appears to be blown just like transformers from other night.
what was discussion when it shut down?
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/12/washington-post-admits-that-qatar-foundation-used-khashoggis-columns-to-spread-propaganda
“Washington Post Hints What Others Have Known: Jamal Khashoggi Was a Paid Qatari Intelligence Asset,” RedState, December 26, 2018:
A lot of people have been highly skeptical of the way the Washington Post and its fellow outlets have treated the story of Jamal Khashoggi. He is the Washington Post opinion writer who was killed by Saudi Arabian operatives at their consulate in Istanbul. Regardless of the facts and circumstances, a couple of things have been clear from the beginning. First, the Turkish government has used Khashoggi’s death as the core of a full-bore information operation designed to stop US-Saudi cooperation in the Middle East. Second, the Washington Post, for reasons they haven’t fully disclosed, elected to make the death of this op-ed writer a cause célèbre in a way they never did when Obama’s BFFs, the Iranian mullahs, held their Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian in prison. In fact, you’d be excused for thinking we were back in the bad old days of yellow journalism when William Randolph Hearst wired his illustrator in Cuba (oddly enough, Frederic Remington), “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
Anyone who has dug into the the story knows that Khashoggi was not some latter day Arab democrat. In his younger days he traveled with Osama bin Laden and was sympathetic to him and to al Qaeda. He was a hard core Muslim Brotherhood operative and used his writing to serve as their apologist. He was the kind of anti-Semite you’d expect to have that pedigree. Though he was touted by the Washington Post as being in favor of a free press in the Arab world, that concept was not one we’d recognize. He’d recently complained that the Saudi government was allowing papers to say positive things about Israel.
Interestingly, just a couple of days ago, the Washington Post ran a story which started rewriting the hagiography that they’ve created surrounding Khashoggi.
Perhaps most problematic for Khashoggi were his connections to an organization funded by Saudi Arabia’s regional nemesis, Qatar. Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government. Khashoggi also appears to have relied on a researcher and translator affiliated with the organization, which promotes Arabic-language education in the United States.
But a lot more is hinted at:
Khashoggi was never a staff employee of the Post, and he was paid about $500 per piece for the 20 columns he wrote over the course of the year. He lived in an apartment near Tysons Corner in Fairfax County that he had purchased while working at the Saudi Embassy a decade earlier. [Note: how did he live in the DC Metro area for about $10K/year?]
…
Khashoggi also appears to have accepted significant help with his columns. Salem, the executive at the Qatar foundation, reviewed his work in advance and in some instances appears to have proposed language, according to a voluminous collection of messages obtained by The Post. [Journalists accepting “significant help” from government operatives in writing stories is a fact of how journalism is conducted in the Middle East, the Post eliding over this speaks volumes.]
In early August, Salem prodded Khashoggi to write about Saudi Arabia’s alliances “from DC to Jerusalem to rising right wing parties across Europe…bringing an end to the liberal world order that challenges their abuses at home.”
Khashoggi expressed misgivings about such a strident tone, then asked, “So do you have time to write it?”
“I’ll try,” she replied, although she went on to urge him to “try a draft” himself incorporating sentences that she had sent him by text. A column reflecting their discussion appeared in The Post on Aug. 7. Khashoggi appears to have used some of Salem’s suggestions, though it largely tracks ideas that he expressed in their exchange over the encrypted app WhatsApp.
Other texts in the 200-page trove indicate that Salem’s organization paid a researcher who did work for Khashoggi. The foundation is an offshoot of a larger Qatar-based organization. Khashoggi also relied on a translator who worked at times for the Qatari embassy and the foundation.
…
On Oct. 3, one day after Khashoggi’s death, while his fate remained uncertain, his researcher contacted The Post to say that he had a draft of a column that Khashoggi had begun writing before his disappearance. It was published two weeks later. [The likelihood that Khashoggi’s last column was ghostwritten to take advantage of his disappearance by making him appear to be an Arabian Thomas Jefferson appraoches [sic] certainty.]…