Friday, October 12, 2018

A Murder In Istanbul

The Turks have the tapes that lead to the conclusion that the Saudis did it.  From the Washington Post:

The Turkish government has told U.S. officials that it has audio and video recordings that prove Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul this month, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.

The recordings show that a Saudi security team detained Khashoggi in the consulate after he walked in Oct. 2 to obtain an official document before his upcoming wedding, then killed him and dismembered his body, the officials said.

The audio recording in particular provides some of the most persuasive and gruesome evidence that the Saudi team is responsible for Khashoggi’s death, the officials said.

“The voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered,” said one person with knowledge of the recording who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive intelligence.

“You can hear his voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic,” this person said. “You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured and then murdered.”

A second person briefed on the recording said men could be heard beating Khashoggi.

So far the response from the Trump administration has been a shrug and pre-recorded concern:

During a bill signing Thursday in the Oval Office, President Trump called Khashoggi’s suspected killing “a terrible thing,” but stopped short of assigning blame.

“We’re looking at it very strongly,” Trump said. “We’ll be having a report out soon. We’re working with Turkey, we’re working with Saudi Arabia. What happened is a terrible thing, assuming that happened. I mean, maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised, but somehow I tend to doubt it.”

That’s because oil and power trump everything.

2 barks and woofs on “A Murder In Istanbul

  1. No no no – Trump cares nothing about oil and power. What he cares about is his own pocket and the Saudis have been “Good Friends” to him in the form of big loans and moving into apartments in one of his shaky hotel ventures in NYC. He dare not endanger his relationship with them – he won’t be President for more than another couple of years and business calls.

  2. Keep in mind also that Trump has no love for a free press and has encouraged his followers to rough up reporters. He’s hardly going to care about a “foreign” journalist being murdered by his good friends.

Comments are closed.