In the weeks following Khashoggi's death, Trump spent more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally, especially as a purchaser of U.S. weapons and goods, than he did reacting to the killing.
Saudi airman kills four at US Naval Base in Florida
An attack carried out by a Saudi air force pilot early Friday morning at the US Navy’s sprawling Pensacola, Florida Naval Air Station left at least four dead, including the shooter, and another eight wounded. Police and naval authorities reported that the attack was carried out with a handgun.
Aerial view of Naval Air Station Pensacola [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
The carnage spread across two floors of a
classroom building at the base, which trains
tens of thousands of pilots and airmen each
year. Deputies from the Escambia County Sheriff’s Department were the first to respond to the incident, shooting and killing the Saudi officer.
He was identified by NBC News as Second Lieutenant Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani. The US Navy and police authorities were withholding the names of the victims pending notification of their families.
The mass shooting at the base in Pensacola was the second such incident at a US Navy facility in the space of barely 48 hours. On Wednesday, a 22-year-old sailor from Texas, identified as Gabriel Antonio Romero, opened fire at Pearl Harbor’s naval shipyard in Hawaii, killing two civilian workers and wounding a third, before shooting himself to death.
At a press conference held Friday afternoon at the Pensacola base, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suggested that the killings there may have been linked to terrorism. “There is obviously going to be a lot of questions about this individual being a foreign national, being a part of the Saudi Air Force and then to be here training on our soil,” DeSantis said, adding that the Saudi monarchy needed “to make things better for these victims” as “this was one of their individuals.”
At the same press conference, Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan told the assembled media not to expect “quick answers” about the shooting, and that there were “aspects of the case that will never be public.” The government, he said, would “tell you what you need to know to keep our [communities] safe.”
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, who
represents the Pensacola area, tweeted
Friday that “This was not a murder. This was
an act of terrorism.”
US President Donald Trump struck a decidedly different tone, declining to answer if the attack was linked to terrorism. Instead, he cited a condolence call from Saudi Arabia’s King Salman. “The King said that the Saudi people are greatly angered by the barbaric actions of the shooter, and that this person in no way shape or form represents the feelings of the Saudi people who love the American people,” Trump tweeted.
Given Trump’s demonization of Muslims, it is
hard to imagine such a response if the
shooter had come from any other country in
the Middle East than Saudi Arabia, whose
monarchical dictatorship serves a lynchpin
for US imperialist policy in the region and, in
particular, for its drive for regime change in
Iran.
With its vast oil wealth, the Saudi monarchy has also acted in US interest in stabilizing the global oil market, while its military contracts have been the source of multi-billion-dollar profits for Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and other US arms manufacturers. The shooting in Pensacola also came just one day after Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil monopoly ARAMCO staged the biggest initial public offering ever, with some $25.6 billion going for shares in the company.
Trump’s reaction to the Pensacola shooting was in line with his response to the grisly October 2018 assassination of dissident journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Then he cited $450 billion in arms contracts, Saudi collaboration against Iran and its having been “very responsive to my requests to keep oil prices at reasonable levels” as justification for turning a blind eye to the international crime.
At the press conference on Friday, the Pensacola base commander, Capt. Timothy Kinsella, estimated that “a "couple hundred foreign students” were training there at the time of the shooting. Saudis make up a significant portion of these trainees.
According to US Defense Department reports,
some 1,753 Saudi military personnel were
trained at US military facilities in 2018 at a
cost of $120,903,786. For fiscal year 2019, it
was projected that 3,150 Saudi military
personnel would receive training in the US.
Friday’s shooting is not the first time that an act of terrorism by a Saudi national has been linked to the Pensacola Naval Air Base.
In the immediate aftermath of the September
11, 2001 attacks on New York City and
Washington, in which 15 of the 19 men
involved in the hijacking of three passenger
planes were Saudis, a report
in Newsweek magazine stated that Saeed
Alghamdi was one of three hijackers who had
taken flight training at the Pensacola Navy Air
Station. It was also reported that three of the hijackers had listed Pensacola Naval Air Station as their address on their Florida driver’s licenses.
