“A Single Death Is a Tragedy…”; Saudi Edition

While Usian’s fail to act is the true tragedy; they’ve forgotten they have the power to shut down the Saudi butchers and U.S.’s foreign, military interventions and war crimes; they won’t, because deep down they’re afraid.
And they should be; to act on the scale to be effective will result in many lives lost.
Not to act in the face of this abomination, is the behavior of slaves…
Feel the fear, and do it anyway.

Agree. It’s called elite validation. No matter how obvious or urgent something is, it remains without substance and unreal until the elite consensus says it is. Trump has been a crook all his life. He has clinical narcissism with onset of dementia. Bits and pieces of this have kept coming out, but it wasn’t until Woodward’s book Fear came out that an Establishment imprimatur was put on the fact that Trump is evil and nuts. So now it’s OK to say that Trump is these things, but there is still no will to act on them.

The IPCC, for once, came out with a Special Report on climate change that was akin to a nuclear alert: Act or die. But while some parts of the Establishment will talk about climate change, if not overpopulation, there is even now no inclination to act because they remain wedded to oil companies, Big Coal, and of course cars, especially SUVs.

So we come to Saudi Arabia. Some of us have been pointing out for years now that the Saudis are the biggest supporters and funders of terrorism on the planet. But even after Khobar Towers, even after 9/11, even after it came out that Saudis constituted the majority of foreign-born suicide bombers in Iraq, Saudi links to terrorism, let alone its leading role in terrorism, were taboo. Oil and America’s failure to confront the KSA over these actions created a culture of impunity which MBS has been exploiting. That Trump is weak, stupid, and easily manipulable is just icing on the cake for him. So the Saudis conducting a brutal, terroristic war in Yemen? The Establishment has no problem with that. But kill a member of their club? That’s a red line. And suddenly we get initially awkward, but increasingly less so, criticism of MBS after his blatant and hamfisted assassination of Kashoggi. Indeed the Establishment has even begun to notice and criticize, only 3 years on, the Saudi war in Yemen.

Some of us have been pointing out for years now that the Saudis are the biggest supporters and funders of terrorism on the planet. wait…i thought iran was.

Is he confirmed dead?

@ Hugh

An excellent summary of what is REALLY at play here! Despite what many Americans believe, the Bush Administration whitewashed the evidence that is was the Saudi’s that engineered 9/11.
Doesn’t anyone remember that even though the skies were shut down to all airlines, the only flight out of New York on that fateful day was to take a Saudi contingent that had been meeting with Bush, the elder, back to the KSA?

Oh yeah, bomb them all to Freedom and Liberty! That’ll teach them ragheads to fut with US! USA! USA! USA! We aren’t poofters and we will bomb the shiznit out you all!

highrpm, if you listened to Trump, you might think the Iranians were behind everything. But Iran is Shia. It backs Shia groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the Alawite regime of Assad in Syria, and the Shia government in Iraq. None of these groups have a stellar reputation. In fact, most of them are fairly dreadful, but none of them is any more terrorist than any other group or government in the Middle East. The main difference is that these groups and governments tend to be anti-US or anti-Israel, or anti-KSA.

Now if we look at what usually passes for international terrorism virtually all the groups are Sunni: al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, al-Shabab, Boku Haram, etc. There have been hundreds of major terrorist attacks over the years and again virtually all of them have been sourced to one of these groups. Saudis, and the Emirates, have funded many of these groups privately and the Saudi government has turned a blind eye to this. The Saudis have also been infamous for their funding of radical madrassas which have served as recruiting and training centers for future terrorists. Finally, if any have forgotten, Osama bin Laden.

Lulymay, US airspace was closed for about two days after 9/11. It was largely re-opened under new rules by September 14. Special flights for Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, left between the 14th and the 24th. Now special treatment was given to many of those leaving. And while the FBI did conduct some interviews of them, it isn’t real clear just how informed those interviews were or could have been, given how soon after the attacks they occurred.

Ordinarily I’m all in favor of pointing out the hypocrisy and tone deafness that characterizes our ruling elite. But where Saudi Arabia is concerned, it seems that some of our “leaders” may have finally started questioning their support of that awful regime. If so, I think we should do whatever we can to encourage this change of attitude. Yes, of course, it’s morally and intellectually absurd to be outraged at the killing of one individual while ignoring the deaths of millions of Yemenis. But Saudi Arabia needs more negative feedback, and so does our cozy relationship with them. Bring it on.

Credit where credit is due: Trump says outloud that it is all about a $110 billion sale.

Clarity.

‘Credit where credit is due: Trump says outloud that it is all about a $110 billion sale.

Clarity.’

amen! both he, & mike pompeo earlier. no weasel-words, or fabrications, just straight-out truth. it is refreshing 🙂 …

“any number of nameless people can be killed, raped and tortured and elites don’t care.”

And starved, denied medicines too, men, woman, and children…

The pursuit of profits. Let’s remember this:

Television interview, “60 Minutes”, May 12, 1996:

Lesley Stahl, speaking of US sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And – and you know, is the price worth it?”

Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”

By the way, Trump’s $110 billion in arms sales to the Saudis is, and I know this will come as a surprise, a made up number.

Also the Congress can and may block arm sales to the KSA.

Anyone got the inside scoop on this quote from Stephanie Kelton featured in Barrons?

“Kelton, 48, explained to the room in Kansas City that the government budget is not like a household budget because the government prints its own money. “But the problem is that Washington always wants to know how to pay for new programs. That’s a problem for you,” she says she told her listeners [‘an all-male breakfast club of the Kansas City rich and powerful”], because the conventional wisdom in the capital is that money “grows on rich people” and you pay for nice things by taking it from them.

“Don’t look at me,” she instructed her audience [of the rich & powerful] to tell lawmakers. “That’s where the money comes from. And you point at the Treasury. You point at Congress.” And she won the room over.”

Here is an article claiming to describe Mr. Khashoggi’s long-running part in power-policy struggles within the ruling Saudi family. It makes him look like not “just” a journalist, but rather an intelligence operative and second-tier power-player within the Saudi royal family ruling system, attached to a family faction which lost a power struggle over aspects of Kingdom policy.
It is perhaps at least worth considering.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/10/12/killing-saudi-journalist-khashoggi-could-spell-end-for-mohammad-bin-salman.html

“The tragedy of the Holocaust was not that six million people were murdered. It is that murder was committed six million times.”

Another such case, by Dave Lindorff:

https://thiscantbehappening.net/us-outrage-over-slaying-of-us-residents-depends-on-the-nation-responsible/