REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

PRESIDENT BIDEN AGREES TO RELEASE REPORT ON THE KILLING OF JAMAL KHASHOGGI

 

      …This Washington Post Journalist was ordered to be killed and dismembered

 

The Biden administration has cancelled arms sales to the Saudis.

 

The Biden administration is about to release a U.S. intelligence report that concludes that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) ordered the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The report is an unclassified summary of the findings of the intelligence community produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).  It will be made public as early as next week.

This report is being released as the U.S. / Saudi relations have sunk to a new low in recent weeks.  The Biden administration has cancelled arms sales to the Saudis, and they have criticized human rights abuses and the harassment of dissidents.  They have also pledged to “recalibrate” U.S. ties with the kingdom.

The Biden administration has said it will continue to supply Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest customer for U.S. weaponry, with the means to defend itself against regional adversaries, including Iran and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen.  And the U.S. has indicated it wants to continue a robust counterterrorism partnership.

But the administration has also made clear that it will, in contrast to the Trump administration, press the Saudis toward a diplomatic end to their war in Yemen and to moderate their own extremism.  It will also not allow the capital Riyadh to interfere with the plans to rejoin the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran.

In what was widely seen as a snub, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that President Biden, has yet to communicate directly with the Saudi rulers.  He would not be speaking with the crown prince, known as MBS, the country’s de facto leader.

“The president’s counterpart is King Salman,” the crown prince’s aging father, Psaki said, “and I expect that, in appropriate time, [Biden] would have a conversation with him.”

The release of the Khashoggi report may make that a difficult exchange. “I think it’s going to put Biden on the spot,” said David Ottaway, a longtime Saudi expert at the Wilson Center. “He’s going to have to define what his relationship is going to be with the leadership, and what steps he’s going to take in response.  There are so many things weighing on the relationship, and I feel it’s going further south,” Ottaway said. 

A senior Saudi Foreign Ministry official did not respond to questions about the release of the report or other aspects of U.S.-Saudi relations. A spokesman for the ODNI said it would not “comment on the reported timing or contents of the unclassified report.”

President Donald Trump made Saudi Arabia a linchpin of his administration’s Middle East policy.  Choosing Riyadh as the destination for his first presidential trip abroad in 2017, he hailed the kingdom as the leader of the Muslim world and a major profit-maker for the U.S. defense industry.

Khashoggi, a self-exiled Saudi journalist who wrote critically of the kingdom’s leadership from his home in Virginia, including in columns for The Washington Post,.  He was brutally murdered in October 2018.  Lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to pick up paperwork required for his planned marriage to a Turkish citizen.  He was drugged and his body dismembered by Saudi agents.  This is according to investigations by the Turkish government and the United Nations.

Suspicion immediately fell on the ambitious heir to the throne, who was consolidating his power within the often fractious royal family.  Despite Saudi government claims that he was not involved, the CIA concluded, in an assessment leaked later that year, that MBS had ordered the assassination.

But President Trump persisted in discounting the conclusions of his own intelligence service, calling the killing a “rogue operation,” and he continued to shield the crown prince.  Speaking of Mohammed, he boasted in an interview with Bob Woodward that he had “saved his [MBS] ass” from congressional attempts to hold the crown prince responsible.

In early 2019, Congress passed a law giving the Trump administration 30 days to submit an unclassified report by the ODNI with “a determination and evidence with respect to the advance knowledge and role of any current or former official of Saudi Arabia . . . over the directing, ordering or tampering of evidence in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.” It specifically ordered a release of names.

Asa expected, Trump ignored the mandate. In February 2020, his ODNI informed congressional leaders that it was “unable to provide additional information . . . at the unclassified level,” and sent them a copy of the classified CIA assessment.

In July, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, responding to additional requests from lawmakers, told them nothing would be forthcoming.  He had concluded after additional review, he wrote to them, that “the disclosure of additional details surrounding Mr. Khashoggi’s murder would undermine U.S. intelligence sources and methods.”

At the same time, Ratcliffe wrote, “I have determined that there is only a marginal ‘public interest’ argument for this declassification.”

At Avril Haines’s confirmation hearing to become Biden’s national intelligence director, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked if she would release the ODNI report.

“Yes, Senator. Actually, we’ll follow the law,” Haines replied.

In a statement through his office, Wyden said this week that “after four years of Donald Trump ignoring and enabling Saudi lawlessness, President Biden has already taken steps to restore accountability, by ending support for the horrific Saudi-led war in Yemen, pausing arms sales and promising to follow the law I wrote and release the report on Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. I urge the administration to build on these steps by imposing real consequences on Saudi officials for these and other abuses.”

Even without Haines’s determination and pressure from Congress, efforts to force release have been moving rapidly through federal court in the Southern District of New York.

By that time, if Haines follows through on plans to release it, the issue will be moot.

Even as the Saudis explore alternative arms partners, including Russia and China, for both arms purchases and nuclear power capability.  They have taken some steps in response to administration concerns, including the recent release of some dissident prisoners.

Some experts believe that if both sides are willing, and nuanced diplomacy is pursued, they can still find a way to work productively together. “Once this report comes out, and it’s very damning to the crown prince, it’s going to be tense,” Karen Young of the American Enterprise Institute said in an interview. “But I think everybody has sort of factored that in. . . . Everybody understands that this was a decision that he [MBS] had something to do with.”

The first order of business now, she said, is reestablishing “appropriate channels of communication” that were all but abandoned by Trump, who left most ties to a personal relationship between the crown prince and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser. Counterparts at various government levels “need to be speaking to each other in routine and official channels,” Young said.

MBS also serves as his country’s defense minister, and the administration is likely to focus on his role there as the proper level of contact.  “But will there be Oval Office visits?” Young responded: “No, definitely not.”

Copyright G. Ater 2021