The Pentagon responded by stating that, while the hijackers had “similar names to foreign alumni of US military courses,” discrepancies in birth dates and other biographical information indicated that they were not the same people. A public affairs officer at Pensacola said that the base had trained more than 1,600 people with the first name Saeed, spelled in various ways, and more than 200 with the surname Alghamdi.
The Saudi pilots being trained at Pensacola and other US bases have been deployed for the most part in the near-genocidal, four-year-old Saudi war against Yemen. The US-backed war has created the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet in what was already the poorest country in the Arab world. Air strikes and other combat operations carried out by Saudi-led coalition forces with US support have caused the deaths of some 80,000 people.
WHO IS FINANCING ALL THE TRUMP AND
SON-IN-LAW’S REFINANCING SCAMS???
FOLLOW THE MONEY!
"I doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about --
what message he's sending. Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended
royal family, have been his patrons for years, buying his distressed properties
when he needed money. In the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's
flashy yacht so that the then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to
stave off personal bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the
Plaza Hotel, one of Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an
entire floor of his landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in
2001."
“The Wahhabis finance thousands of
madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed into becoming
fanatical foot-soldiers for the petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of the
Persian Gulf.” AMIL
IMANI
I recommend that Ignatius read Raymond
Ibrahim's outstanding book Sword and Scimitar, which contains accounts of dynastic
succession in the Muslim monarchies of the Middle East, where standard
operating procedure for a new monarch on the death of his father was to
strangle all his brothers. Yes, it's awful. But it has
been happening for a very long time. And it's not going to change
quickly, no matter how outraged we pretend to be. MONICA SHOWALTER
TRUMP AND THE
MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper
and his family of parasites up their ar$es??
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s
charter. He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
*
*
JOHN DEAN: Not
so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter.
He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching
par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the
way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---
-
Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: Pathological
liar, swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster,
tax evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators
Opinion: Trump And Pompeo
Have Enabled A Saudi Cover-Up
Of The Khashoggi Killing
In the weeks
following the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump spent
more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally than he did
reacting to the killing.
Hasan Jamali/AP
Aaron David Miller (@aarondmiller2) is a senior fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department Middle
East analyst, adviser and negotiator in Republican and Democratic
administrations. He is the author most recently of the End of Greatness:
Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President.
Richard Sokolsky, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, worked in the State Department for six
different administrations and was a member of the secretary of state's Office
of Policy Planning from 2005 to 2015.
It has been a year since Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist
Jamal Khashoggi entered Saudi Arabia's Consulate in Istanbul where he was slain
and dismembered. There is still no objective or comprehensive Saudi or American
accounting of what occurred, let alone any real accountability.
The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's admission in a
recent CBS interview that
he takes "full responsibility," while denying foreknowledge of the
killing or that he ordered it, sweeps under the rug the lengths to which the
Saudis have gone to obscure the truth about their involvement in the killing
and cover-up.
The Saudi campaign of obfuscation, denial and cover-up would never
have gotten off the ground had it not been for the Trump administration's
support over the past year. The president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
not only refused to distance themselves from the crown prince, known by his
initials MBS, but also actively worked to relegitimize him. The Saudis killed
Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to protect the
U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah status. In short,
without Trump, the attempted makeover — such as it is — would not have been
possible.
The
Saudis killed Khashoggi but Trump
acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard
to protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship and
soften the crown prince's pariah status.
acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard
to protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship and
soften the crown prince's pariah status.
Weak administration response
The administration's weak and feckless
response to Khashoggi's killing was foreshadowed a year before it occurred. In
May 2017, in an unusual break with precedent, Trump visited Saudi Arabia on his
inaugural presidential trip; gave his son-in-law the authority to manage the
MBS file, which he did with the utmost secrecy; and made it unmistakably clear
that Saudi money, oil, arm purchases and support for the administration's
anti-Iranian and pro-Israeli policies would elevate the U.S.-Saudi
"special relationship" to a new level.
