WAYNE MADSEN—Riyadh was also able to count on the support of Kushner, Trump, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and their Israeli friends who wanted nothing to interfere with the American-Israeli-Saudi axis gearing up for war against Iran. Trump also said he did not want anything to affect the “$110 billion [in Saudi military purchases] from being spent in this country.” Trump was lying. The Saudis have only committed to the buying of $14.5 billion in US military hardware. Nevertheless, Trump told an impromptu White House press gathering on October 13, “I tell you what I don’t want to do. Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, all these companies. I don’t want to hurt jobs. I don’t want to lose an order like that.”
SAUDI CONNECTION
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Blaming Saudis for Corrupting Otherwise Human Rights–Loving US
15 minutes readADAM JOHNSON—Clearly Saudi money—like pro-Israel money—has influence around the margins (or else, one assumes, they wouldn’t spend it), but the idea that the US wouldn’t be backing violent dictatorships if it wasn’t corrupted by some sinister foreign actor has no historical or empirical basis. US backing of Saudi Arabia predates its current public relations machine by decades, a machine that exists largely to influence the scope and depth of the US/Saudi alliance, not the fact of it.
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ALASTAIR CROOKE—So, here is the second potential tipping point: Will Erdogan’s so-far successful leveraging of the Khashoggi murder also succeed in drawing in its wake, an inversion of US support away from the Gulf back toward the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood model? The US has oscillated (often quite violently), over the years, between supporting the MB as the catalyst of change in the ME, only to swing back to the Saudi intelligence service’s ability to field ‘kick-ass’ jihadists as the better recipé for quick regime change.
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REMINDERS: US ‘Outrage’ over Slaying of US Residents Depends on the Nation Responsible
12 minutes readDAVE LINDORFF—Dogan, born and raised in the US to Turkish immigrant parents, was brutally beaten, kicked and then shot in the back and head by several members of the so-called Israeli Defense Force who on May 31, 2010 boarded a Turkish-flagged vessel, the Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. There is video of the attack on Furkan, who was unarmed with anything but a cell phone that he was using to video the IDF assault on the ship, the leading vessel of a “Peace Flotilla” delivering medicine, food and building supplies to Gaza, the fenced-in Palestinian ghetto controlled by Israel.
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From the beginning, the Khashoggi story wasn’t really about the fate of one man. The Saudis have been getting away with bloody murder, literally, for years. They’re daily slaughtering the civilian population of Yemen with American and British help, with barely a ho-hum from the sensitive consciences always ready to invoke the so-called “responsibility to protect” Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, Xinjiang, Rakhine, and so forth.