Murder and lies
Reporter’s killing very likely sanctioned by Saudis
First, the government of Saudi Arabia claimed that it knew nothing about the Oct. 2 disappearance of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.
King Salman assured President Donald Trump that he knew nothing about Mr. Khashoggi’s fate, and the royal government dismissed stories of its involvement as “baseless.”
Then, last week, the Saudis admitted that Mr. Khashoggi met an untimely death — during a fistfight in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate — and that the shocking discovery had prompted the detention and firing of various security officials.
No one believed it for a second. How could a government that maintains rigid control over its subjects’ lives not know about the death of a journalist in one of its consulates? And continue not knowing for weeks, even though its own people were the ones allegedly fighting with Mr. Khashoggi?
On Sunday, the Saudis tweaked the narrative again, admitting that Mr. Khashoggi was murdered but insisting it was at the hands of rogue officials, not on orders of the ruling family often criticized by Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen living in the U.S. No one’s buying that one, either. The conflicting accounts, halftruths and inept cover-ups hatched from Riyadh in recent weeks are the gaffes to be expected of a government that usually is accountable to no one but now, because of intense media and international pressure, is scrambling to explain itself to the world. For once, the Saudi leadership can’t control the conversation, can’t squelch the questions, can’t make a problem disappear.
In democratic societies, sleazy politicians hire crafty PR people to try to make sense of their messes. But the concept of accountability is so foreign, so novel, to Saudi Arabia’s unchecked rulers that they can’t even weave a coherent web of credible lies.
Turkey has had the goods on Saudi Arabia’s involvement since Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance, and Istanbul’s release of one detail after another only has fastened the chains of responsibility ever more firmly on the probable mastermind, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who’s turned out to be much less the reformer than people the world over had hoped he would be.
Mr. Khashoggi, who entered the consulate to get paperwork for his wedding, never had a chance to leave. A Saudi hit squad tortured, killed and dismembered him. That narrative, pieced together from Turkish intelligence, U.S. intelligence and news reports, is the one that rings true.
Mr. Khashoggi’s murder has reinforced Saudi Arabia’s reputation as one of the world’s great bastions of repression, with a ruling family trapped in the Dark Ages. Perhaps the international fallout from the murder and cover-ups will force Saudi Arabia’s government to change just a little. It would be some small measure of justice for Mr. Khashoggi to have achieved in death but he could not accomplish during his life.