Predictably, therefore, the administration's reaction to
Khashoggi's killing was shaped by a desire to manage the damage and preserve
the relationship. In the weeks following Khashoggi's death, Trump spent
more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally, especially as a
purchaser of U.S. weapons and goods, than he did
reacting to the killing. Trump vowed to get to the bottom of the
Khashoggi killing but focused more on defending the crown prince, saying this was another example of
being "guilty before being proven innocent."
Those pledges to investigate and impose accountability would
continue to remain hollow. Over the past year, Trump and Pompeo have neither
criticized nor repudiated Saudi actions that have harmed American interests in
the Middle East. Two months after Khashoggi's death, the administration, in
what Pompeo described as an "initial step," imposed sanctions on 17
Saudi individuals implicated in the killing. But no others have been
forthcoming, and the visa restrictions that were imposed are meaningless
because none of the sanctioned Saudis would
be foolish enough to seek entry into the United States.
What's more, the administration virtually ignored a congressional
resolution imposing sanctions on the Saudis for human rights abuses
and vetoed another bipartisan resolution that would have ended U.S. military
assistance to Saudi Arabia's inhumane military campaign in Yemen.
The Saudis opened a trial in January of 11 men implicated in the
killing, but the proceedings have been slow and secretive, leading the United
Nations' top human rights expert to declare that "the trial underway in
Saudi Arabia will not deliver credible accountability." Despite accusations
that the crown prince's key adviser Saud al-Qahtani was involved in the
killing, he's still advising MBS, has not stood trial and
will likely escape punishment. A year later, there are still no reports of
convictions or serious punishment.
Legitimizing Mohammed bin Salman
The Trump administration has not only given the crown prince a
pass on the Khashoggi killing, but it has also worked assiduously to remove his
pariah status and rehabilitate his global image. Barely two months after the
2018 slaying, Trump was exchanging pleasantries with the crown prince at the
Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires and holding out prospects
of spending more time with him. Then this past June, at the G-20 in Osaka,
Japan, Trump sang his praises while dodging questions about the killing.
"It's an honor to be with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of
mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of
opening up Saudi Arabia," Trump said.
And you can
bet that when Saudi Arabia hosts the G-20, scheduled to be held in its capital
of Riyadh in November 2020, the Trump administration will be smiling as its
rehab project takes another step in its desired direction.
What the U.S. should have done
Trump has failed to impose any serious costs or constraints on
Saudi Arabia for the killing of a U.S. newspaper columnist who resided in
Virginia or for the kingdom's aggressive policies, from Yemen to Qatar. In the
wake of the Khashoggi killing, the administration should have made it
unmistakably clear, both publicly and privately, that it expected a
comprehensive and credible accounting and investigation. It should have suspended
high-level contacts and arms sales with the kingdom for a period of time. And
to make the point, the administration should have supported at least one
congressional resolution taking the Saudis to task, in addition to triggering
the Magnitsky Act, which would have required a U.S. investigation; a report to
Congress; and sanctions if warranted.
Back to business as usual
The dark
stain of the crown prince's apparent involvement in Khashoggi's death will not
fade easily. But for Trump and Pompeo, it pales before the great expectations
they still maintain for the kingdom to confront and contain their common enemy,
Iran, as well as support the White House's plan for Middle East peace, defeat
jihadists in the region and keep the oil spigot open.
Most of
these goals are illusory. Saudi Arabia is a weak, fearful and unreliable ally.
The kingdom has introduced significant social and cultural reforms but has
imposed new levels of repression and authoritarianism. Its reckless policies
toward Yemen and Qatar have expanded, not contracted, opportunities for Iran, while
the Saudi military has demonstrated that, even after spending billions to buy
America's most sophisticated weapons, it still can't defend itself without
American help.
Meanwhile,
recent attacks on critical Saudi oil facilities that the U.S. blames on Iran
have helped rally more American and international support for the kingdom.
When it
comes to the U.S.-Saudi relationship and the kingdom's callous reaction to
Khashoggi's killing, the president and his secretary of state have been
derelict in their duty: They have not only failed to advance American strategic
interests but also undermined America's values in the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment