Saudi Arabia-Jamal Khashoggi - Western Hypocrisy - Page 4 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14953344
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Trump
Saudi Arabia — and I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me,
They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.


His corruption is a national security issue.
A foreign government — an American ally, no less — can’t just murder a US resident with impunity while he’s on the soil of a NATO member state because they didn’t like his newspaper columns.
And yet that seems to be exactly what President Donald Trump wants to let Saudi officials do, explaining to reporters on Thursday that he does not want to respond to the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi because “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money coming into our country” and “I don’t like stopping an investment of $110 billion in the United States.”
Trump’s nonchalance is getting some pushback from Congress, which is welcome, including some actual action from Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who has often complained about Trump but rarely done anything.
Still, while a little inter-branch tension on this subject is welcome, it leaves unexamined the elephant in the room. Why is Trump so willing to let the Saudis slide? Is Trump getting paid by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS, and the Saudis? Is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner?
Normally, these would be absurd questions to raise about a president. But they are serious. Trump has commented before on his business ties to Saudi Arabia, bragging at a campaign rally in Alabama about how much business he did with Saudi interests. And he’s never fully aired the extent of his vast business and financial ties.

Now, as the White House is preparing to make policy (or not) in a crucial moment, how can the public have any confidence that the president isn’t just looking out for his own interests and not the country’s?
Trump doesn’t care about Khashoggi
After Trump told reporters he didn’t want to lose the billions the Saudis spend on American goods, he suggested that perhaps because Khashoggi was murdered in Turkey, and because he is a permanent resident of the US but not a citizen, it’s all just no big deal.
US intelligence agencies are leaking like sieves trying to make the opposite point, getting word out to the American public that the American government has solid evidence that things are exactly as they appear, and that the Saudi government was behind the mysterious disappearance and likely murder of Khashoggi.
A Washington Post report based on US intelligence intercepts of Saudi officials states that MBS personally “ordered an operation to lure Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia from his home in Virginia and then detain him.”
Meanwhile, the United States has no ambassador accredited in Riyadh. Instead, the relationship is in the hands of Kushner, an unqualified nobody whose personal finances are shot through with conflicts of interest.
It’s a situation no normal president would tolerate. But no normal president would have Trump’s level of financial conflicts of interest.
Trump’s personal corruption is a national security issue

“Saudi Arabia — and I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me,” Trump said at a 2015 rally in Alabama. ”They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
There’s nothing illegal about making money from rich Saudis. And as Max Fisher explained in his 2016 Vox feature on Saudi influence in American politics, there’s nothing all that unusual about political elites aligning their foreign policy views with Gulf money. But what’s unique about Trump is the extent to which he is able to personally profit from the Saudi government while in office. This August, for example, the general manager of the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan was pleased to announce that after two straight years of decline, revenue grew 13 percent in the first quarter of 2018.
Why? Well, according to a letter he wrote that was obtained by the Post, “a last-minute visit to New York by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia” played a key role.
We happen to know about that because of hard work by the journalists who uncovered it.
The letter also noted the curious fact that, during this lucrative engagement, neither the crown prince nor any other members of the royal family actually stayed in the hotel, since it didn’t have suites as big as they wanted. Nevertheless, “due to our close industry relationships ... we were able to accommodate many of the accompanying travelers.”
Maybe it was close industry relationships, or maybe it was a cash bribe paid by the leader of a foreign dictatorship to the president of the United States. Either way, it’s not something we found out about through President Trump’s financial disclosures because he doesn’t make any meaningful financial disclosures. And it’s not something we found out through a congressional investigation because congressional Republicans have stonewalled all efforts to figure out what’s going on with Trump’s money.
We happen to know this because a hotel general manager put this particular bit of news in writing and somehow it leaked to the Post.
It’s almost certainly not the only instance of a foreign state putting money directly into Trump’s pockets with disturbing implications for the conduct of US foreign policy. But the only way to find out how often it happens or what policy choices it’s linked to would be to get a Congress that bothers to care.


https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... -khashoggi
#14953561
Curious when the Turkish police are going to share their evidence of the murder. So far it's only their say-so we're going with.

