==Why the Release of the Khashoggi Report Has Everything to Do With Iran
Lee Smith March 1, 2021
Biden’s preferred Middle East partner, Iran, look better by comparison.
The administration is preparing to re-enter Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with Tehran and legalize the nuclear weapons program of a terror state that has been launching missile attacks on Saudi Arabia for several years. It’s hard to imagine Washington imposing a steeper penalty on Riyadh.
Trump made his first presidential trip to Saudi Arabia to underscore the importance of a relationship that brought Saudi investment and American jobs.
First, Khashoggi was not, as the press asserts, a Washington Post columnist. The several opinion pieces the paper published under his name were written by others. Because he did not write English well, his articles were directed, from conception through composition, by paid agents of Qatar, Saudi Arabia’s Gulf Cooperation Council rival, who encouraged him to opine critically on his native country. Nor was he, as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken tweeted, a permanent U.S. resident, and thereby entitled to the protection, attention, and consideration Washington owes U.S. citizens and green-card holders. Khashoggi owned an apartment in Virginia and lived in the United States on a work visa.
Moreover, Khashoggi was not a “dissident.” He was a Saudi insider with ties to the country’s intelligence services. He had managed media companies owned by a member of the Saudi royal family who was a longtime head of Riyadh’s general intelligence directorate. Khashoggi had once considered Osama Bin Laden a friend and was sympathetic to other Islamic extremist movements. He frequently expressed anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments on social media. Before he was killed, Khashoggi sought $2 million from Riyadh to start a think-tank in Washington, DC to promote Saudi interests. In other words, it seems he was using his Post articles and relationship with Doha to negotiate with Riyadh for his loyalty.
His death in turn was used by former U.S. officials to advance their causes. A group of retired CIA officers was hammering away at MBS even before he replaced Mohamed Bin Nayef as crown prince in 2017. As a former head of Saudi intelligence, Nayef was well known to U.S. intelligence officials who expected him to ascend to the throne once the aging King Salman died. They assumed Nayef would feather their retirement nests, as the Saudis frequently bestow favors on former U.S. diplomats and senior spies friendly to the Kingdom.
By releasing the DNI assessment, the Biden administration is simply announcing that the Obama policy is once again operative. Virtually all of the Obama officials who swung the Iran deal in 2015 are back with Team Biden, primed to undo sanctions and flood the regime’s war chest.
The assessment is also meant to paint the Saudis as uniquely evil, a tactic similar to the one deployed the last several years against Trump supporters.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-the-release-of-the-khashoggi-report-has-everything-to-do-with-iran