Saudi slide

When Avril Haines, Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence, released a formal public finding last week that, “we assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” she was not revealing a state secret. The CIA pinned the murder on the prince within weeks of when the Washington Post columnist and U.S. permanent resident walked into the Saudi consulate on Oct. 2, 2018 and was set upon, offed and chopped up.

Candidate Biden knew full well that the de facto Saudi king was behind the particularly bloody and gruesome assassination a year later during the Nov. 20, 2019 Democratic debate: “Khashoggi was, in fact, murdered and dismembered, and I believe on the order of the crown prince. And I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them, we were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”

So the punishment for MBS, the guy who gave the order, and his pariah regime was that one of his goons would have his American bank accounts frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department and he won’t be welcomed traveling here. That also goes for the prince’s Rapid Intervention Force. Nothing about weapons. Nothing about paying.

How weak is the Biden slap? On Nov. 15, 2018, weeks after the murder, the Trump U.S. Treasury Department put the same limits on 17 other Saudis tied to the rubout.

As for MBS himself, the top pariah, the mealymouthed White House now only says that it’s not the practice to sanction foreign leaders with whom we have diplomatic relations.

However, says White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, the goal is to prevent this from happening again. On that, the Biden team is on solid ground. It absolutely never will happen again. That’s a total guarantee. Khashoggi is already dead and chopped to bits and carted off in suitcases.