Rugoz wrote:The US feeds the Saudi war machine in Yemen and you think demanding not to murder US residents is "too much meddling"? :lol:


:D

Not just any US resident, he was also a journalist for the Washington Post and there are rumours of him being a secret agent but I haven't come across proof of that, so who knows...
#14953635
Yes.
Fake news. News that I don't like. Trump style


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Political outrage sparked by the disappearance of a dissident Saudi journalist is not just damaging the reputation of a key US ally — it's now threatening the authority of President Donald Trump himself.
The possible murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul has unleashed forces in Washington that are putting Trump's sharp turn away from traditional American foreign policy values to its most stark political test yet.
And there are growing signs that the White House may be unable to thwart fast-building pressure in Congress for action to punish Saudi Arabia and rein in its ruthless de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, tapped by the White House as America's anchor in the Middle East.
The President, with his dealmaker's instincts, has inserted Saudi Arabia into a foreign policy designed to leverage US power for material gain rather than for global moral leadership — and has argued the current crisis should not derail a commercial relationship worth billions of dollars.
But such is the anger in Congress over the US-based Khashoggi's fate, that support is building for an effort to impose a change in Trump's strategy, much as lawmakers did when enforcing sanctions on Russia against his will.
"If they lured this man into that consulate, they went medieval on him, and he was killed and he was chopped up and they sent a death crew down there to kill him and do all this, that would be an outrage," Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said on CNN's "State of the Union.
"Just because they're an ally in an important mission, which is containing Iranian expansion in the region, cannot allow us to overlook or walk away from that. It undermines our ability to stand for morality and human rights all over the world," Rubio said on Sunday.
Saudi Arabia has denied killing Khashoggi but has not provided evidence to explain his disappearance from the consulate.
That being the case, Rubio called on Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to cancel a trip to an investment conference in Saudi Arabia later this month.
"I don't think any of our government officials should be going and pretending it's business as usual until we know exactly what's happened here," Rubio said.
The White House has sought to slow a rush to judgment against the Saudi government amid demands for immediate sanctions.
Trump's ascent as a political leader in 2016 was a lesson in how the traditional foreign policy orthodoxy, in which moral values and a sense of America exceptionalism and democratic leadership — a strain of thought that Rubio represents — have been eclipsed in the Republican Party.
But the Saudi drama appears to be becoming a rare case in which clamor for action is building across political divides that could threaten the President's primacy in foreign policy and emerge as a genuine constraint on his power.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who is in many ways a political opposite of Rubio and is an independent senator from Vermont, also called for action on "State of the Union" Sunday.
"I think one of the strong things that we can do is not only stop military sales, not only put sanctions on Saudi Arabia, but most importantly, get out of this terrible, terrible war in Yemen led by the Saudis," Sanders said.
There are signs that political pressure is beginning to tell, and that a President who has shown little concern for press freedom and repeatedly courted autocrats accused of gross human rights abuses, is becoming uncomfortable with repeated questioning on the issue.
"Maybe especially so because this man was a reporter. You'll be surprised to hear me say that, there's something really terrible and disgusting about that if that was the case so we're going to have to see," Trump told Lesley Stahl in a "60 Minutes" interview broadcast Sunday. "We're going to get to the bottom of it and there will be severe punishment."
The White House has not specified the nature of the steps Saudi Arabia could face. But in the same interview the President also reiterated his concern that any action should not deflect from his own mercantilist instincts — a desire to use American power to maximize economic gains.
"It depends on what the sanction is. I'll give you an example, they are ordering military equipment. Everybody in the world wanted that order. Russia wanted it, China wanted it, we wanted it. We got it, and we got all of it, every bit of it," Trump said.
Asked by Stahl if he would cut off that order, the President said: "I'll tell you what I don't want to do. Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, I don't want to hurt jobs. I don't want to lose an order like that. And you know what, there are other ways of punishing, to use a word that's a pretty harsh word, but it's true."
The President's reshaping of American foreign policy to prioritize job creation and financial might is a centerpiece of the case he is making to voters ahead of the midterm elections in three weeks.
He argues that after decades of being ripped off by friends and foes, the United States is now driving hard bargains, and claims to have engineered huge victories in trade disputes with Canada, Mexico, China, South Korea and Europe — despite evidence he has only made moderate changes.
So the question of what the United States gets from its relationship with the Saudis is not just a geopolitical one as it has been for most past presidents — it strikes at the heart of Trump's identity as a politician.
Trump came to power faced with a question with which presidents have wrestled for decades: how to reconcile Saudi Arabia's poor human rights record, its tolerance of radical Islam and its stifling of dissent with its role as a fulcrum of US foreign policy and vital strategic position in a treacherous region and key partner in issues like counterterrorism, Afghanistan, and intelligence cooperation.
The President's solution initially appeared to be to ignore it, after traveling to the kingdom on his first foreign trip and marveling at the lavish welcome that he received.
Trump and his son-in-law and Middle East fixer Jared Kushner enthusiastically embraced the crown prince, or MBS as he is popularly known, and saw the kingdom as a powerful partner in a new effort to ratchet up confrontation with Iran across the region.
They eagerly accepted the notion that MBS was a young reformer intent on building a new, more open kingdom, easing its reliance on oil and transforming the leadership of a country led in recent years by ailing and aged kings.
But in practice, MBS has alarmed US allies with his erratic behavior, escalated a Saudi war in Yemen against Iran-backed rebels that has killed thousands of civilians and sparked a public health crisis, and emerged as a ferocious leader who has caused repeated awkward questions for the White House.

