Oops, interrogated a little too hard
Ok he’s dead, ok we killed him, but it wasn’t murder, it was an interrogation gone wrong, all right? Are you happy now?
The Saudi government is preparing to say that the death of prominent journalist Jamal Khashoggi was the result of an interrogation by Saudi operatives that went wrong, two sources close to the Saudi kingdom tell CBS News. Khashoggi vanished after entering a Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, igniting a global firestorm over the circumstances of his disappearance.
Saudi officials are expected to claim that the mission was initiated to interrogate Khashoggi, a frequent critic of the government, not to kill him.
Of course, they didn’t have any business “interrogating” him either, if you think human rights are a thing.
The admission would mark a departure from the kingdom’s repeated insistence that it had no knowledge of what happened to Khashoggi, who was picking up paperwork needed to marry his fiancée. CNN first reported that the Saudis were planning to admit Khashoggi died in the consulate.
As recently as Monday morning, Saudi leaders were still not admitting any wrongdoing.
That was then. Can’t a guy change his mind?
Well, since Trump has made it clear that there will almost certainly be no meaningful repercussions, admitting that overzealous underlings got carried away (or more likely claim that he had a heart attack) will be embarrassing, but not actually hurt the bank balance.
Trump, pro-actively handed them all the plausible deniability they need to get out of this.
Ah, that’ll be the ‘rogue operatives’ that Trump was blathering on about. So MBS and him spoke by phone, MBS told him what was what, and Trump blurted it out the first time someone stuck a microphone under his nose.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/15/turkey-jamal-khashoggi-granted-permission-search-saudi-arabia-consulate-istanbul
So… they didn’t kill him? They only interrogated him to death?
That’s good, I guess?
Not victim blaming, but if the stories about how concerned he was that the Saudis were out to get him are even half true, I wonder why he’d even consider voluntarily going into a Saudi consulate, especially in a country like Turkey.
He must have thought they’d never dare to do something like that in that kind of setting.
Skeletor, the reports I’ve seen suggest he was in fact very concerned and had made a range of contingency arrangements assuming he may be held or kidnapped. He needed paperwork that could only be provided at the embassy so that he could be married…