President Donald Trump talked to reporters today about his phone conversation with Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz, during which the two despots discussed the disappearance and apparent killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Because of course they would. President Donald Trump's son Don Jr., along with pro-Trump extreme right wing media, are exploiting Washington Post contributing journalist Jamal Khashoggi's interviews with Osama bin Laden to imply that he supported Islamic terror, reports The Daily Beast. — Read the rest
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered an operation to lure Washington Post contributing journalist Jamal Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia where he was to be detained, U.S. intercepts show. The whole torture, dismemberment, and death inside the Saudi embassy thing that apparently happened was a rendition gone bad, according to this report.
Journalist Jamal Khashoggi is believed by some to have been tortured, murdered, and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Others think he was kidnapped by Saudi officials and is still alive.
Facing nearly half a billion dollars in fraud penalties and another hundred for defamation, Donald Trump begs for more time to pay his bills. I guess NATO is laughing pretty hard.
This court filing suggests that Trump struggles to find anyone not sanctioned from doing business in the United States willing to loan him money. — Read the rest
Vice Media, the once-edgy news outlet that built its reputation on hard-hitting investigative journalism, has apparently sold its spine for a bucketful of riyals. It recently removed its documentary "Inside Saudi Crown Prince's Ruthless Quest for Power" from its YouTube channel. — Read the rest
Billionaire tycoon Mohamed Al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods in London, is dead at 94. Al-Fayed loved to picked big fights–the circumstances under which he acquired the flagship retailer and its parent chain meant he would later be denied UK citizenship, a slight that echoed in his further interactions with the British establishment. — Read the rest
Saad Ibrahim Almadi (72), a dual US-Saudi national, is serving a 16-year-sentence for posting tweets that were critical of the Saudi government. He posted the tweets in Florida, but when he went to Saudi Arabia, he was apprehended and convicted of harboring a terrorist ideology and trying to destabilize the kingdom. — Read the rest
The Russian Embassy in Washington DC now has an unofficial new street name: President Zelensky Way.
The sign, which is attached to a pole and cement base, was rolled over on a dolly at 2:30 pm yesterday by activist Claude Taylor, who told Insider it's meant to be "a peaceful, nonviolent, silent form of protest." — Read the rest
John Bolton, challenged as to why he reserved his claims about Trump's behavior for a book deal, has a grimly convincing excuse: revealing them during his former boss's impeachment trial wouldn't have made any difference because his party controls the Senate. — Read the rest
The Saudi sovereign wealth fund bought a $500 million stake in Ticketmaster, the much revilved ticket service with a long history of being terrible to venues, performer, and fans. On his Pluralistic blog, Cory Doctorow says the Saudi fund is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman…
That is, the Mister Bone Saw widely believed to have personally ordered the kidnapping, torture and dismemberment of journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi.
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One of the strangest contradictory sensations of the Trump era is the man's relationship towards and with the various U.S. intelligence agencies. In many cases, Trump's broad criticisms about the unaccountable and seemingly limitless scope of intelligence gathering are valid. Or would be, anyway, if the man actually cared about those issues for any reason beyond his larger tantrum over the way those agencies have undermined his ego. — Read the rest
Andrew Coyle and B.C. Jackson have published a baby board book featuring key concepts of Cult Trump. A is for Alternative Facts, C is for Covefe, D is for Drain the Swamp, F is for Fake News. My favorite part: "Reading Level: Presidential." — Read the rest
Motherboard has obtained and published a copy of the forensics report that suggests that Jeff Bezos's phone was hacked by Prince Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud, possibly in a scheme to obtain kompromat that could be used as leverage to prevent the Washington Post of reporting on the death of Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered and mutilated by agents of the prince.
"I think absurd is exactly the right word," said Saudi Prince Faisal
In Israel on Thursday, a court ordered closed-door hearings in the legal bid by Amnesty International to stop the global export of NSO Group surveillance software, which Amnesty and other human rights groups say is sold to autocratic regimes around the world to spy on journalists and dissidents, and target them more efficiently for imprisonment and assassination. — Read the rest
On this week's Intercepted podcast (MP3) (previously), host Jeremy Scahill (previously) takes a long, deep look at the history of McKinsey and Company, whose consultants are the architects of ICE's gulags, a failed, high-cost initiative to curb violence at Rikers Island that used falsified data to secure ongoing funding — a company whose internal documents compare management consultants to "the Marine Corps, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits" and whose government contracts bill out freshly hired, inexperienced junior consultants at $3m/year.
The NSO Group (previously) is an Israeli spyware company that sells tools to autocratic states that are used to spy on democratic opposition movements, journalists, and so on (the company's tools were used by the Saudi government to spy on Jamal Khashoggi in the runup to his kidnap and grisly murder).
Uber is significantly backed by Saudi investments and the country's sovereign wealth fund controls a seat on its board. — Read the rest
Twitter has some very serious security explaining to do.