All that has created an awkward visual for Trump, who prides himself on his strong leadership and his ability to win respect from foreign strongmen, since MBS's behavior appears to show little concern for the increasingly difficult political questions he is causing for his American friends.
For a politician such as Trump, who is unusually protective of his own image, the sense that he has been embarrassed might be as much a reason to rein in MBS as disgust at actions that cut against traditional US foreign policy values.
And if Trump will not act, it's clear that leading figures in Congress plan to in a way that could make a powerful statement that despite Trump's "America First" approach, traditional foreign policy values still hold some sway on Capitol Hill.
James Rubin, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration told CNN on Sunday that lawmakers would seek to destroy the sense of "arrogance" shown by MBS in his apparent belief that he could act in such a manner drawing the condemnation of Washington.
"I suspect they are surprised in Saudi Arabia. They must not have expected this kind of reaction or they wouldn't have done this," Rubin said. "Whether President Trump does this himself, or whether it is forced upon him by majorities in both houses, I believe this is the end of the full embrace by the United States of Saudi Arabia."

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/15/poli ... index.html


Edit:
This has just been released.
The King of Saudi Arabia is saying that he doesn't know anything about the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.
Believe that then you'll believe anything. lol
US President Donald Trump has suggested "rogue killers" could be behind the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.



#14953797
Trump has supposedly lost a billion dollars since being in office. Accusing him of making money off his office is so far into fantasyland the Dim supporters will believe it.
#14953807
One Degree wrote:Trump has supposedly lost a billion dollars since being in office. Accusing him of making money off his office is so far into fantasyland the Dim supporters will believe it.


All politicians profit from their offices. I think it's only right to assume this with every single politician on the planet. Down to your city council.

All politicians are dirt bag assholes that are in it for themselves.
#14953809
Zagadka wrote:Do you have a source for that? Or how much will he make once it becomes legal for him to conduct business again?


