing is careful maneuvering to decide what is the most they can concede that will enable their most ardent supporters, in this case Donald Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to continue their warm relationship with both the kingdom and bin Salman.
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The complicated Turkey-Saudi Arabia relationship

I mentioned in an earlier post my puzzlement as to why Turkey and its president were taking such an aggressive role in revealing information about the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi after he entered a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey. There has been a steady release of information from Turkish authorities saying that they had information that Khashoggi was murdered and his body dismembered by a hit squad that came from Saudi Arabia, and this had led to worldwide outrage.
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Turkey’s surprising role in the Khashoggi case

As worldwide condemnation grows, the Saudi Arabian government definitely acts like it is guilty in the alleged murder of journalist Jamal Khasshoggi.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on Tuesday said police who entered the consulate for the first time on Monday had found some surfaces had been painted over. “My hope is that we can reach conclusions that will give us a reasonable opinion as soon as possible, because the investigation is looking into many things such as toxic materials and those materials being removed by painting them over,” he told reporters.
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