Why ‘The Dissident’ is harrowing but essential
On Oct. 2, 2018, Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up some documents for his upcoming wedding; his fiancée waited outside.
He never came out. Khashoggi was suffocated and dismembered with a bone saw. But on that day Hatice Cengiz, who was to marry Khashoggi, just waited, not knowing what happened. In “The Dissident,” Bryan Fogel’s documentary about the killing and the Saudi regime’s role in it, we’re told she waited from 1 p.m. when Khashoggi walked in till 1 a.m.
Obviously she and others knew something was wrong. Just how wrong is jaw-dropping. Fogel, who won an Oscar for “Icarus,” covers some
well-traveled ground. The death of a journalist — particularly one as wellknown and influential as Khashoggi, who was writing for the Washington Post and a resident of Washington, D.C., at the time of his death — is going to generate a lot of media coverage. But this is nevertheless a gripping film, pieced together like a thriller and succeeding on that front (maybe too well in places where Fogel might have pulled back a bit).
‘The Dissident’ is at times a maddening documentary
It’s also a maddening film, as the Saudis first denied knowing anything about Khashoggi’s disappearance, then had to acknowledge he died in the consulate. Fogel, through a series of interviews and with transcripts of the audio tapes of Khashoggi’s murder (yes, it was recorded), meticulously builds the case against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a frequent target of Khashoggi’s criticism.
President Donald Trump, asked about the murder, is shown telling reporters that it has been investigated and he’s not inclined to jeopardize billions in arms deals with the Saudis.
Khashoggi’s murder is, of course, terrifying. So is the blatant attack on free speech and such a callous refusal to criticize it. Khashoggi had self-exiled to Washington because of Mohammed bin Salman’s crackdown on criticism of the Saudi regime — a regime in which Khashoggi had long been an insider.
The prince, or MBS as he’s often called, championed some progressive moves in Saudi Arabia, such as allowing women to drive. But as Khashoggi and others pointed out, MBS allowed no criticism, and began arresting any dissenters. Khashoggi didn’t want to leave Saudi Arabia. He had to.
How Omar Abdulaziz continues Khashoggi’s work
So did Omar Abdulaziz, a 27-year-old dissident we meet at the beginning of the film, living in exile and fear in Montreal. He had worked with Khashoggi on a plan to battle the social-media fight the Saudi government waged. Basically if anyone criticized the regime, an army of trolls would rain down a storm of disparaging tweets on the offender. Abdulaziz put together his own band of resis
ters, to counter-troll the trolls. The Saudis were called flies. Abdulaziz called his group bees.
This is where Fogel gets a little carried away. He illustrates the attacks and counterattacks with animated flies and bees fighting. It’s a silly effect that distracts from the information.
Whatever the case, intrigued by the idea, Khashoggi helped finance Abdulaziz’s effort. Shortly after it launched, he was killed.
The extent to which the Saudis use technology and social media is also eyeopening. Eight out of 10 people in Saudi
Arabia use Twitter, we’re told. Hacking software turns cellphones into miniature spies. Fogel suggests that MBS could have been behind the hacking of the phone of Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, and the release of compromising photos. Fogel posits that a personal text from MBS to Bezos was evidently what allowed the Saudis access.
All this builds to a horrible description of the thoroughly planned murder of Khashoggi. In the transcript the culprits talk about how to dismember his body — how many bags. He’s called
“prey.” They laugh throughout the planning. It took more than seven minutes for Khashoggi to die as they suffocated him. Later they bought 70 pounds of meat they burned, to disguise the smell of his body being burned.
This for exercising free speech. It should be unthinkable. Yet it isn’t. The Saudis charged some lower-level people with the crime, albeit in secret. Trump vetoed a bipartisan effort by the U.S. Congress to stop arms sales to the Saudis.
We are daily reminded of the importance of a free media, of free speech. “The Dissident” is a reminder of how far some governments will go to suppress it.