I don’t recall. I have reduced my news to Fox, ABC, and NBC so one of them. Probably not Fox since it seemed to be geared against Trump if I recall correctly.
All our politicians leave rich.
#14953810
BTW, billionaires are not interested in more money. They have more than they can spend. They switch to wanting power. There have been studies on this.
#14953811
One Degree wrote:BTW, billionaires are not interested in more money. They have more than they can spend. They switch to wanting power. There have been studies on this.


Interesting assumption. It doesn't seem to follow principle or practice. Can we take from this you will be publishing the source of this study?
#14953812
I think this is another tactic of keeping Turkey busy with something. The US fully supports this murder as long as it prevents Turkey somehow from entering northern Syria.

This is an organized international crime. Everytime Erdogan opens his mouth and talk about crashing Kurdish terrorists in northern Syria, The West finds something to hijack the agenda.
#14953815
One Degree wrote:http://time.com/money/5188095/donald-trump-net-worth-2018/

Apparently it was a Time story originally. @B0ycey @Rancid @Zagadka


I was talking about this study that people of wealth remove their attention from greater wealth and into power. Whether his value on paper has declined or not in the last year doesn't detract from the fact he wants to make more money. Wanting power is not a trait linked to wealth but in human nature. They are not interchangeable.
#14953817
B0ycey wrote:I was talking about this study that people of wealth remove their attention from greater wealth and into power. Whether his value on paper has declined or not in the last year doesn't detract from the fact he wants to make more money. Wanting power is not a trait linked to wealth but in human nature. They are not interchangeable.


My information is pre internet. An internet search just gives articles on how to get rich by thinking like them.
It is not that they don’t care about making more money, It is just not their main motivation after a certain level of wealth. Once you have enough to buy what you want, you then use it to control others. This should not be news to anyone who has worked for wealthy people. There are exceptions but normally they will be motivated by power and control.
#14953820
One Degree wrote:My information is pre internet. An internet search just gives articles on how to get rich by thinking like them.
It is not that they don’t care about making more money, It is just not their main motivation after a certain level of wealth. Once you have enough to buy what you want, you then use it to control others. This should not be news to anyone who has worked for wealthy people. There are exceptions but normally they will be motivated by power and control.


Pre-internet? OK whatever!

Trumps so called loss of wealth is on paper. His brand and real estate has lost value, which isn't surprising as "Trump" is decisive. But you can sleep easily knowing he will still be tax dodging and underpaying his staff at every opportunity @One Degree. Old dogs, new tricks and all that.

But that wasn't really my argument. My argument is that you claim people of wealth don't want more wealth but power. I say they want both as they are not interchangeable. So if you have a source, even written in a book, please provide it.
#14953821
Trump, even to himself, is about the brand. Shameless (and happy about it) self-promotion to represent the concept of an elite. His bluster is not surprising at all, and I feel like he'll keep leveraging the name until he dies, and perhaps a while thereafter.

Getting a bit off topic, though. I've seen recent reports that the Saudis are going to admit that the journalist (completely forget his name) died "under interrogation", which raises a ton of more questions. Haven't seen any confirmation of that, though.
#14953823
B0ycey wrote:Pre-internet? OK whatever!

Trumps so called loss of wealth is on paper. His brand and real estate has lost value, which isn't surprising as "Trump" is decisive. But you can sleep easily knowing he will still be tax dodging and underpaying his staff at every opportunity @One Degree. Old dogs, new tricks and all that.

But that wasn't really my argument. My argument is that you claim people of wealth don't want more wealth but power. I say they want both as they are not interchangeable. So if you have a source, even written in a book, please provide it.


I don’t care enough to search anymore. It was just a study I read. It does not prove anything even if I found a modern version. I am content with letting others decide if it rings true.
#14953832
I feel like since nobody has presented any evidence of the journalist's death, that we can't even say at this stage if he's been killed.

Something weird is going on.

But :cheers: to Saudi Arabia being demonized in the Western press. That's been long over-due. Now for some of its allies...
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